While Apple publicly struggles with FBI requests that it unlock the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone, BlackBerry continues to leave unclear quite how much data it's willing to give to law enforcement.
Asked at a roundtable here at Mobile World Congress about whether it would create back doors for law enforcement, BlackBerry COO Marty Beard pointed to two blog posts that CEO John Chen wrote in December and January, before the most recent controversy erupted.
"There are no backdoors in any BlackBerry devices, and BlackBerry does not store and therefore cannot share BlackBerry device passwords with law enforcement or anyone else," Chen said in a Jan. 16 blog post.
That sounds clear, but the January blog post was a clarification of a December post that left quite a lot of wiggle room. It says that "our privacy commitment does not extend to criminals," and that the company will cooperate with law enforcement requests itself, but will not give law enforcement backdoor access or "government access to our servers."
Beard wouldn't go into many more details here at MWC.
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"We almost left Pakistan recently because we were asked to provide a back door which we did not do," Beard said at MWC. "On the other hand, we comply with legal requests where it makes sense, and we've always done that."
Beard declined to say whether BlackBerry would decrypt a fully encrypted Priv ($499.00 at Amazon) phone for the FBI, or even whether that was technically possible.
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