ONE UNEXPECTED side-effect of the UK riots has been the sudden prominence of the BlackBerry smartphone, a device hitherto more associated in the public mind with whey-faced middle managers checking their office e-mails than with balaclava-wearing teenaged arsonists and looters.
According to police, the BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) service has been used to co-ordinate violence in London and other cities across the UK in recent days. One MP has called on Research in Motion (RiM), BlackBerry’s Canadian manufacturers, to suspend its UK messaging service in an attempt to stop rioters communicating.
The high-profile Apple iPhone and the social networks Twitter and Facebook may get more media attention, but BlackBerry devices – cheaper and more widespread than Apple or Android smartphones – are owned by more than a third of British teens, according to one recent study. BBM, an instant messaging service for BlackBerry owners, is virtually free, instantaneous, and much more private than Twitter or Facebook. Described by one observer as “SMS on steroids”, BBM’s encryption technology makes it much harder for law enforcement officials to decipher messages and trace them to their origins.
A number of Middle Eastern countries with dubious human rights records have already restricted BlackBerry services for this very reason, which should give pause to those who seek to restrict these services.
Twitter, hailed as an enabler of democracy in the Arab uprisings earlier this year, was criticised by the deputy assistant commissioner of the London Metropolitan police on Monday. “Really inflammatory” messages on Twitter were mainly to blame for the disorder, Steve Kavanagh told a press conference on Monday. “Social media and other methods have been used to organise these levels of greed and criminality.”
In fact, there’s little evidence that Twitter was used except to reflect the violent disorder which was already taking place.
People successfully organised riots long before the advent of mobile phones or social media. New technology may make it a little easier to co-ordinate mass unrest, but it has little or nothing to do with the virulence and extent of disorder in British cities this week. And since BlackBerry’s owners have undertaken to co-operate with the police, those who used its technology to loot and destroy may find they are less secure from prosecution than they might have imagined.