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The main workhorse to protect the SIPRNET is the KG-175D or Taclane Micro. The next problem you run into is getting one with the same software the military uses.

Ugh ....
Maryland - Goddard Space Flight Center
New Mexico - AF Research Lab - Space Vehicles, Sandia Labs, Los Alamos Labs
Colorado - Ball, Raytheon, etc
California - JPL, Livermore Labs and way too many others to list
Virginia - Navy Research Lab, Wallops Island
Texas - UT Dallas, Texas A&M, Johnson Space Center, many more
Arizona - Orbital Sciences Corp., GD, etc
Tennessee - Oakridge
Alabama - U.S. Space and Rocket Center
Utah -Space Dynamics Laboratory, L3
Florida - Kennedy, ATK and many more
Alaska - Kodiak Island

The space industry is spread out over the entire country. This list could go on and on. Saying it is only Florida and Texas that benefit is mildly absurd. I agree with the idea, but it isn't nearly as narrow as that.

Blackberry - designed by untrustworthy Canadians

Actually, Blackberries have been tested & certified by the US govt, NATO, et al for many, many years:

http://us.blackberry.com/ataglance/security/certifications.jsp

Android & iphone have been certified by... nobody.

Beyond blackberry there is the sectera edge: http://www.gdc4s.com/content/detail.cfm?item=32640fd9-0213-4330-a742-55106fbaff32

The Sectera Edge is certified for classified communications... in fact, it's the only "smartphone" that is certified for Top Secret comms. That fact is half of what they're trying to get around here.

The good news is that the US government takes information assurance really, really seriously. The bad news is that they take it seriously enough that the only mobile device you can read your Top Secret e-mail on is a government-only, multi-thousand dollar Windows PDA that's many years behind the times because it took that long to jump through all the high-level government certification hoops.

Fortunately, the government has lately caught on to the idea that they will always be behind on mobile technology if they don't find a way to build their requirements on top of consumer platforms rather than trying to build the whole thing government-specific from the ground up. This effort is part of their attempt to stop falling way behind the innovation curve that off the shelf iOS, Android, etc. devices are delivering, and it seems to be working. Good on them.

It's from General Dynamics:

http://www.gdc4s.com/content/detail.cfm?item=32640fd9-0213-4330-a742-55106fbaff32

Blackberry is very good, it currently holds many certifications (but not top secret):

http://us.blackberry.com/ataglance/security/certifications.jsp

Fundamentally, there is a problem with mobile access for top secret communications - you don't know who is looking over the shoulder of the authorized user. Or if someone is pointing a gun at the head of an authorized user. These problems are reduced when you make the user come in to the office.

That's just one problem and possibly the main problem. But you also don't know for sure the person reading it is the person authorized. Looking over their shoulder isn't the only problem, as most authentication schemes can be faked.

When an individual has access to classified information it's best to monitor their every move. This is why it's best if they access it from an environment where their every move is seen. This would have to be a completely secured location.

Mobile phones create insecurity because now there is no way to guarantee the location is a secure location or that the individual is the authorized individual.

http://www.gdc4s.com/content/detail.cfm?item=32640fd9-0213-4330-a742-55106fbaff32

Looks like a Blackberry, but it's about an inch and a half thick and weighs about a pound.
Never before have I seen such hatred heaped upon an inanimate object by its user base.

Wireless, secure, cheap, reliable -- pick two.

It's from General Dynamics:

http://www.gdc4s.com/content/detail.cfm?item=32640fd9-0213-4330-a742-55106fbaff32

Blackberry is very good, it currently holds many certifications (but not top secret):

http://us.blackberry.com/ataglance/security/certifications.jsp

Fundamentally, there is a problem with mobile access for top secret communications - you don't know who is looking over the shoulder of the authorized user. Or if someone is pointing a gun at the head of an authorized user. These problems are reduced when you make the user come in to the office.

Military computer systems share a lot in common with servers, including hardware (although SPARC and PowerPC are disproportionately popular), but tend to have special requirements that differ from normal commercial or technical systems. In this case, it was a massive and complex machine that would be deployable to near the front, would take multiple vehicles to set up, and was designed to handle battlefield intelligence needs for a fairly large area.

http://www.gdc4s.com/documents/DCGS-A.pdf

It's supposedly this thing

You are correct, it is a Sectera. I am a software engineer and am working on a web app for the dissemination of classified information on secure US networks. General Dynamics and the NSA worked together to create a mobile device that was both secure and rugged and it received final approval in late 2008. When that occurred, we began modifying our code to ensure it could run on the mobile device and even have one in the office for testing. After the election we learned that Obabma's "Blackberry" is really the GD Sectera or SME-PED.. There was one article that actually got it right soon after the election and turns out a news.google.com search for SME-PED reveals some good articles (I can't remember where I found the original article I referred to). From a Geek perspective, this is REALLY cool! Specs are freely available at the first link.

Would be why Barack cannot use his blackberry, yet they can use youtube...

Mr. Obama can use his blackberry. Mr. President is supposed to use his new Sectera Edge. Given he's a democrat, I'm guessing that he'll pick Canada over the USA, but perhaps I'll be wrong.

As far as I know, neither of the proposed devices can yet access youtube video. ;^)

Wow, this is close to my ideal phone. If it were running Android and less than $3500 phone geeks everywhere would be using them.

Whatever. "I am the head of the Executive Branch. I will use my crackberry, and you will find a way to make me untraceable just the same as you found a way for me to walk down a D.C. street without getting shot. Is that clear?" "Yes Mr. President."

The end.

Probably the solution is as simple as, "Don't use your Blackberry's wireless connection." But I don't know; that's what security experts are for. Everyday I see Congressmen using cellphones; if those can be secure enough to carry day-to-day government business, why not other wireless devices?

Chickenhead congressmen aren't really privy to the sort of information the president is. And securing a crackberry is like trying to secure a paper bag. No president is going to be so stupid as to demand that. The government doesn't control RIM, so they are in no position to change the nature of the communications protocol, no matter what the president demands. A crackberry can't be made secure. That's why they have companies like General Dynamics making Sectera secure phones.

Grrr.. Slashdot ate my link again.

So was I. It's a "Secure Mobile Environment Portable Electronic Device", it's made by General Dynamics, and you can read more about it here.

General Dynamics offers a product called CoMotion that allows you to visually explore your data and find interesting patterns and trends.

http://www.gdc4s.com/content/detail.cfm?item=32341561-76f9-40f8-8ad5-0f0d66dd240e

CoMotion is a commercial fork of Visage, a collaborative visualization platform designed at Carnegie Mellon University and MAYA Design:

• http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sage/visage.html
• http://www.maya.com/visage/base/papers/mayaDemo.htm
• Google: "visage site:maya.com"

I don't know about white house comm. But; in the Air Force we are beginning to have to support specially designed blackberry like devices that not only support all of your conventional on the go services but also classified voice and data, like this this one. I don't know why seemingly every Colonel General in the Air Force can have one of these but the president couldn't

That hardware solution is the KG-175 from General Dynamics. I can't say for certain, but I highly doubt they outsource that to China.

I hope not. COTS programs have their benefits but this is one area we'd best keep in-house.

I looked into this a while back and found one solution that you might find interesting. GD makes an Iridium reachback device that will combine four Iridium data channels into one larger virtual network pipe. If one connection goes down (which I understand happens often since the satellites are moving) the system will divert that traffic through the remaining three channels until the failed connection recovers. I was told that the unit can be booted using windows or Linux, which of course makes it more configurable. The unit can be used as a network router between disparate networks to give a low bandwidth dial on demand network connection which can then be used to tunnel your management IP traffic without any additional support on either end for what ever software you choose for your remote management. Alternately each of the four channels can be used separately to connect to other remote sites if desired. http://www.gdc4s.com/content/detail.cfm?item=7b0bceb6-36e0-49f3-b879-8df91d6a3409&page=5

That hardware solution is the KG-175 from General Dynamics. I can't say for certain, but I highly doubt they outsource that to China.

Options include:
S/MIME, PGP, GPG, VPN's are good too, my personal preference is using hardware accelerated encrypted disconnected networks.
General Dynamics makes a nice product for this:
Taclane They are not cheap but they secure the world.

No "state secrets" were lost. If something is "secret", then it's "classified". If it's classified, then it isn't being stored on a system that has access to the internet, directly or indirectly. According to the article, (yes, I read it...) there was some sensative information lost. This is not going to be launch codes or anything that's even remotely that valuable. I'm not saying it's no big deal, I'm saying that it's not nearly as big a deal as you're trying to make it out to be.

Hate to break it to you, but there are a ton of connections between classified networks and the Internet. The connections are generally made via high assurance gateway devices (usually a few systems that work together to protect the connection). Wikipedia has a general article here. There are some of these things actually in use, and their use is a lot wider than you would expect.

In my previous life, I worked for the DoD's head of cross-domain solutions as a research weenie and pen-tester. I'm quite the skeptic about the way the cross-domain world is run: the solutions are all based on super-old and kludgey software, and DoD has been too terrified of risk to admit that it needs to come up with higher-assurance solutions.

Also, there's too much data on DoD's networks to be accurately classified these days. Classification levels are supposed to determine how detrimental a leak would be to national security, but typically a few unclassified documents are assembled into one place and the result is classified. It's also worth noting that in an ideal case, only unclassified material will be on the unclassified network, but security violations happen all the time. At one of my previous employs, a contractor was caught taking a USB hard drive home (as in, to his house) from a classified lab. He got a slap on the wrist. Later, he got a job working for Defense Intelligence. I can only presume that his clearance was not affected.

I was a big proponent of "disinformation" while I was a research weenie: seeding bogus reports, making up totally insane presentations for research projects that weren't real, etc. I think it's a good area for DoD to invest in the idea, as in creating a 'disinformation czar' (or preferably one or two of them per research lab). Let the Chinese steal fake documents and let them waste their money reacting accordingly, I say...

Seriously though, as I understand it the expected test of the Land Warrior system in Iraq (outfitting one of the Stryker Brigade Combat Teams from the 2nd ID) was scaled back from 'full-deployment' to every soldier due to weight concerns (the batteries, cameras, and computers still took up far too much weight - not to mention being expensive). Only one soldier in a squad would have the full system. It looks like instead they decided to go back to the drawing board and come up with something that doesn't add 40lbs of weight to a soldier that already has plenty of gear to haul around. According to General Dynamics C4 they're basically merging the Land Warrior and Future Force Warrior programs.

Here's a hint for those of you Powerpoint addicts in the DOD: Get a Mac and use Keynote.

Here's a hint for those of you Powerpoint addicts in the DOD: get a workstation and use General Dynamics Viz' Command Post of the Future. A blatant plug, of course, because I work for the group that writes it, but the entire concept of a series of static, throw-away slides is so 20th century. If you can't manipulate and dig into information live, and have those viewing the presentation doing the same, then you're really not utilizing a tiny fraction of the benefit of having a large group of interested people assembled on the topic.

Disks work just fine in space (although they do need to be ruggedized a little). See for example the General Dynamics (nee Spectrum Astro) Space-Qualified RAID. Note that these are meant for use on unmanned spacecraft.

Try the CDA. Commander's Digital Assistant. Software by General Dynamics. Running on a ruggedized HP iPAQ. In use now on the battle field.

http://chs3.gdc4s.com/products

Yes, it's encrypted.

The actual conversation itself is encrypted, but the traffic passes through the AF central message server, where it's decrypted and read by analysis software. If any keywords pop up, *then* it will be flagged for an operator to examine and determine if they need to intervene or cut off the conversation.

The monitoring software and the hardware supporing it is incredibly fast. You never notice the delay.

Once the text is approved by the software at the central server, it's then passed to the NIPR servers and sent over the NIPRnet. The NIPRnet is passed to trunks encrypted using FASTLANES, but they're upgrading to TACLANES, which have a much higher capacity and more goodies, and can be trusted for use in a tactical environment, where equipment not only needs to be hardend, but electronically destroyed quickly and easily.

All NIPR trunks pass to a SATCOM link, which then gets passed to one of the three NCTAMS, DISA or other communications stations, where it's decrypted and passed to their internal networks. From there, all traffic is copied and the copied traffic sent to the spooks for analysis, while the original signals proceed to their destination.

ALL of it. Every single one and zero is monitored. As you can imagine, this level of monitoring engenders it's own problems, but understand that it *IS* monitored.

If you do something stupid, it may take a while before you're caught, depending on what you're trying to do. If you're stupid, you'll get balled out by your chain of command and lose your priviledges. If you're smart-or just THINK you are-then they will watch you in silence, monitoring your every single move, as well as everything being done by those you're talking to.

If you are *really* smart, you will stick to snail-mail. THAT is something they don't have the time or the manpower to read, and it all just passes through the system, mostly ignored. Occassionally, they will open a few hundred letters to make a stab at things, see if anyone is being blatantly obvious or trying to use some sort of cipher.

But because everyone is so keen on "instant communication", the chances of someone going for a written letter instead of instant gratification are low. They have the bait and know where to find the fish.

If they are smart, they will use something like this for encryption. The page hints at where it's used.

If someone made a copier or printer that could be bounced around working in heat, cold and dust, they'd make a killing with the US Army.

Try this...

http://chs2.gdc4s.com/Products/LCIP_PIB.pdf

It will even survive the EMP pulse of a nuclear warhead. I don't want to think about how much is costs.