The Real Risks of Obama's BlackBerry 273
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."
Cellphones? (Score:5, Insightful)
The Prez doesn't have a cellphone?
Give me a break (Score:5, Funny)
U.S. Presidents have had subcutaneous tracking implants for some time now.
Given a bit of technical savvy, those are no different when it comes to anyone being able to locate the Pres.
In addition, you could strip him of tech hardware completely and the plethora of social indicators easily associated with his daily routine would still light him up like a Shenzhen cathouse.
Re:Give me a break (Score:5, Funny)
U.S. Presidents have had subcutaneous tracking implants for some time now.
Please explain this statement by using <sarcasm> or <tinfoil hat> tags so we can figure out if we should laugh or mock you ;)
Tag THIS, buddy. (Score:2)
They're using Walmart's new Instore Cookie System [futurefeedforward.com].
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Are you talking to the guy with the implants or the original poster?
I could imagine... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I could imagine... (Score:5, Funny)
An antire group of people devoted to tracking and reporting on the whereabouts of the president. They could hire pundits to theorize on why he is there, film him getting in the car, getting out of the car. They could even predict where he's going to be, like "The president will be in Miami next Tuesday to talk to the guy in that place". Now that would be really freaky.
And we could give them a cute name, like "media".
Re:Cellphones? (Score:4, Insightful)
Oddly enough, that pretty much covers it. This article has nothing specifically to do with blackberrys, its about any kind of cell phone using a public GSM or CDMA network.
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The Prez doesn't have a cellphone?
They used to demonstrate this on The West Wing pretty well. Bartlet never had a cell phone - If he had a call an aide (usually "Charlie") would hand him a phone and when the call was complete he'd hand the phone back. If he had to make a call he'd say "Someone get Leo on the phone" and then a minute later someone would hand him a phone.
Re:Cellphones? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Unless it's using a cellphone technology that we've never heard of it's still radiating and sending and receiving data and acting like a huge red "come and get me" marker. A blackberry is much stealthier.
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Sorry, but why is a device that constantly can recieve and respond to a receive this email signal any safer than a device that does the same for a phone call?
Re:Cellphones? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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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
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Exactly! And by "exactly", I mean completely wrong [wikipedia.org].
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Re:turn it off? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:turn it off? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or leave it at home?
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Re:turn it off? (Score:5, Funny)
But then the bad guys would be able to find the secret location of the White house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C.
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Re:turn it off? (Score:5, Funny)
They might know where he is when he's home, but it's all about subtlety when he's out and about. What about when he sneaks out in a secret motorcade with only 923 vehicles with flashing lights followed by dozens of members of the press with cellphones up the wazoo who track his every move 24/7? Or when he sneaks out in a flight of several helicopters with highly obvious markings? Or a Boeing 747 with an obvious paint-job and "I'm the fucking president, feel my power bitches" written on the side? Nobody can track him then.
Re:turn it off? (Score:5, Funny)
coat it in honey and feed it to a bear.
No good, the bear will follow you around looking for more handouts. In the meantime operatives are tracking the bear.
Re:turn it off? (Score:5, Funny)
unless they have chinese needle snakes (Score:5, Funny)
in which case, we need gorillas to take care of the snakes. and that's the beautiful part. when wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death
Re:turn it off? (Score:4, Funny)
Well then feed it to a rat and get your ass to Mars.
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coat it in honey and feed it to a bear.
No good, the bear will follow you around looking for more handouts. In the meantime operatives are tracking the bear.
All things considered, it isn't too hard to track a trail of empty picinic baskets.
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No good, the bear will follow you around looking for more handouts.
Sounds about like the American voter. Or banking industry. Or auto industry. Or state & local governments.
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That may not be enough for most devices out there. You'll probably also have to take out the battery, and even then there could be an internal battery that keeps the tracking going. Your best bet, whenever you don't want people to track you through your cell phone, would be to smash it to bits, or coat it in honey and feed it to a bear.
Take off and nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Unrealistic because ... (Score:5, Interesting)
... 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 think that may be unrealistic. Last time I looked (a LONG time ago) the luggage bin of a greyhound bus appeared to be a pretty good Faraday cage.
Basic concept is good though. (Yes they can and do hunt down federal fugitives, serial killers, and the like by tracking the cellphone location when it's just turned on.) Just don't turn it on and throw it in a sealed metal box: They'll zero in on where you turned it on and go from there.
The trick was also used in The Da Vinci Code, where the lead finds the tracking device and drops it onto a passing garbage truck. This is followed by a Keystone Cops / O. J. Simpson style car chase of the truck.
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I mean, turn it off if you're trying to sneak around?
The article mentioned one 'threat': that the SS driving around a limo pretending to contain the president while he arrives quietly in a different car, saying that the GSM chip would give away the 'right' car.
Except that the ruse would work even better by putting the real phone in the fake car and driving that around. Do we believe the SS didn't already think of this?
Femto-cells (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems like using a portable femtocell [wikipedia.org] and a private relay to some central government location would be enough to mitigate the problem. And besides, don't the secret service carry cell phones?/ If you can't track the prez, just track the people around him.
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Re:Femto-cells (Score:5, Interesting)
Back when I worked at Rockwell-Collins, I was developing software for a piece of SIGINT hardware. Every so often, a group of spooks from the client would come on over to play with the tools (I never learned which branch of the government they were from; management liked being vague). On one of these occasions they were scanning through the spectrum and tuning in to various signals that popped up with various demodulations. Then they encountered a signal they didn't recognize and couldn't understand, and got all excited like kids in a candy store. Someone suggested that it was probably something being worked on at Rockwell itself, and so they pulled out a directional antenna, left our office, and started running through the halls trying to track it down.
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I wonder what it takes to get a job like that (government agent or "spook" as you called it). It sounds like in some cases it could be a rather interesting career.
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There are other fields to consider, especially military stuff. Try EWS, fun stuff there, though it takes a few years to get past merely reading the manuals and being able to understand what the heck is going on.
Then separate and go to work for one of the vendors. woot.
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There's some crazy stuff going on in the field of radio communications and radar. While I was there -- and again, I left in the early '00s -- we saw a presentation from a researcher in the field. In particular, he pointed out some of the stuff the Chinese are working on. For example, picture a radar that instead of broadcasting a single frequency, broadcasts pure white noise across the entire spectrum, and then looks for statistical changes in the return and translates that to the radar echo. It'll requ
Re:Femto-cells (Score:4, Interesting)
The Chinese seem to be active in EWS, largely because we've developed the bad habit of admitting them to the U.S. for so long to our best PhD programs.
Stat. anal. return processing would require multiple antennas to develop what amounts to a 'map' of the space being irradiated. This sounds a little like the prmise behind backscatter systems, where adapting to the changing propogation effects was a big hurdle. Various random and pseudorandom baseband noise techniques might make the returns less usable. This sounds like EWS and surveillance systems, since tracking and targeting need more precision and quicker response, and generally work in shorter ranges where even raw power can overcome some countermeasures.
Of course, you generally don't need to entirely defeat a system, merely degrade the performance, delay the response, or just confuse the system long enough to get past it. Maybe a few seconds sometimes.
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It was kind of fun developing it. For example, to make sure that it worked, we made sure we could tune into cell phone calls with it, and there's only one way to figure that out... Cell phone signals are so freaking obvious on a scanner like that -- big, sharp blips, easy as heck to spot. We also used the device as a normal radio when 9/11 struck and everyone wanted to listen to news all day.
Oh, hey, to any "spooks" out there using "Bullfrog" (if it's still in use): on the frontend display (the one that
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usajobs.gov
Search for covert agent, SIGINT, whatever strikes you. ...and no, I'm not kidding.
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A friend of mine's dad back in college was in "intelligence gathering" for the government. You know the sort of thing were they kept a "bug out bag" packed and ready to go. Essentially his family was part of his cover story. For this sort of work you apparently needed to join the military, be intelligent & pass the various tests in the appropriate way, maintain a high degree of physical fitness, be willing to do things most people wouldn't and probably most importantly be able to keep you mouth shut.
Re:Femto-cells (Score:4, Funny)
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Admit it... you planted that signal to make them go away. :-D
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Your story conjures a mental image for me of a group of very serious-looking MIB types huddled in front of an oscilliscope, suddenly grinning big and pulling out a gun-with-a-d
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Hey, my interface was much nicer than an oscilliscope, you insensitive clod! ;)
Also, the antenna wasn't a dish. Or a horn. It looked more like some kind of old rooftop TV antenna. But yeah, they had a real kid-in-a-candy store look to them. It was neat listening to them trying to figure out what modulation just by listening to the sound of the signal on a different demodulation. It wasn't one we could tune into, but they were able to narrow it down just by sound. Pretty neat. ;)
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Problem solved.
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It wouldn't cover the "man with an antenna" attack, the first one describe in the article. The femtocell location is also probably easy to determine.
Keep the power on both low enough that the "man with an antenna" has to get real close or use a directional antenna, but if he has to use a directional antenna, he already knows where the prez is in order to point it at him.
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Decoys (Score:2)
Don't worry - the feds will put out a nice cloud of decoy signals. Anyway, it's not as if you can't find out where the pres is generally going to be at any one time: the Whitehouse press office put out that info every day!
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Anyway, it's not as if you can't find out where the pres is generally going to be at any one time: the Whitehouse press office put out that info every day!
They don't generally tell you which car in the motorcade he happens to be in though.....
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Or which motorcade. When he comes to NYC, at least, they have two motorcade routes with cars on each.
PrezBO's security (Score:5, Funny)
Re:PrezBO's security (Score:4, Funny)
The #1 thing that is going to guarantee his security is this- if he dies, Biden becomes president.
If that was his approach to security he would have asked Dick Cheney to be his running mate ;)
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Well, it worked in my case. :-)
The thought of Cheney becoming POTUS kept me far from D.C. and rifles at the same time.
With all of the silly rumours flying around Oklahoma about Obama never making it in the door of the Whitehouse due to assassins, my only reply to any of that was:
Whatever, as long as they shoot Palin FIRST, I did not really care who was assassinating who, or why....just PLEASE shoot Palin first!!!
*note to NSA and FBI: I am uhmm, joking. Yeah, that's it...Joking!....see :-)*
Re:PrezBO's security (Score:5, Funny)
If that was his approach to security he would have asked Dick Cheney to be his running mate
nah, that kind of thinking just blows up in your face.
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Don't forget that is also worked for W's dad.
Although since Sarah Palin has gotten herself onto the national scene, we've realized how bright Dan Quayle was.
Heaven forbid! (Score:2)
There are always security concerns. At what point does security invade your ability to complete your job tasks? Six Inches of Air?
Uh, I guess we are talking about wireless phones.
Risks of NOT using a BlackBerry (Score:4, Insightful)
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Ring ring ring (Score:5, Funny)
POTUS: Hello?
Caller: Hi. Do you have...uh...like Prince Albert in a can?
POTUS: Excuse me?
Caller: Wait! I mean...is your refrigerator running? Could you like go and check it?
POTUS: How did you get this number? Who is this?
Caller: Uh...this is Haywood. Haywood Jablo-
Click.
Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not to mention the TFR(temporary flight restriction) that follows him wherever he goes.
Exploding battery risks far higher (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, this is just another case of illogical fear of "new" technologies. It is already easy to track him: just look for the long motorcade.
Wow, they know where the president is (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think they ever could have sussed it out without the phone. It's not like the giant airplane, motorcades, helicopters, press pool, and army of Secret Service agents are a dead giveaway. The man can't even take a piss without a humorless man in black sunglasses whispering into his wrist.
If there are any vulnerabilities to be found here, no doubt there will be hackers looking into it and making it public knowledge for the notoriety, just like they do with Microsoft. The holes will be plugged, new research paid for, and I think we can all rest assured that wireless security will be all the more advanced from his eight years in office.
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I think it sucks more for the whisperer...
Knowing where the President is... (Score:5, Insightful)
... is much less important, from a personal security standpoint, than knowing where he's going to be.
So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
So let's imagine someone did actually manage to track the President using his Blackberry. Now that person could plan an assassination based on the Presiden't location? How is that more useful than knowing he'll be in location X at time Y based on a press release, or a public event?
The last link supposedly discusses the "risks" of a "trackable" President by supposing some would-be assassin could tell if the President was in the White House, or which car he was in out of several choices. Wouldn't this assassin be better off waiting for a public rally where the President's attendance, location (and probably the time of his attendance) are public knowledge?
This just strikes me as wild speculation with a healty dose of paranoia. Maybe I'm wrong, and I'm sure a hundred people will now cite many examples of how this could lead to "another JFK". Fire away people...
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It is easier to figure out that the President is in White House or at public rallies (or "town meetings") than which car he's in in the motorcade, but those stationary locations are also easier to secure. It's pretty hard to sneak a weapon into those places and an attack against them with anything less than an airliner isn't going to be terribly effective.
On the other hand, if you can hit him with an IED and a couple AT4s while he's in the Presidential Limo, you've got a better chance of actually doing him
i don't think obama has a blackberry (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong. [gizmodo.com]
He carries both. And he is carrying a "real" blackberry.
Not correct (Score:3, Informative)
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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+
There is nothing absurd at all about the notion that the President would have one device for official government business and another for personal use. In fact, that's the easiest method to comply with the relevant laws.
anyone, anywhere, writing about what obama is using is either guessing or lying.
Ah. Well, you could have j
when you are president of the united states (Score:3, Insightful)
there is no such thing as personal use
what i mean by that is, any communication of yours meant to be private that can be intercepted and used against you is a national security concern. there is a reason his daughters have secret service agents: someone could hurt his children, or threaten to hurt them, and by extension, influence national policy. his communication with them by extension is vulnerable to interception, manipulation, etc. all sorts of fascinating psychological data about the president can be
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Of course there is such a thing as "personal use", and there are laws regarding security and data retention and use of government resources that delineate the definition and rules regarding personal vs official use.
Your fantasies about foreign spies gaining "fascinating psychological data" from his email that isn't available from his books or non-scripted speaking events is fun, but simply that, fantasy. There is no need nor is there any requirement nor is there any precedent for every single thing the Pre
bush was purposefully avoided data retention (Score:3, Insightful)
because he and his cohorts knew what they were talking about was a political liability. there's not protection from a president who is keeping secrets from his own people. that's an entirely different scenario than a president engaging in personal but politically harmless communications
"Your fantasies about foreign spies gaining "fascinating psychological data" from his email that isn't available from his books or non-scripted speaking events is fun, but simply that, fantasy."
so there's no dedicated teams i
Bush did not hide that he used RNC email at all (Score:2)
because he and his cohorts knew what they were talking about was a political liability. there's not protection from a president who is keeping secrets from his own people. that's an entirely different scenario than a president engaging in personal but politically harmless communications
You're kinda missing the important point: The fact that Bush and other White House staff used RNC mail servers at all was not considered a secret or problem. It was known before the scandal, by people in the government, tha
laughably naive (Score:2)
dude. go to wikipedia. type in "espionage". follow the pretty links. educate your ignorant self. here endeth the intellectual charity for you about spywork and communications
as for bush:
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/03/26/rnc-emails-waxman/ [thinkprogress.org]
the feds would run their own BES (Score:2)
no data would touch canada. it would have the https and the tripe DES and all the usual blackberry bells and whistles that your typical ceo knows and loves
and yet still, there you have it: the highest communications in the usa hopping around on a protocol canadians designed and the whole world understands
no, sorry, god bless canadians, i have nothing against canada. but if there is going to be info going out on the open airwaves from the highest levels of the american government, that network and that proto
Re:i don't think obama has a blackberry (Score:5, Informative)
Re:i don't think obama has a blackberry (Score:5, Informative)
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I, also, was disheartened to learn that the Sectera was running Windows Mobile. Let's hope he keeps up with those software patches.
I agree. A couple of posts have pointed to a Gizmodo article that apparently states that he has both. Wouldn't be surprised.
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The Sectera Edge is in no way a Blackberry. It runs Windows Mobile. Blackberry runs a proprietary OS which is completely different from WinMo.
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Most devices that could home on a Blackberry ... (Score:2)
... emit recognizable signals. You can bet that the Secret Service (or their friends at the FCC) have equipment in the President's vicinity listening for such signatures.
geek solutions (Score:2)
What strikes me about the article is that it for the most part deals only with solutions that the average geek could implement. This is the office of the President of the United States, with the resources and leverage of the US Government at disposal to solve the problem. Talking about "green" solutions, or speculating on whether RIM would sue the US Government if Obama was using a hacked Blackberry is nonsense. I suspect the US Government could go to RIM and get whatever custom firmware they needed, or
I'd be surprised if he isn't tracked already (Score:2)
Given how ultra paranoid the Secret Service is, I'd be surprised if Obama hasn't been given a tracking device that he keeps on him. So the real question is whether the special Blackberry he's carrying is any more vulnerable than whatever tracking device he's using.
Really. (Score:2)
I hate to break it to you, but somebody knows where the president is at all times anyway. The big ass plane with the unique paint job, the helicopters with the presidential seal, the convoy of black Escalades, all those are kinda b
One (Score:4, Insightful)
"The big ass plane with the unique paint job, the helicopters with the presidential seal, the convoy of black Escalades, all those are kinda big giveaways."
Well... actually, there are TWO Air Force Ones. The Marine One HMX-1 squadron consists (IIRC) of 28 birds, and most POTUS transport missions fly three identical whitebacks in an aerial shell game. And there are often multiple convoys of Escalades and Cadilac limos.
So which plane? Which helicopter? Which convoy? Which limo? There's a difference between knowing where he is in a general sense, and in exactly which vehicle he's being transported.
Besides, all of those "kinda big giveaways" you mentioned also make kinda big decoys. Just because they're there doesn't mean HE'S there...
How is this new? (Score:2)
Hasn't every president for about a hundred years gone everywhere with a realtime tracking system [treasury.gov]?
President is already tracked in real time (Score:3, Informative)
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].
Too many assumptions (Score:2)
...keeping the US president's e-mail communications private from spies and hackers...
...the potential physical security risks that come with someone knowing the president's real-time physical location...
Just because he has a Blackberry doesn't mean he's actually using it for email. If he is, it might be personal email (not work-related) but I feel pretty safe assuming that he wouldn't be passing data sensitive to national security with it.
As for the GPS tracking, I believe that can easily be enabled/disabled in the settings of the device. Ignoring that, as many had mentioned above, it's not like his 24/7 location is a secret...
Can't hide the president. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a silly discussion.
You can't hide the U.S. President in his daily business. It's just impossible. Motorcades, helicopters, public speeches, platoons of serious men in dark suits... the dude wins the prize for Most Obvious Man in America. forget about it.
Now, if the President *wants* to hide, he goes to a secure bunker somewhere where the radio waves don't shine, somewhere that even the sneakiest guy with an antenna can't get within ten miles of.
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eeeevery device has an "off" ;)
Re:Obama's crackberry doesn't have a power button (Score:5, Funny)
Even if it happens to be in the form of a really big sledgehammer with the word "OFF" emblazoned on it?
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I've said it once if I've said it a thousand times...
If you're going to try to goatse us, at least try to hide the link somehow.
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Err.... you can make it available to Verizon and 911 people and whoever some tech that has access to the system is willing to lose his job to provide it. Also, look up tirangulation- it can find your radio-wave emitting cellphone.