ORGANISING VIOLENCE:LONG THE preserve of busy executives, BlackBerry smartphones have been revealed by the London riots as very popular with young city dwellers.
Invented by Canadian firm Research in Motion to give mobile access to e-mail to business people, in recent years BlackBerry devices have found a following with younger users who can send messages at speed using their qwerty keyboards.
“The iPhone doesn’t have the same appeal – the BlackBerry is a click-and-send device,” said Steven Pierce, founder of PimpBerry, which sells BlackBerry accessories to the youth and student market.
It is this feature that seems to have made it the communications tool of choice for sharing information quickly during the fast-moving London riots.
Mr Pierce launched his business after Irish networks began to offer BlackBerrys on pre-pay plans. In Britain, they have been available as pay-as-you-go for a number of years, putting them in the price bracket of students and teenagers.
Just as text messaging was originally an obscure tool intended to be used by network engineers, the rioters are using a BlackBerry service designed for corporate workforces. The BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) service allows messages to be sent to other BlackBerry devices free of charge.
“It has got so popular because BBM is instant and doesn’t cost anything; you aren’t even using your free texts,” said Mr Pierce.
These messages are encrypted and cannot be easily read by authorities if intercepted.
Crucially though, Research in Motion has the digital keys to unscramble the messages which also pass through its private network. The firm has said it has contacted the authorities and is assisting investigations. It could hand over details of rioters – including their names, the number of messages sent and received, the names of people they sent messages to, the time they were sent, and the location – without being issued with a police warrant. However, police officers would have to be granted a warrant to force the firm to hand over the contents of users’ “broadcasts”.
Last year, a number of Middle Eastern nations, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, threatened to restrict certain BlackBerry services because they could not be monitored by the local authorities. The role of smartphones and social media in helping to organise the Arab Spring uprising has been praised by western commentators.
David Lammy, MP for Tottenham, where the riots started last Saturday, has however called for the firm to suspend the BBM service. “This is one of the reasons why unsophisticated criminals are outfoxing an otherwise sophisticated police force,” he tweeted yesterday. “BBM is different as it is encrypted and police can’t access it.” A group calling itself Poison yesterday posted a message warning the firm against co-operation with the authorities.