All the President's Email
From the Times' story about Obama surrendering his BlackBerry:
For all the perquisites and power afforded the president, the chief executive of the United States is essentially deprived by law and by culture of some of the very tools that other chief executives depend on to survive and to thrive. Mr. Obama, however, seems intent on pulling the office at least partly into the 21st century on that score; aides said he hopes to have a laptop computer on his desk in the Oval Office, making him the first American president to do so.The article explains that Obama has to give up his BlackBerry and laptop due to restrictions from the Presidential Records Act. To which I say...huh? The President won't use email because it could be subpoenaed? That seems really paranoid.
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If he opens a Yahoo! account I want my donation back! I am keeping the "Yes we can toast"er....
The President won't use email because it could be subpoenaed?
No, the Blackberry system does not meet the standards of the recordkeeping act.
That seems really paranoid.
251 days of Cheney's e-mail (W-mail?) is missing. Oops?
The article does mention 2 reasons: PRA and security. From a security perspective, Blackberries route their traffic through normal cell phone networks. The data is encrypted but doesn't meet the government's requirements for top secret security so that alone would kill the device for presidential use. Maybe the gov't could work up a solution that routes his mail over the uber encrypted links that carry other data to him when on the road or something.
The PRA simply requires that the Pres and VP retain all records and defines them as public property (this in response to Nixon). It also now allows some stuff to get out via FOIA and certainly allows everything to be released eventually so I can see how you might think twice about the kind of stuff you will put on paper vs. using the phone which you aren't required to record and retain.
After 8 years of losing emails, claiming the VP is suddenly not part of the administration in order to hide Cheney's records, and Bush overall trying to runaround the PRA to keep his and previous presidents papers out of public hands, I do hope that Obama will reverse course and certainly expect him to.
He could probably request that RIM make him a special Blackberry which includes the necessary software to provide more powerful encryption, which they could then turn around and sell to other customers at a premium...
"It's what the President of the United States uses!" would be a valid slogan.
He could keep a personal BlackBerry for personal uses, which fall outside the scope of the PRA. I understand he carries two, so he may already have one for this purpose.
If the data transmitted by a cell phone is not properly encrypted, then what about the voice calls? The BES server already does 3Des DH encryption and can be integrated into PKI Correct me if I am wrong, but that is a hell of a lot more security than the algorithm used by the CDMA carriers for the phone-to-phone transmissions.
Perhaps there is something I am not considering...
And yeah, if RIM would just go ahead and implement AES on thier devices with site-to-site VPN capabilites so we could terminate them to a Cisco ASA 5540 via DMVPN us network engineers would be appreciative...
Roboton, you hovered around the point: the federal encryption standard is AES, and 3DES doesn't cut it.
Frankly, I suspect this is just to make sure there are no questions about POTUS using private email illegally.
I like this part of the article:
The President won't use email because it could be subpoenaed? That seems really paranoid.
Every president as far back as Reagan (at least, that I know for sure about) used e-mail, even if some of them had it printed out for them and hand-carried to their desk. But they keep it to business stuff, because they know it'll be the target of lawsuits.
What Obama won't do, because of the laws that currently exist, is maintain a personal e-mail address, or a written diary, or a box at FedEx-Kinko's. He could, but it's an absolute cinch that everything everyone ever sent him would become part of discovery for the million or so lawsuits to which the president is a party. That means that if Malia wrote him an e-mail calling him President Poopyhead because he made her clean up her room, it'd be public. Nobody, not a good or bad president, needs that kind of grief.
It sucks for Obama (and every president before or after) but it's the cost of doing business. Sarah Palin gave us a good hard look at what happens when you let an executive do all her business "off the books" at Yahoo.com.
Cryptoberry
http://www.sessionware.com/Download/Cryptoberry/SMIME_for_BlackBerry_explained_011603.pdf
Simple:
1) Hire Bruce Schneier as head of Homeland Security.
...And no step 2 needed because much of the current silliness will stop right there. I'm sure in his off moments Bruce could have any number of contracts produce a heavily encrypted laptop and Blackberry.
Of course, the down-side is the Epic Pass-Poem Obama will have to memorize to access them.