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Obama Keeps His Blackberry (And Gets a Sectera)
InternetVoting writes "After all the controversy surrounding Obama's Blackberry, word has come that he will get to keep it. Few details are available and neither the National Security Agency nor the White House are talking. The current rumor is that the Blackberry will be used exclusively for personal use and a Sectera Edge will be used for official communications."
It turns out, that, after trashing Bush and Cheney for eight years for not making all of their communications public, the first thing the new Democratic President does is get for himself a means of making private communications based on his word that it will be for personal use only.
Frankly, I don't dispute the right of any President to have secret communications. He needs to be judged by his work product and not be constantly subject to the Congress. It was wrong for Republicans to harrass Clinton during his Presidency and it was wrong for Bush to be harrassed as well. IT's not because, ideally, the President is above the law, but it is because, he (or she!), is not subjugated to the Congress. They are equal branches of government.
This is my sig.
And now we are told that Obama 'promises' to only use his blackberry for personal communications. I am sure he has every good intention to comply, but, as with Palin, we see that routine use of personal assets while in a government job can lead to a confusion and misuse between the personal asset and government property. One can imagine Palin logged onto her yahoo account simply writing a government note because it was more efficient that logging into the proper account, or thinking that since she was staying in her own home on government business, that the taxpayers should help her pay her mortgage.
Which is to say that we cannot trust that our officials are always doing the right thing, no matter how moral or trustworthy we think they are. If Obama uses the blackberry, then it still has to fall under the FOIA. If that means we get hundreds of pages of 'thinking of you dear', that is fine. At least we will know that he is not plotting to defraud the American consumers by colluding with oil company executives.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
the need for security does not stem from fear of those that elected him, but from fear of foreign interests getting their hands on sensitive information. I could care less if China, Al-Queda, Russia, etc. get their hands on his emails from his wife. I do care if any of them were to get their hands on sensitive information like internal comments about on-going negotiations on pending legislate, trade agreements, or human rights issues.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
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?
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
But what Obama wants, presumably, is the common good, and his plans are but means to that end. Rush is simply being idiotically idiological, in the most stupid way.
By the way: I find it amazing the way the US has brute forced the word "liberalism" into meaning exactly the opposite of what it used to mean...
Okay, the hardware specs look good, but the software description scotched the deal for me. "Familiar Microsoft® Windows® Platform".
Of course, that's only the front-end. Chances are it's running virtualized using a secure separation kernel. This system is likely so thoroughly contained and hardened that it can't even access external networks- and if it can, it's doing so through a kernel like GHS INTEGRITY or LynxSecure or something.
Ideally, with a secure embedded system like this, Windows, Linux, Mac, whatever- they're only good as front-ends. The thought of any of those three running bare on a system with that much sensitive information is quite frankly frightening.
I agree that Congress has multiply failed the American people, both for the reasons you cite and more. But Bush has also failed his responsibility to the American people and the US Constitution. It is reasonable to hold Bush personally responsible for the actions of his Administration. Unfortunately it makes no sense to hold Congress responsible as an institution. Each citizen must hold their representative to Congress personally responsible.
Unfortunately there are only 2 ways I can think of to investigate improprieties of a Presidential Administration, through a special prosecutor appointed by that or a later Administration, or by Congress. And only Congress has the power within the US to hold that Administration accountable.
Ultimately this is where Congress failed the American people most miserably. They failed to investigate the egregiously illegal and immoral acts of the Bush Administration, largely because the Democrats were afraid of the same quagmire that befell the Reublicans after the Clinton impeachment hearings.
I didn't realize that AES encryption was trivial to crack. If you add S/MIME encryption on top of that (which the US government uses) I would think it's pretty hard eavesdrop on emails. The BlackBerry Enterprise Server isn't the backend of RIM, that's administered by the organization; in this case the government. It's encrypted from the device to the BES at the very least, simple as that.