When former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was pushing to get a waiver allowing her to use a BlackBerry like President Barack Obama back in 2009, the National Security Agency had a very short list of devices approved for classified communications. It was two devices built for the Secure Mobile Environment Portable Electronic Device (SME PED) program. In fact, those devices were the only thing anyone in government without an explicit security waiver (like the one the president got, along with his souped-up BlackBerry 8830) could use until as recently as last year to get mobile access to top secret encrypted calls and secure e-mail.
Despite $18 million in development contracts for each of the vendors selected to build the competing SME PED phones (or perhaps because of it), the resulting devices were far from user-friendly. The phones – General Dynamics’ Sectéra Edge and L3 Communications’ Guardian – were not technically “smart phones,” but instead were handheld personal digital assistants with phone capability, derived from late 1990s and early 2000s technology that had been hardened for security purposes – specifically, Windows CE technology.
This is an absolutely fascinating piece of technological history here. Can you imagine using one of these monstrous things?
Poor Hillary… trying to find something decent to use for work, and her bosses respond with a middle finger, so she disobeys orders and does her own thing. I’m not going to lie… I’ve been there.
I remember being on call for work and having a work laptop at home that would auto lock after 10 minutes of inactivity, so I wrote a script that moved the mouse pointer and ran it every 9 minutes, so I wouldn’t have to keep typing in my password every time an alert came in
[q]Poor Hillary… trying to find something decent to use for work, and her bosses respond with a middle finger, so she disobeys orders and does her own thing. /q]
No, it was more like this:
[[email protected]] wgetblackberry
Error: This command has to be run under the root user.
[[email protected]]sudo wgetblackberry
request sent, awaiting response… 200 OK
Length: unspecified [phone/blackberry]
Saving to: ‘hillary.blackberry’
hillary.blackberry [ <=> ] 8.71GB 8.71GB/s in 1.0s
2008-02-18 10:28:34 (8.71 GB/s) – ‘hillary.blackberry’ saved [158426]
…
Sudo will do
in 0.02s?
Awesome. Best thing I’ve read so far today.
Huhm… reminds me of Homer Simpson and his swinging bird resetting the nuclear vents XD…
Edited 2016-03-18 23:49 UTC
“Oh, stupid bird! I never should have put you in charge!”
It is because of dumb things like these why people keep developing their own work-a-rounds/solutions that end up making things more insecure, but the original people requesting services would use more secure products if only they were allowed to get them.
PS. It does not help that BlackBerry let government access it’s messaging systems.
In a similar vein, when IT departments mandate overly picky rules about passwords (must contain a number, special character, capital letter) it just increases the chances that employees will write their difficult to memorize passwords on a post-it and stick it to their monitor.
This always pisses me off, considering that a long password with no special characters is just as hard if not harder to brute force.
Agreed. That’s why we dropped our password requirements where I work. It lead to less security in the long run–the opposite of the original intent.
trying to make Hilliary hilarious?
Would she be happy if, say, she got an iPhone and the FBI wins against Apple? Would she be all gung ho then?
Intending to talk well of Apple.
Is my personal view that this is not a war of people. Not even a war of ideas. It’s a war of visions.
Mass media nature of focusing in extremes has kind of gave an impression that there is an apprehension against the financial facet of our World.
Present -in every mind that goes beyond mass media- is the idea that beyond expectation of a decent profit or capitalization, next questions among lots of finance people fly around decency. Also present is that among this last group is also a smaller group asking if their decisions are good to everybody future.
Apple has an impeccable work ethics -World exemplary level-.
From what I have learned in recent months. There seems a ‘sisma’ happened around the Iron Curtain Fail. Nothing easier than concluding our burden is the heaviest [Mine is, miserable ‘beast of burden’
].
A Nation can’t survive if every group, faction, layer, class, [add yours here] starts building their own ‘walled’, ‘gardened’, ‘dampened’ [add yours here] version of Paradise, Nirvana, Valhalla, [add yours here].
talking about privacy on civilian gadgets. Wouldn’t dare playfully chat about this curious object [Looks more like a ‘swiss knife’ than an integrated appliance].
Usability is a top tier concern when it comes to security.
Otherwise you risk insecure behaviour from users who find workarounds.
It is the job of good security architects and designers to make products as usable as possible – and security control as invisible as possible.
Security is about managing risks – and usability is a major risk.
I disagree with the comments here, it’s one thing to work around a bad work policy with something like Linux on a PC you’ve been given control over. It’s another thing to compromise work data by putting it on a system that’s not controlled by your company. This wasn’t a small workaround to have email on a government owned computer. This was taking data that was explicitly to be accessed on a government system and moving it to a civilian controlled system.