This time last year Julian Assange was the darling of the internet world as his WikiLeaks organisation began flooding the web with thousands of cables allegedly sourced from a soldier serving in the US army.

One year on and his world has changed dramatically. Assange has been dragged through a court case that saw him extradited to Sweden to face several charges, and he has fallen out spectacularly with his former allies at The Guardian.

Nevertheless, the anti-government campaigner is still beating the drum for more insight into the practices of those in power by claiming that they are covertly monitoring popular social services and devices used by citizens across the world.

Speaking at the launch of a new publication from Wikileaks, Spy Files, looking at firms that supply monitoring systems to governments, Assange said such technology is creating a "totalitarian surveillance state" as popular services are routinely monitored.

"Who here has an iPhone? Who here has a BlackBerry? Who here uses Gmail? Well, you're all screwed. The reality is that intelligence contractors are selling right now to countries across the world mass surveillance systems for all those products," he told those at the event.

The publication contains details on 160 companies that sell such intelligence products, and comes after several nations in the Arab world were accused of such practices in an attempt to quell protests that flared up throughout the year.

While it's probably not the case that the UK government is monitoring every email out there for details on people arranging to go to the pub on Friday night, it's an interesting point to bear in mind as we use digital technologies to run our lives and leave everything we write open to monitoring by unseen agencies.

The announcement that RIM is adding support to Microsoft Office 365 should be welcome news to firms that have investments in BlackBerrys and Microsoft's email system, a group which no doubt makes up a large proportion of the business world.

RIM's BlackBerry Business Cloud Services offers access to Microsoft Exchange Online email, as well as calendar, contacts, tasks and memos via the BlackBerry. And even better for IT workers is the news that they can provision, manage and secure individual handsets using a web-based console.

If RIM handles this rollout correctly, it could reinvigorate its popularity in the business world, letting its enterprise customers take advantage of the latest cloud technologies from Microsoft while still retaining the famed BlackBerry security standards.

However, there are still challenges for RIM to overcome, highlighted to V3 during a conversation with the global IT manager of a UK media company off the back of Tuesday's announcement.

The first of these is the recent BlackBerry outage issues.

"Our confidence in RIM has taken a bit of a bashing recently with the outages. Do I really want to put 200 users in a new cloud service, when the reliability hasn't been proved?" he said.

Another issue is the early stage status of the BlackBerry Business Cloud Services. The company V3 spoke to is in the process of a move to Office 365, so has been eagerly awaiting this move from RIM.

"As someone who's responsible for the email of the entire company, am I really comfortable using a beta version?" he questioned.

However, he added that there is pressure from elsewhere in the business to adopt the technology as soon as possible, now that the investment has been made in Office 365.

"I've got close to 200 BlackBerry users, and otherwise I need to keep those mail boxes in house, rather than move them to the cloud," he said.

On the positive side, he welcomed the news that this technology could be free of charge for organisations, as there was a concern that there would be an additional cost to tie the two products together.

And he supported V3's initial suspicions that this release has been timed to help RIM wipe away lingering concerns over the recent service outages.

"The expectation was that this release wouldn't be ready until Christmas, so it's very useful that they're doing it now," he said.

If RIM did indeed rush this one out earlier than planned, hopefully it won't backfire and end up with glitches in the technology and more unhappy customers.

Research in Motion founder Mike Lazaridis has been forced to take to the web to personally apologise for the outages affecting users across the globe this week.

He said it's too early to say if the issue has been completely fixed, but added that normal service levels are just around the corner for EMEA.

"Since launching BlackBerry in 1999, it's been my goal to provide reliable, real time communications around the world," he said. "We did not deliver on that goal this week. Not even close. You expect better from us and I expect better from us."

Lazaridis, however, did warn that there would be "some instability" as the problem was resolved.

There was also a rare admission of failure on the part of RIM, in the sluggish way it initially communicated with its customers.

Many took to Twitter in the early days of the outage to express their anger not only at being left without a business critical service, but also for being given no information on what was happening and what was being done by RIM to fix it.

"We know that you want to hear more from us, and we're working to update you more frequently to update you through our websites and social media channels as we gather more information," he said.

Despite all the tough talking rhetoric from the prime minister following the recent UK riots about potentially banning social media in times of unrest, the meeting between the home secretary, police chiefs and social media representatives on Thursday steered well clear of this contentious topic.

It is understood that the issue of restricting services such as Facebook, Twitter and BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), all of which were to a lesser or greater extent blamed for the riots, was never a topic for discussion.

This is despite calls from Tottenham MP David Lammy for a ban on BBM at times of social disorder and David Cameron's own admission that the government "is working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these web sites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality".

Instead, the meeting is believed to have focused on how the police can build up their skills to monitor social networks more effectively.

"We welcome the fact that this was a dialogue about working together to keep people safe rather than about imposing new restrictions on internet services," said Facebook in a statement.

"We were pleased to highlight our array of effective reporting tools and the relationships we have built with law enforcement to keep the site safe for the 30 million people in the UK use Facebook - especially during times of crisis."

A similarly bland statement came from the Home Office.

"The home secretary, along with the culture secretary and foreign office minister Jeremy Browne, has held a constructive meeting with the Association of Chief Police officers, the police and representatives from the social media industry," it read.

"The discussions looked at how law enforcement and the networks can build on the existing relationships and co-operation to crack down on the networks being used for criminal behaviour."

It's certainly good news that the government apparently understands the good that social networks can do in rallying communities after and during such heinous events and in providing law enforcement with invaluable intelligence in catching those who organised such crimes.

We all suspected the worst when the prime minister came out with his initial statements, but thankfully another knee-jerk reaction from out-of-touch politicians has not reared its head, giving way instead to a more thoughtful and considered approach.

It remains to be seen whether rights campaigners will seek assurances from the social networks that private data is not just being handed over to police in these situations as a matter of course.

While it's good to see co-operation between the tech companies and law enforcement, no-one would want that relationship to begin eroding individual privacy rights online.

Two men who used Facebook in an attempt to incite disorder during the London riots were jailed on Tuesday at Chester Crown Court.

Jordan Blackshaw, 20, and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, 22, were each sentenced to four years behind bars, even though the Facebook posts did not lead to any criminal activity.

Cheshire Constabulary Assistant Chief Constable Phil Thompson welcomed the verdict as a "strong message" to social networking users thinking about stirring up trouble.

"The sentences passed down today recognise how technology can be abused to incite criminal activity, and sends a strong message to potential troublemakers," he said.

"If we cast our minds back just a few days to last week and recall the way in which technology was used to spread incitement and bring people together to commit acts of criminality, it is easy to understand the four-year sentences that were handed down in court today."

Thompson claimed that the Cheshire police force had quickly realised the way in which social media was being used by rioters and looters to incite trouble and create fear in communities.

According to a report in The Guardian, Blackshaw and Sutcliffe-Keenan set up event pages on Facebook to invite 'friends' to "smash down" and riot, but neither page resulted in actual rioting.

Blackshaw is reported to have turned up to his event alone, where he was immediately arrested.

The sentences are just further worrying signs that the government and police blame social media sites for the riots, rather than addressing the underlying problems in UK society.

In a speech to the House of Commons last Thursday, prime minister David Cameron suggested that social media sites, and communication technologies such as BlackBerry Messenger, could even be banned during times of social unrest.

Clearly the authorities lack a firm understanding of social media, and have overlooked the good it can bring, such as how Facebook and Twitter united people to clean up the mess after the riots.

The authorities must also have used BBM and social media to track the would-be rioters, so a ban on these tools would end up making the job of policing harder.

It was easy for the police to track down Blackshaw and Sutcliffe-Keenan and use them as scapegoats, but reacting to the riots with sentencing which is completely out of proportion to the crime will only exacerbate the perceived social injustice against which many were rioting in the first place.

As London braces for a possible fourth night of violence, the local MP for Tottenham, where rioting first erupted on Saturday, has apparently called for BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) to be shut down this evening to disrupt the plans of would-be rioters.

Speaking on BBC Radio 5 Live, David Lammy said that the service is helping the rioters to organise themselves in a way that leaves the police constantly one step behind.

The point has been made before, and holds some truth given that BBM's encrypted messages effectively give the looters a private social network to communicate without fear of surveillance.

Twitter has also been blamed for helping groups to co-ordinate their efforts in an agile and dynamic way, although the authorities, of course, are technically able to monitor these communications.

It remains to be seen whether shutting BBM would actually do much to dent the success of the rioters. Some have suggested, in fact, that mobile operators could already be complying with the authorities to allow access to mobile data.

If this is true, and if RIM complies in decrypting the messages, it could be better to keep the service up and running to monitor messages and catch those responsible.

As London prepares for a potential third night of sporadic rioting in the wake of the fatal shooting by police of father of four Mark Duggan, questions are inevitably being asked about the technologies which many believe are to blame.

In a tiresomely predictable backlash, the Metropolitan Police blamed social media this morning for helping groups of rioters to organise quickly and dynamically in a way that police were incapable of responding to speedily enough.

There are a couple of questions that beg to be asked if this is the case: why aren't the police capable of monitoring social media better, and haven't they heard of BlackBerry Messenger?

Starting in Tottenham, the rioting has spread to Brixton, Enfield, Walthamstow and even Oxford Circus, and arrests are being made in Hackney at the time of writing.

To say that it has caught the police by surprise is an understatement, but to blame it on Twitter and other forms of social media is to ignore the underlying cause of the unrest and, quite literally, to blame the messenger.

It also underlines just how far the police have to go before they become social media savvy. Having reportedly just received a four-fold funding increase which will enable the Police Central e-Crime Unit to swell its numbers from 20 to 85, maybe now would be a good time to engage properly with Web 2.0.

The tech vendors have certainly wasted no time in broadcasting the fact that the tools are out there to enable organisations to do just that.

Alcatel-Lucent gets a prize for being the first to ping into my inbox, explaining that its Genesys Social Engagement offering can help organisations monitor social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter in real time.

The tool works for a big brand keen to engage with its customers and prevent bad publicity just as much as it could for the police to track trends and prevent violence.

Not only is the Met wrong to blame social media, though, it is also probably wrong to single it out, after news emerged that BlackBerry Messenger has been a potentially more pervasive tool used by rioters to organise activities.

This encrypted instant message-type service effectively gives its senders anonymity, although it is pretty clear that BlackBerry maker RIM will hand over encryption keys if asked.

It's lazy and ignorant to blame technology for the spread of social unrest. Twitter, social networks and other communications tools have saved countless lives as well as occasionally enabling the sort of mindless violence we've seen in parts of London in recent days.

If it wasn't Twitter and BlackBerry Messenger, people would find another way to communicate and rally. I don't seem to remember web-based tools being implicated in the Poll Tax riots.

RIM's woes have continued after the smartphone maker lost a senior product manager to major rival Samsung.

Ryan Biden, formerly a senior product manager for the BlackBerry PlayBook, defected to the Korean manufacturer, where he is now director of product marketing.

He is the second high-level executive to leave RIM in the past month, following Brian Wallace, who was vice president of digital media and is now vice president of strategic marketing at Samsung.

Biden's last official act was to help launch the PlayBook, which debuted to a mixed reception. The device was plagued by problems on release, and RIM had to embarrassingly admit that it had shipped 1,000 faulty models. However, the tablet appears to be back on track as RIM shipped 500,000 devices in the most recent quarter.

Still, RIM has been struggling with numerous problems over the past 12 months. The firm received scathing criticism from Morgan Stanley for ineffective R&D ahead of its financial results, which were below par.

The firm's shares plunged by 15 per cent in mid-June after it announced that profits were down $74m year on year.

Dissent within the RIM ranks was also confirmed by an anonymous high-level employee, who published an open letter outlining faults in the current management.

Among the criticisms were a poor management structure, a lack of focus on developers, and an accusation that the company is carrying too much dead wood.