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Recent reports have indicated that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) has had a key to unlock encrypted messages sent between BlackBerry users since 2010. Citizen Lab Postdoctoral Fellow Christopher Parsons commented on the significance of the revelations in an interview with VICE Motherboard.
Apple CEO Tim Cook recently announced that the company would battle a court order requiring it to turn over information stored on an iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters to the FBI. Christopher Parsons and Morgan Marquis-Boire outline the possibility that the creation of a backdoor would be used as a precedent for future cases.
In a guest post on JustSecurity co-authored with Tamir Israel of the Canadian Internet Policy & Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC), Citizen Lab Postdoctoral Fellow Christopher Parsons urged a revaluation of Canada’s intelligence sharing with its Five Eyes allies.
Canada’s Department of National Defence, and its associated research wing, Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC), are looking to purchase software to analyze social media streams in real-time. Christopher Parsons weighs in on concerns of the possibility of accidentally collecting Canadians’ personal information.
Pakistan and BlackBerry have agreed to delay the shutdown of BlackBerry’s Enterprise Server (BES) by one month. This comes months after Pakistan initially ordered the shutdown of the company’s encrypted messaging services for businesses. Postdoctoral Fellow Christopher Parsons weighed in on the policy reasons for the disagreement.