Besides being of questionable legality, there are a number of common sense problems here.

For one, while BlackBerry may have been the preferred communication device among protesters, news of and plans for riots largely spread to Twitter and more public channels. Public channels that police could easily monitor to determine where outbreaks of violence might occur next, to better coordinate their efforts. Even on BlackBerry’s network, there’s nothing to suggest that police who may have had BlackBery devices themselves were banned or restricted from accessing more open forum posts, or submitting their own numbers to organizers looking to rally as many people as they could.

The most secure BlackBerry messages – ones with end-to-end encryption are typically not even available to users not on the type of enterprise plan normally used by large companies and government. {Deutsch Welle} So if everyone else is sending messages that can be unencrypted by any other BlackBerry device, would it not make more sense to simply buy the police department a few BlackBerry handsets so that they could monitor chatter on the network?

That’s to say nothing of more open networks like Twitter or Facebook, who are also coming under fire.

So instead of oh, say, putting a few tech savvy officers on the networks to create profiles, and monitor and potentially engage people suspected of plotting criminal activity, you instead shut down their profiles, forcing them to move to secondary accounts which are further under the radar, or onto methods that are more difficult to monitor, like in person conversations.

Then you not only have plots that are more difficult to trace, but less evidence to actually prosecute people with as well.

Brilliant.

Say what you will about their ethics, but maybe we should get News Corp. on this – they seem to be the one London organization who can figure out how to monitor a person and gather information. A group of anonymous UK residents (ex-News of the World?) created Zavilia.com, a site that uses Facebook to get photos of rioters, and has crowd sourced identification of people in the pictures. Once multiple IDs come in on the same person, the name is forwarded to police. Some particularly bold rioters are posting photos of themselves with their loot on social networks, sites where they can sell the merchandise and doing other things online that are easily traceable and identifiable. All this to say that if a random developer with a few spare hours can figure out how to use social media to identify and potentially stop looters, fame seeking criminals with more braggadocio than criminal genius are openly posting photos, surely the entire UK government can figure out how to prevent and prosecute crimes with the help of social media, not in spite of it.

While there is a real need to review the plans for dealing with sudden and unexpected outbursts of criminal activity, Mr. Cameron’s anti-social media strategy is unlikely to have any real effectiveness within it. BBMs don’t cause criminal activity, for all the credit they’ve received, neither Twitter or Facebook caused revolutions. They may facilitate the planning, but for both good and bad, killing a communication method doesn’t kill the spirit behind the messages.

Four days after the fatal shooting of a man in its Tottenham neighborhood, London is still burning. As firefighters douse the flames of buildings set ablaze from gasoline bombs, the riots responsible for much of the destruction are spreading to other parts of the country. In London, even areas that haven’t been affected by rioting and violence are under a self-imposed curfew that sees stores shuttering early and normally busy streets emptied after sunset.

Four days after the initial incident that sparked the unrest, there still appears to be no definitive end to the organized violence. Some blame BlackBerry BBMs and Twitter for facilitating the organization of riots and looting, but regardless of the communication tools used to communicate, London faces a bigger problem: police can’t figure out how to quell outbursts of violence and stop them from spreading. That doesn’t lend a lot of confidence to the city’s ability to ensure safety for the 2012 Olympics.

The athlete’s village and stadiums for the 2012 Olympics will come with a $15 billion price tag. Officials have said that athlete accommodations will become community housing after the games are over, leaving the city with a net benefit. The destroyed areas of London are just a few miles away from this area. {NY Times}

Much of the destruction has been caused by groups of a few hundred people or so. At one point it was reported that 1700 police officers were on duty, compared to 5000 for the Royal Wedding. {Gawker} Granted, the Royal Wedding was a planned event, but what happens if an unexpected event occurs during the Olympic games?

Will there be a plan in place to handle simultaneous civil protests, terrorist threats and general crowd related security at the same time? Part of the current problem lies with austerity budget cuts that haven’t seen police jobs spared. There are plans to cut 9,000 of 35,000 police jobs, and emergency responders like firefighters and paramedics face staff cuts as well. When the police are busy protecting firefighters trying to extinguish fires, riots spring up in other areas where there is no police presence.

While the city surely has some sort of plan for dealing with the security challenges that come with a major public event, the lack of a tenable plan for keeping unplanned criminal behavior under control with less than 12 months til the Olympic games begin has to be of concern to residents and visitors alike.

Before and after image of  the Allied Carpets store building via the Guardian

Over the weekend, protesters in London turned out to show their opposition to the shooting of Mark Duggan by armed police. In London, unlike the vast majority of the United States, not all police officers carry guns. Duggan was a passenger in a livery cab when police made a pre-organized stop of the car to arrest Duggan. Details are still emerging, but initial reports from investigators pointed to an exchange of gunfire. At the end, Duggan was dead. To date, none of the investigating agencies have confirmed that Duggan fired the weapon he was allegedly carrying at police.

Protests were organized in response, and while a march to the Tottenham police station (near the scene of the shooting) started peacefully, it eventually devolved into violent riots. While Twitter was initially credited with helping to spread the unrest, newspapers and tech blogs are suggesting that the BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) service actually had more of a role, thanks to the privacy of messages exchanged on the network and its popularity with young people. {TechCrunch Europe}

How did a phone which early adopters have abandoned for iPhones or Androids, with a network that’s rarely mentioned in the same breath as ones like Twitter become the unofficial news and organizational device for working class young people in London?

BBM offers inexpensive chat options between BlackBerry users, which means an option that’s less expensive with more privacy than traditional SMS messages. In other words, some of the same things that initially attracted corporate users.

So it’s not necessarily that BlackBerry has become a sinister network for those plotting riots and criminal acts. There was already something of a trend of the BlackBerry gaining in popularity among young people in London, and for good or bad, BBM is where they knew their friends and updates on the situation would be.

That included some people organizing copycat riots which may have had little in common with the initial protest in Tottenham, even if news spread through the same channel.