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Solving Obama's BlackBerry Dilemma
CurtMonash writes "Much is being made of the deliberations as to whether President Obama will be able to keep using his beloved "BarackBerry." As the NYTimes details, there are two major sets of objections: infosecurity and legal/records retention. Deven Coldeway of CrunchGear does a good job of showing that the technological infosecurity problems can be solved. And as I've noted elsewhere, the 'Omigod, he left his Blackberry behind at dinner' issue is absurd. Presidents are surrounded by attendants, Secret Service and otherwise. Somebody just has to be given the job of keeping track of the president's personal communication device. As for the legal question of whether the president can afford to put things in writing that will likely be exposed by courts and archivists later — the answer to that surely depends on the subject matter or recipient. Email to his Chicago friends — why not? Anything he'd write to them would be necessarily non-secret anyway. Email to the Secretary of Defense? That might be a different matter."
I just did a pretty good submission about the very same issue. Now, alas, redundant. But I did pick up one useful new fact: General Dynamics makes something called a Sectera Edge which would probably be a good, secure, replacement for the Obamaberry.
Can we stop all this portmanteau crap? Please? It's like the imaginary label "President-Elect"...
PS:
And as I've noted elsewhere, the 'Omigod, he left his Blackberry behind at dinner' issue is absurd
No, it's not. The people who surround the president have (practically since the inception of nuclear weapons) had problems keeping the codes or the authorization mechanisms physically secure, despite the fact that the fucking thing is in fact attached to the person carrying it:
On occasion the President has left his aide carrying the football behind. This happened to Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush[2] and, most recently, Bill Clinton on April 24, 1999.[3] In none of these cases was the integrity of the football breached. clicky.
It's one thing for a "football" which is specifically designed to not rely just on restricted access, but if someone got ahold of Obama's blackberry, getting into it isn't nearly as challenging.
Also, the article submitter doesn't have the remotest understanding of how things work at a presidential level in regards to information security; its not as simple as "zOMG, do not email the sec of defense on blackberry!" Bush went so far as to keep his press secretary at arm's length so that he was truly ignorant on stuff that Bush didn't want the press to know about.
Much of information security at that level isn't about actual classified information, but dissemination of unclassified information to the media that is either beneficial or hurtful to other political entities and individuals, domestic or foreign.
Please help metamoderate.
Didn't they try something like that in 1812 already? Didn't they set fire to the White House? Didn't the Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie make a wonderful song about that?
Well, I don't watch any TV, let alone news. And most news is no better, as far as being opinionated, than talk radio (which, ironically, I do listen to).
That said, I think NPR (not sure if that is necessarily the same as PBS though) is decidedly biased as well. And I might add, NPR did cover the dog story on "All Things Considered." (Online here.)
Working for a state agency I am required to use a Blackberry vs. a smartphone or other PDA. This is suppossedly because it is more secure and has an encryption password built in that will wipe the phone if lost.
"The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget." -Thomas Szasz
Or, why not take away his personal blackberry, and give him a government-issued one? They're already so prevalent throughout the government, so why not give him one? Then you can do the BES thing and have remote wipe, and have all emails sent through it archived. And given the encryption already on it, I'm sure it's usable for classified stuff as well.
Classified? No. While blackberries are very secure and have been audited from end-to-end by many government agencies, they are currently certified for "Sensitive But Unclassified" information by the US government.
For example, blackerries aren't tempest shielded.
http://www.l-3com.com/cs-east/ia/smeped/ie_ia_smeped.shtml
Is RIM still forcing people to send information to their servers? If so, can anyone give me a single good reason for that, and why I, as a customer, would want that rather than a normal IMAP+SSL connection to my own mail server?
Yes, I'll give you two. Because of that permanent stateful connection to RIM's NOC, your e-mail is pushed to the device automatically rather when needed. Your IMAP/SSL connection only checks on a regular schedule (whatever you set it to be) and that can be too often or not often enough. On top of that, it allows BlackBerries to communicate with each other via a unique PIN address so even if your mail server/BlackBerry Enterprise Server is slammed or out of commission, you can still communicate with any other BlackBerry user if you know their PIN address.
On the downside it does represent a single point of failure, but RIM does a pretty good job of making their NOC highly available (of course not perfect). In the real world you're more likely to be out of cell coverage or have your corporate e-mail/BES down than for the RIM NOC to be down.
"95% of all Slashdot
There, fixed that for ya. Noone except hormonal chicks care about baby seals. It's all because of the eye-head size ratio.
Canadian Bacon: great movie.
Zamboni: invented & built in California. Who'da thunk?
a) Parliament has never been in Montreal.
b) The torching you're referring to is Fort York, now Toronto.
c) There was no Canada, and no parliament, till 1867.
d) The first parliament was (very briefly) in Charlottetown, PEI, and then moved to Kingston, Ontario, as a provisional capital. It stayed there until Queen Vickie got pissed with the lobbyists from Kingston & Toronto both wanting to be named the capital, and screwed them both over by naming Bytown (now Ottawa) as the capital instead.
first off, they are already quite well encrypted, second it would never be used for any type of classified e-mail or messaging, if by some massive waste of taxpayers dollars the NSA were to be engaged to approve a crackberry for processing Secret and above data it would not be allowed on the regular internet and would thus be useless for anything else - despite what some may say, workable multilevel security systems are many years away - as far as secure erasure THAT is in the realm of possible today and you can obtain devices capable of erasing themselves to NSA, DoD and other government standards
Exchange does it. IMAP servers can do it (though not all do).
Yes, the newest versions of Exchange with Direct Push do it as well. Although IMAP IDLE can theoretically do it, I have yet to see it in the wild. The deficiency in IMAP is that (unlike RIM's NOC or Exchange Direct Push + SCMDM) the encrypted permanent connection is used for device management as well (OTA provisioning, remote wipe if the device is stolen, etc.)
That doesn't sound like much of a feature to me [...] I could just set my phone up to have my work account *and* my gmail account, which makes even more sense.
The point of PIN-to-PIN is not just proofing against just one e-mail account being unavailable (although in most large enterprise/government environments you would be shot by the IT security group for sending potentially sensitive information via your gmail account). It's about the fact that those communications go from any BlackBerry to the RIM NOC and straight to the other BlackBerry. The whole Internet could disappear and as long as the RIM NOC (which links directly to the packet networks of the major cell carriers) is there you can still send messages between BlackBerries. Not an everyday feature but very useful in emergency situations...
"95% of all Slashdot
That would be the 8820. I have one. Very nice. I think Obama has an 8830.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Dead wrong. You must be Canadian. ;)
The term Canada was in use for about 300 years before the 1867 Confederation as the Dominion of Canada, which is just one in a long series of 'Canada' names for the area immediately above the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence.
While we're at it, Fort York did not become Toronto, York did. Also York is where the American troops committed arson. Fort York was exploded by the retreating British. Incidentally, the Americans also burned the Parliment buildings at York. T'was the Parliment of Upper Canada.
But you can go back to telling the Americans they don't know nuthin now.
This is so wrong. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliament_of_Canada
In 1841, the British Parliament united Upper and Lower Canada into a new colony, called the Province of Canada. A single legislature, consisting of an elected Legislative Assembly and an appointed Legislative Council, was created. [...]
From 1841 to 1844, Parliament met on what is now the site of Kingston General Hospital in Kingston, Ontario. In 1849, the Parliament Building in Montreal, which had been the home of the legislature since being transferred from Kingston in 1843, burnt down. The fire was part of a Tory-led riot caused by the Rebellion Losses Bill and a series of tensions between Francophones and Anglophones, as well as an economic depression. In 1857, the legislature was finally moved to Ottawa, after a few years of alternating between Toronto and Quebec City.
So, yes the parliament was in Montreal, but there was no parliament in 1814 when the whitehouse burned.
No I'm not, and yes, I am.
Canada comes from the Iroquois word 'Kanata', which means villiage, or settlement. It was in common use anywhere the Iroquois were - which includes the area above the Great Lakes - but also below, and around.
Fort York was a British military garrison, and York, the town, grew up around it. As a matter of fact, Fort York is almost smack dab in the middle of Toronto - you can go and visit it if you'd like. There just wasn't much of a town there at the time - and I hardly think that the American troups went to "York" to trash the town, and ignore the Fort. The Fort WAS the target.
See above.
True ... but a detail, given the situation. When the Americans do 99% of the damage during the battle, it's a bit specious to tell me I'm wrong becuase the British did the remaining 1%. But I might also add that your statement reinforces my point - Fort York was the target. It was destroyed by the British to deny the Americans use of it.
Ummmm ... wrong. Upper Canada didn't *have* a parliament - it had a legislative assembly. Parliament is very similar to congress in that way ... original usage was a meeting or session - nowadays, it also refers to a place or a body. The "1st Parliament of Upper Canada", which ran from 1792-1796, refers to a meeting of the Legislative Assembly, not a specific place.
The Parliament buildings you refer to didn't really exist, either - when in Session, the legislative assembly used nondescript government buildings - I could be wrong, but I don't think they were even dedicated for the purpose (I'd have to look that up).
Your assumption, not mine. The only thing I've assumed is that not everybody is very familiar with the history of countries other than their own.
So you're saying NObama is the first president in the last eight years that can grip a banana?
That quotation was Tina Fey, in fact.
Surprised? That's what media with opinions does to you.
No, actually, I was aware of the difference. In any case the Fey quote it was a parody of something Palin and the McCain campaign actually said... that Palin had foreign policy experience by virtue of Alaska's being a neighbour to Russia.
References: here and here.
When you're a real girl, and not just a girl in training, you'll have reason to complain!
O_o I suppose now isn't the best time to tell you that my nickname comes from the fact that I have been raised by lesbians and have been told that it would be a good idea to "try acting like a girl." Not that it should matter, prick.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie