France Bans BlackBerries In Govt. On Fears of Spying

DesertBlade writes "French government officials are no longer allowed to use BlackBerries for official correspondence. The reason? Fear that the US government will snoop out French national secrets via RIM's network. From the article: '"The risks of interception are real. It is economic war," daily Le Monde quoted Alain Juillet, in charge of economic intelligence for the government, as saying. With BlackBerries, there is "a problem with the protection of information," he said. Juillet's office confirmed that he spoke to Le Monde but said he would not talk to other reporters. Officials at the presidential Elysee Palace and the prime minister's office were not immediately available for comment. Le Monde said information sent from BlackBerries goes through servers in the United States and Britain, and that France fears that the U.S. National Security Agency can snoop.'"

Comments

Entirely plausible, even likely.

[Frosty Piss]

I'm sure there will be an avalanche of French jokes (looking forward to some good ones!), but as silly as it may seem, put that in the context of past and present behavior of our executive branch and their reach with the "Intelligence" Community. Entirely plausible, even likely.

It's not unreasonable

[rbanzai]

I don't think it's unreasonable for a foreign government to suspect that our government is not currently obeying any laws, morals, or ethics where snooping on electronic information is concerned.

Even when laws are obeyed they differ from country to country, and one country might not appreciate the latitude (or lack of it) in the way another country handles information and espionage.

Seems rational

[Chairboy]

This seems like a perfectly rational precaution. For five every crazed conspiracy theory where random Joe Public runs around screaming that the NSA is decrypting his SSL'd eBay login information and/or listening for words like "bomb" and "president" on his phone calls to his mother, there's one very legitimate precaution like this.

The real news story would be any government organization, US or foreign, that _WAS_ entrusting valuable national secrets to a third party vendor anywhere. The US isn't the only country with ELINT, and unless you have a network that doesn't require external trust (eg, the encryption is done server side or via a proprietary program that could be compromised) there's every reason NOT to make it easy for someone to profit at your expense.

The minute God crapped out the third cave man, a conspiracy was hatched against one of them. You don't need to be a tin-foil wearing, taxi driving crazypants to know this.

No surprises here

[patrik]

I am not surprised. The US Government does not particularly like them either. They are not considered secure devices by anyone's standard. I used to work at a large contractor and whenever some idiot manager had accidentally forwarded their classified emails to their to a blackberry there was always a lot of yelling and head rolling. The person had to basically give up their PDA for a week while the security guys sanitized the device. I believe the emails are actually stored on blackberry's emails servers so they even had to contact them to remove said emails.

If I were worried about security I wouldn't think twice about banning them, no matter what country the mail servers were in. That being said, our govt and I am sure the French govt have skiffs for the really higher classification stuff.

Patrik

Re:It's been going on longer than that

[Frosty Piss]

Our intelligence community has always depended on help from large American corporations.

RIM is Canadian.

Duh

[Opportunist]

You just gave the answer yourself. Do you think the French would trust anything based in Waterloo?