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No Blackberry For Obama. Should You Rely On One?

So, if the US president isn’t allowed to have a Blackberry for security concerns, should we be using them? What’s the rationale behind the refusal?

From ComputerWorld:

The press has been all over President-elect Barack Obama’s addiction to his BlackBerry and the possibility that he might have to give up the device for reasons of national security. But no one in the media seems to be asking the most logical follow-up question: Is the technology that can compromise the future chief executive’s BlackBerry also a threat to mobile devices being used every day by thousands of senior executives in corporate America?

One security expert, Ron Cochoran, president of RER Technology, answers that question quite succinctly: “If the president can’t use it for security reasons, then there’s obviously something wrong with the security system.”

Quite the sweeping statement.

But, what if it were true? Then that would beg the question, “what’s wrong with Blackberry security?” or is this all fluff?

OK, so further to this story, my confusion resides in the fact that the British military rolled out Blackberry devices last year and yet the French government banned them for officials a few months earlier. There seems to be a complete lack of consistency on this subject. Most of it, like the situation in India, seems to based on paranoia.

Is this merely posturing?

The Communications Security Establishment (CSE) in Canada at one point in 2006 had approved the use of a “secure blackberry” implementation. Strangely, this document (Google cache) appears to have now been removed from the CSE website. Not to mention the absence of the list (Google cache) of other products they were evaluating.

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