The British security service MI5 and the electronic interception center, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), have been asked by the government to join the hunt for people who organized last week’s riots, the Guardian has learned.
The agencies, the bulk of whose work normally involves catching terrorists inspired by al-Qaeda, are helping the effort to catch people who used social messaging, especially BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), to mobilize looters.
A key difficulty for law enforcers last week was cracking the high level of encryption on the BBM system. BBM is a pin--protected instant message system that is only accessible to BlackBerry users.
MI5 and GCHQ will also help the effort to try to get ahead of any further organization of disturbances. They have a statutory right to target criminals or those suspected of being involved in crime, officials said yesterday.
Police struggled to access the BBM network last week, though some who received messages -planning violence were so outraged they passed them on to law enforcement agencies.
GCHQ’s computers and listening devices can pick up audio messages and BBM communications. MI5 and the police can identify the owners with the help of mobile companies and Internet service providers.
The agencies can intercept electronic and telephone messages, identify where they have been sent from and their destination. That allows other investigations to take place and other efforts to develop intelligence.
“The hope is this will boost the intelligence available. It’s always useful to get some boffins [researchers] in,” one source said.
In a speech on Monday, British Prime Minister David Cameron made no mention of his threatened clampdown on social media.
Last week, in the House of Commons emergency debate, he said: “There was an awful lot of hoaxes and false trails made on Twitter and BlackBerry Messenger and the rest of it. We need a major piece of work to make sure that the police have all the -technological -capabilities they need to hunt down and beat the criminals.”
For law enforcement, the difficulty with BBM is that it boasts semi-private — and instant — -access to a network of like-minded users.
BlackBerry handsets are the smartphone of choice for 37 percent of British teenagers, according to Ofcom. BBM allows users to send the same message to a network of contacts connected by “BBM pins.” For many teenagers, BBM has replaced text messaging because it is free and instant.
Unlike Twitter or Facebook, many BBM messages are untraceable by the authorities. And unlike Facebook, friends are connected either by individual pin numbers or a registered e-mail address. In short, BlackBerry Messenger is more secure than almost all other social networks.
So-called “broadcasts” can be sent to hundreds of disparate users within minutes, away from the attention of law enforcement agencies.
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