The 4^th Chamber of the Italian Supreme Court (hereinafter: S.C.), recently returned, with its Judgment No. 46968, to the matter of pin-to-pin chat tapping between BlackBerry users, strengthening the already well-established legal principle according to which chat tapping does not require international letters rogatory.

In short, this is the way the operating system should work: the message of the sender is encrypted by the smartphone, sent to the server of the Canadian company RIM (i.e. Research in Motion) and forwarded to the recipient’s device, which decompresses the message and makes it intelligible.

The procedures aimed at acquiring the chats should, on the other hand, work this way: the Public Prosecutor’s office asks RIM Italia S.r.l., an Italian company which represents its parent company legally established in Canada, the deciphered texts of the messages; RIM Italia S.r.l. transmits the relevant request to the Canadian RIM – where the encryption keys are kept – which, after having fulfilled, sends the outcomes of the tapping activity to the Italian branch, which, in turn, transmits them to the servers of the Public Prosecutor’s Office.

On such factual basis, in response to the question raised, the S.C. remarked that the tapping activity does not require international letters rogatory when the telematic flow’s collection, reception and registration (i.e. the main stages of the tapping sequence) is entirely carried out on the national territory, being the foreign operator responsible for the sole decryption of the messages intercepted.

The principle stated by the S.C. was the following: “With regard to telephone tapping, the acquisition of the messages exchanged by means of a BlackBerry system does not require international letters rogatory when communications take place in Italy, even if, in order to “decrypt” the identifying data associated with the PIN codes, a collaboration with the foreign based producer of the operating systems is necessary” (Ex plurimis, Judgment No. 52925 of 2016 and Judgment No. 16670 of 2016 of the Italian S.C.).