You can trust the United Nations, and its subsidiary bodies, to be on the side of tin-pot despots. Like the ones who make up a sizeable chunk of the organisation. The latest despatch from the Department of Idiocy is signed by the head of the ITU, Hamadoun Toure, who advocates no less than universal government access to Blackberry secure communications.
His Soviet and Russian education have surely influenced his world view. How else can we explain the elimination from his dictionary of terms such as common sense, privacy or, God forbid, not mentioning "security" every time one runs out of arguments?
The country most plagued by Islamic terrorism, Israel, has never to my knowledge contemplated putting such pressure on RIM. The reason? Israelis have an excellent intelligence service and an efficient law enforcement branch. They know that terrorists were discovered, caught and killed in times when electronic surveillance was science fiction.
I don't deny the importance of spying in the ether rather than on the ground. Yet the latest pressures on RIM to hand over the encryption keys are nothing but an excuse to be lazy, sit back, and assume everyone nowadays runs terror networks from the comfort of their own home, or cave, with Blackberries.
On the other hand, with Blackberries spied everywhere we might just uncover more of the corruption and cronyism that dog the UN's operations. Suddenly the overpaid talking shop won't be as enthusiastic about a worldwide Big Brother.
Cracking the Berries is nonsense. That the UN endorses it just proves me right.
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