BlackBerry CEO Blasts Apple for Not Allowing Government Access to an iPhone

Security. It’s been BlackBerry’s last strength, the one thing the company could argue it did better than any other smartphone vendor in the market. BlackBerry knows this, which is why so much of its discussions of the Priv focused on how the company had hardened the basic Android OS to make it more secure at every level. Even now, BlackBerry is banking on the Priv as a secure smartphone rather than simply making a play in the me-too Android space.

That’s why it’s so baffling to see BlackBerry’s CEO, John Chen, torpedoing his company’s reputation for building secure products in a blog post he appears to have written himself. After discussing the debate between the tech industry and government officials pleading for backdoors, even if this leads to weaker encryption standards, Chen drops the following bombshell:

“In fact, one of the world’s most powerful tech companies [Apple] recently refused a lawful access request in an investigation of a known drug dealer because doing so would ‘substantially tarnish the brand’ of the company. We are indeed in a dark place when companies put their reputations above the greater good. At BlackBerry, we understand, arguably more than any other large tech company, the importance of our privacy commitment to product success and brand value: privacy and security form the crux of everything we do. However, our privacy commitment does not extend to criminals.”