The NSA Wants Its Own Smartphone

Art Vanderlay writes "Troy Lange might work for one of the more secretive spy agencies in the United States, but he is happy to talk about his work. He is the NSA's mobility mission manager and he has been tasked with creating a smartphone that is secure enough to allow government personnel who deal with highly sensitive information to take their work on the road. At present, the U.S. Government has secure cellphones; they use the government's Secret Internet Protocol Router Network. The problem is that they can only communicate with other devices that are plugged into the network and their use is restricted to top-secret level communications. Lange wants a smartphone that is inter-operable and presumably trusted to deal with even more sensitive information. Lange said that he wanted to see his secure smartphone reach beyond the NSA – ultimately to reach every 'every employee in the Defense Department, intelligence community, and across government.'"

Comments

Good enough for them, but not for us huh?

[elrous0]

Oh, so your boys get the privacy protections that you've spent the last 10 years undermining for all the rest of us plebs, huh? I tell you what, I'll be cool with your special phones if, in exchange, the President and NSA Director will issue a public directive to all NSA employees reaffirming the pre-911 NSA policy of not to spying on the phone calls or emails of any American citizen without a court order. You know that policy, right? It's the one we put into law in 1978--the law that you ignored just because the President said so.

I'll hold my breath.

Re:Good enough for them, but not for us huh?

[FatLittleMonkey]

Who's saying that the employees conversations on these phones won't be tracked?

Yeah, but securely tracked.

Re:Good enough for them, but not for us huh?

[bsDaemon]

I would be willing to bet that the people who will have this phone issued to them will have even less personal privacy on the device than normal cell phone users. After all, what good is securing the device from evesdropping by foreign intelligence if you can't catch people who are spying from the inside? State security and personal privacy aren't the same thing, not that the difference justifies fucking us, as citizens, over in the name of stopping turrerism.

Re:Good enough for them, but not for us huh?

[Ouchie]

The NSA/DOD listening is not as simple as you think. It isn't a bunch of analysts sitting around listening to everyone's phone calls to Pakistan. Computers listen passively to international phone calls looking for keywords and codewords. They score hits based on these usages and push it up for further analysis such as voice identification and stress pattern analysis.

The analysis is multi-level relying on computers for the first few levels until the computer ranks you high enough to warrant an analyst attention.

The likelihood of you being snooped on is slim, unless you do make regular phone calls to a phone number previously flagged. Like a payphone down the street from a known safe house.

Oddly enough they get around the search warrant thing by primarily listening to phone calls that leave and enter the United States. Your long distance calls fall under their charter as Foreign Intelligence because your phone calls are most likely bounced off a satellite owned by a Canadian, or other foreign subsidiary.

There already is one, the sectera

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Gah

[lightknight]

*facepalms*

How can they ask for something like this after doing everything in their power to ensure something like this can't be created?

Well, sure Mr. NSA, we can cobble together a secure phone for you...we'll just throw in an encryption / decryption chip and a process that prompts for a password every 5 minutes. And your agents will hate it, it will become compromised (journalists are so irresponsible), and it will become a waste of tax-payer money.

Did I mention it won't be secure? But don't worry; someone will tell you it can be done, and you'll pay them a lot of money, only to realize they lied.

Small article error that changes the context a lot

[Anonymous Coward]

"Secret Internet Protocol Router Network"

  "use is restricted to top-secret level communications"
This article contradicts it self, SIPR is only up to secret.

Re:contradiction per se

[kevinNCSU]

I don't think there's anything inherently contradictory about wanting to keep the enemy's knowledge of you to a minimum while maximizing your knowledge of the enemy. Both stem from the idea that knowledge/information is power, and in the information battle, just like the physical battle, you're not interested in a level playing field.