How did British rioters manage to loot and ransack their neighbourhoods for four straight nights? Police claim the culprits used smartphones to quickly organize and avoid getting caught, sparking questions of how much leeway law enforcement has to crack into private communication devices.
The issue comes after Canada's Research In Motion came under fire for reports of BlackBerry-toting rioters using the free and secure messaging service, or BBM, as a way to organize their criminal activity.
A statement released by RIM on Thursday stated that the Waterloo, Ont.-based company had "engaged with the authorities to assist" in any way it can and that it would "co-operate fully" with Britain's Home Office and U.K police forces.
That assurance of full co-operation may cause concern regarding privacy infringement and personal security, especially if RIM gives U.K. authorities unprecedented access to data.
In Canada, because of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, law enforcement would have to obtain judicial permission and warrants to access text messages from private cellphones, said University of British Columbia professor, Christopher Schneider.
"This is going to be problematic for police because of the immediacy of social media. By the time they go and get the warrant, the riots have been going on for days," Schneider told CTVNews.ca.
Because social media and cellular communication have changed how riots are formed and how they spread, police are finding it increasingly difficult to control disturbances.
"All of a sudden people are moving and are fluid. They can escape police easier," he said, adding that tools like BBM, text messaging, Twitter and Facebook facilitate and perhaps can even encourage a riot.
Britain's riots began on Saturday, Aug. 6 when a peaceful protest over a police shooting in London's Tottenham neighbourhood turned violent.
That conflict led to a series of riots in London and several other cities that police had trouble containing.
Groups of masked or hooded rioters swung baseball bats, burned buildings and vehicles and used their cellphones, specifically their BlackBerrys, to communicate and co-ordinate this violence.
Security versus privacy
But while smartphones may have played an important role in the riots, the phones didn't start the violence.
"It's just business as usual. People are arranging to meet in the same way they normally do using their BlackBerry," David Murakami Wood, a surveillance studies professor at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont. told CTVNew.ca.
"Except this time instead of meeting just to go out and do whatever they normally do, they were arranging to go looting."
Murakami Wood said if RIM is forced to reduce their security and co-operate with authorities too much, they will lose what makes them distinctive in the marketplace.
"Some MPs in Britain have talked about trying to close down services like BBM when things like this happen – that to me is a ludicrous overreaction," he said.
"It's like blaming the postal service for carrying threatening messages. You don't close down the postal service if people have written to each other about committing a crime, it's no different that that."
RIM has been vague on public details regarding government access to user data in the past. The company was recently faced with threats from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to cut off BlackBerry services unless concessions on access were made.
Schneider said he thinks police are going to find a way to temporarily suspend communication and information devices by targeting an area, effectively shutting down everyone's phones in a certain radius.
"Maybe in a police car they'd have some sort of device. They'd flip a switch and maybe in a couple hundred yards it would wipe out cellphone communication," he said.
Social Consequences
Such a blanket curtailment of cellphone communication has far-reaching consequences on privacy and even how a riot might escalate.
Schneider said disabling communication could anger the rioters further but it would enable the police to contain and "squash" the disturbance quicker.
As for privacy and access rights, Schneider said he suspects ordinary citizens would understand the need for such a drastic option in the face of violence and public disturbances.
"I think those people, the majority of people are law-abiding citizens, would be less inclined to be angered by the police incorporating this sort of strategy into their policing tactics."
But Murakami Wood isn't as sure.
"Is it really right that everybody's mobile phone service gets trolled because a few people have been using this to organize looting?" he asked.
Schneider said the criminal code may also be amended to include social media legislation to expedite judicial permissions to obtain such data and enforce a communication lock-down.
Video deterrence
Even though Britain has the highest concentration of closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras, rioters and looters were not deterred by the surveillance, said Murakami Wood, and that doesn't surprise him.
"There's absolutely no relationship between the two things," he said. "Some of the biggest riots were in the areas with the densest amount of CCTV cameras."
He said the cameras may be more useful in detecting the people responsible for the crimes through police posting photos that were captured by CCTV online.
"They're banking on people being so angry about the rioting that they will give in people to the police they know were involved," he said.
Along with posting the photos on Internet sites, British police are reportedly using facial recognition software, which treats the human face like a grid, measuring the distance between a person's nose, lips, ears and eyes, to spot suspects.
But, in order for the software to be successful the photos must be good quality and the person must already have a criminal record.
"Misrecognition and misidentification is going to be a big issue here," Murakami Wood said. "Recognition both by people and by software is equally difficult."
With files from The Canadian Press
