From this website I understand there are three reasons:
[ul]
[li]The secret service thinks it might get hacked.[/li][li]Unsavory people might be able to locate him from the wireless signal.[/li][li]He might send out emails that are embarrassing.[/li][/ul]
Maybe it’s me, but I don’t see the first and third reasons as legitimate… I have a Blackberry, and was involved in its deployment for a security conscious company. It has triple DES encryption, and my understanding is that Blackberries are used in some three letter government agencies.
I also can’t see that we don’t trust the president to be responsible with email.
I guess my GQ is,
What is the real likelihood that a Blackberry can get hacked (I thought the encryption was very strong) and
Is there some way to let him keep his Blackberry and not let people be able to identify his location. I’m somewhat familiar with a Blackberry Enterprise Server. Maybe they could give him a different device every day, or every morning at 3Am transfer his email account around and switch devices to keep the bad guys on their toes.
Although I’m addicted to my crackberry and sometimes wish I could kick the addiction, I’d personally like to the president-elect keep his Blackberry.
The Secret Service is just doing what they are supposed to. They need to keep him safe and the Clinton’s gave them enough to worry about. The SS falls under the Executive Branch of government so he could re-org the entire thing to keep his Blackberry but no one knows what they are getting into when they step inside the Oval Office in the presidential chair for the first time. The SS gets paid to be hyper-paranoid about everything and they have experience with all kinds of whackos, both dim and brilliant. I think the paper (electronic) trail is most worrisome of all the concerns.
Bingo. I doubt the real reason has much to do with security (although I’m sure there’s an element to that). Strictly the political consequences of having personal email are too risky in this day & age. That’s why Presidents Clinton and Bush never had private email, just as you can thank Richard Nixon for eliminating recorded conversations in the Oval Office (or Bob Packwood for eliminating 99% of the diaries in Washington).
As a historian, personally, I’m somewhat horrified by all of this. Just think of all the history we’re losing! We understand our leaders like Washington, Lincoln, FDR and Reagan through their letters and diaries, and even JFK, LBJ and Nixon had their tapes. No one will ever again have that intimate view of history-- Clinton, Bush 43, Obama and every president to follow will be defined (and defended, and criticized) only in the abstract, by memoirs and biographers, with few contemporary records available to future historians.
And this is the responsibility of the SS, how? I thought their function was to provide physical protection and security for the President, not to keep him from holding onto any documents that might get him into trouble down the road.
Even if he chooses a Blackberry device that has GPS, GPS is just a receiver of signals from the GPS satellites. Nobody else should be able to track him from that, but theoretically people could track him by triangulating the cellular signals the device is receiving assuming they had access to the phone carriers systems.
That is why I thought maybe they could swap devices and Blackberry accounts every night (or something).
There’s also the possibility of the Blackberry simply getting physically misplaced; while we all try to be careful, these kind of gadgets do occasionally get lost.
If a system is to be hacked, it will most likely be done by exploiting weaknesses in its design and implementation (aka bugs), rather than directly cracking the cipher per se. The Blackberry most likely was not developed with the same level of carefulness and subjected to the scrutiny that will be required for a device intended to handle classified information.
Having said that, does Blackberry only support TripleDES? According to Wiki, AES is the only algorithm available to the public that is approved for top secret information.
As far as I know, there’s a concern that Blackberry e-mails might violate the Presidential Records Act due to problems backing up and storing the messages.
They are probably going to give him a replacement one that has been sanitized with a few unique features. Special encryption from the nsa, port and ip forwarding , restricted network ,berry pin, phone #, and a way to scram the data remotely.
Add in a special screamer for those pesky kidnapper that operates silently , and commonality with every other executive berry that the administration will use.
I doubt it’s really about security. The encryption RIM uses on Blackberries is famously secure. As a matter of fact, the Indian government has been refusing to contract with RIM because RIM will not allow them to decrypt their data. They have threatened to hack it (see this article.) I have no cite, but I’ve been told that they have been trying to hack it for over a year without success.
There’s always the conspiratorial idea that they just don’t want him getting any information that isn’t filtered through their circle.
It seems to me like the President of the US could get enough security/protection to allow him to have a device like that without causing too much of a stir. How often is the White House network compromised?
The SS protects both the physical President and the Office of the Presidency. But I was not the one who said the SS was behind this, I merely gave a reason for a lack of Presidential e-mails.
It really is as basic as his texts and emails are considered as written messages, and are therefore subject to retention, archiving and disclosure as matters of public record, no matter how mundane.
Just imagine what the pork producers’ lobby would have to say if he sent a text to Mrs. O. that he was tired of porkchops and wanted roast chicken for dinner? Remember the stir over Bush Sr. and broccoli?
*"There is presidential precedent for an email blackout. Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton didn’t email while in office.
“It’s all discoverable; it creates a trail that might end up in congressional investigators’ hands,” said Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry."*
BTW, I think that everyone but Ken Starr can agree that, at least for Clinton’s sake, it was a very good idea for him not to use email while at the White House.
The irony being that conversations in the Oval Office began being recorded with Kennedy. After quite a few Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended the Bay of Pigs Invasion and pushed it through despite Kennedy’s misgivings only to denounce any responsibility once it became a disaster. He wasn’t going to go through that again.
For the security issue, you should consider that no matter how strong the RIM security is, security breaches aren’t usually a matter of someone cracking a 3DES key or anything like that. It’s a matter of someone at RIM making a mistake (or getting paid off) and allowing keys to get leaked or backups to be left unencrypted on a tape somewhere. In other words, your blackberry email is famously secure from random hackers on the internet, but not necessarily from people who work at RIM. Someone would have to do a very thorough audit of all of their data handling procedures to trust them with (potentially) national security.
