Gang Bangers Roll with the BlackBerry

For years the BlackBerry smartphone was used exclusively by business professionals, then RIM opened up their device to everyone else and it was a success.  Now a new a group is using the BlackBerry and they are using it for the wrong reasons.  In 2007 it was reported that Canadian gang members were using the phone to communicate with each other.  They realized that the BlackBerry is the most secure smartphone out there and because of encryption they couldn’t be tracked.  Two years later it is becoming a bigger problem because of the sophistication of each new BlackBerry that is released.

According to Canada.com, BC gang members using BlackBerry phones is such an issue now because they are becoming more affordable than ever.  They are also hard to wiretap and they are difficult to deal with after the phone is confiscated because of how hard it is to crack passwords and get information.

“It’s something we’ve seen increasing over the last three to four years,” Staff Sgt. Bruce Imrie, head of the RCMP’s Vancouver Integrated Technological Crime Unit, said in an interview. And that poses a big challenge for law enforcement, because encryption and security features make the devices much harder to wiretap than land lines or cellphones.”

Naturally this has caused several police organizations to use their own special kind of  BlackBerry called “Pocket Cops.”  These are supposed to give police an advantage but that will kind of hard to do when gangs are already one step ahead.