The Real Risks of Obama's BlackBerry

An anonymous reader writes "When the mainstream media first announced Barack Obama's 'victory' in keeping his BlackBerry, the focus was on the security of the device, and keeping the US president's e-mail communications private from spies and hackers. The news coverage and analysis by armchair security experts thus far has failed to focus on the real threat: attacks against President Obama's location privacy, and the potential physical security risks that come with someone knowing the president's real-time physical location. In this article, a CNET blogger digs into the real risks associated with the President carrying around a tracking device at all times."

Re:turn it off?

[Anonymous Coward]

One cool scene of the 90s version of Vanishing Point, the driver simply turned on his cell phone and threw it in the luggage bin of a Greyhound bus. The cops were hundereds of miles off course by the time they found out.

i don't think obama has a blackberry

[circletimessquare]

i think he has a sectera edge [intomobile.com], which is a sort of military grade blackberry. as such, you can bet he is immune from the kind of attack mentioned in the summary

slashdot noted this already [slashdot.org], with the rumor that he has a blackberry and a sectera. this is absurd because:

1. the sectera has civilian and military network abilities, so it would be doubly redundant to have both a blackberry and sectera, since a sectera is pretty much already a blackberry+

2. since we are talking about top level extremely sensitive communications, rumors about the reality of his communication device is all any of us will hear about, as a rule. and probably with purposeful misdirection about what obama is actually using thrown in to boot: let the yokels believe what they want to believe about his communication device and the "stories" aka myths about him keeping his blackberry. uh huh. anyone, anywhere, writing about what obama is using is either guessing or lying. the more the certainty and conviction they have about what his communication device is, the sillier they are. the only people who know for sure what obama is communicating with on the go are probably a few tight-lipped spooks at the nsa. and if they talk, they are about to lose their job and are going to be heavily prosecuted about disclosing obviously extremely senstive national security details of obama's mobile communication situation. all obama cares about is the convenience of qwerty keyboard email on the go in a cellphone. switch a real blackberry with a sectera edge, he is happy. he's married to the convenience, not an actual brand of device

3. but i think most convincingly, when someone talks about obama keeping his "blackberry", i think they are using the word "blackberry" the way some people use "xerox": that is, like the word xerox has become a rough synonym for copying a piece of paper, i think blackberry is so ubiquitous now, any shiny brick with a full qwerty keyboard can be called a "blackberry" in common parlance, or soon will be. that's all the sectera edge is: a blackberry rip off with ultrahigh security. and that's most probably what obam is using

Re:i don't think obama has a blackberry

[epiphani]

Wrong. [gizmodo.com]

He carries both. And he is carrying a "real" blackberry.

Not correct

[RootWind]

He most likely has both, as Obama has been seen using a blackberry while president: http://i.gizmodo.com/5144129/the-secrets-of-obamas-email [gizmodo.com]

Re:i don't think obama has a blackberry

[GeekZilla]

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. [gdc4s.com]. There was one article that actually got it right soon after the election and turns out a news.google.com search for SME-PED [google.com] 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.

Re:i don't think obama has a blackberry

[afidel]

Wrong, he carries both, he has his Blackberry Curve for personal use AND he has the SME-PED for official use. It's VERY easy to tell which device he has in pictures as the SME looks like a Palm Treo 700W with blocky corners versus the smooth edges on the Curve.

President is already tracked in real time

[tburke]

When I last worked in the White House in the '90s certain senior staff had a little device that constantly updated with the President's location from WHCA [disa.mil].

Re:Single Prez ?

[shadow349]

This has the huge drawback of being a single point of failure and an easy target. (And has only 1 single backup : the vice president).

Exactly! And by "exactly", I mean completely wrong [wikipedia.org].

Re:Seriously?

[WarJolt]

Not to mention the TFR(temporary flight restriction) that follows him wherever he goes.

Re:Cellphones?

[argent]

The acceptable latency for email is much higher... if you send someone an email you're not sitting there with a brick against your face waiting for them to get it and reply, if it takes a few minutes, even, that's pretty good. Many mail servers have longer internal latency than that. Given the power budget for these things, if RIM don't take advantage of that to reduce the power use they should be shot.

Re:Cellphones?

[hey!]

Here's something to ponder. Do presidents carry a wallet? What would they use it for? Surely, they never need to show ID. Why would they need cash, or credit cards? They're not going to take a spur of the moment side trip to Target to do some Christmas shopping.

George H. W. Bush lost the election to Bill Clinton in part because of an infamous incident where he visited a supermarket and was amazed to find that prices were scanned by laser. As president, and vice president for eight years before that, he had never once popped out to the supermarket for a gallon of milk.

This puts the Obama-Blackberry thing in a different perspective. Presidents spend their days wrapped up in a kind of cocoon that isolates them from what are the normal details of life for everyone else. Every mundane need is quietly taken care of without his having to ask. Every communication outside his immediate support system is elaborately screened, planned and orchestrated. So Obama's insistence on keeping "his" blackberry makes a kind of sense in this context; it reflects a desire to have some other channel of communication that isn't completely managed on his behalf by his usual staff.

Re:Cellphones?

[Ash Vince]

From my very sketchy knowledge on the system they have a special system to push email to the device. Normal POP3 relies on the device to constantly check the mail server. This might be ok for a computer but makes no sense from a the point of view of a mobile device on limited power. This means the phone is only using power when it recieves the email or when you try and use it.

This is far more power efficient than the system you mentioned using latency. This also means you have zero latency as it becomes far closer to the way a phone operates when receiving text messages or similar.

Sorry, I thought everyone on slashdot would know this so left it out. From the way your post has been modded Push email technology is clearly not as widespread knowledge here as I thought.

Here's a link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_e-mail [wikipedia.org]