Do Communities Dominate personal security of Obama? The Blackberry Battle

Its only days from the inaugration of President Obama. Us technologists have been observing the ongoing "Battle of the Blackberry" to see who wins out. Can the most powerful man on the planet get his way and keep his connectivity. Do Communities Dominate also over his personal sercurity matters? The US President's personal bodyguards, the Secret Service, want to remove the gadget for fears of targeting. Other bureaucrats are also worried about national security matters and the modest secrecy level of the messages on the device. But President-elect Obama said as late as Friday, that he is hopeful he gets to keep his fave gadget.

BLACKBERRY AND NATIONAL SECURITY

First lets examine the consideratoin from the side of message secrecy. Yes, the emails on the Blackberry can be encrycpted, but the standard RIM software is not "military level" secure, so it is quite feasible for terrorists or just curious hackers to break the security on the Blackberry and spy on President Obama's emails and messages. Here I think the President-elect has shown a most remarkable level of calm and control in his two-year journey to the Presidency. He says that he regularly considers all emails he sends on his Blackberry, that they may end up on CNN, and keeps them at the level of communication that is not sensitive. Note how well he kept his campaign decisions such as his choice of VP a secret for example. I am personally not concerned that the Blackberry in the hands of President Obama would bring any remarkable leaks or breaches of national security. It may be different with other members of his staff and cabinet, however, some of whom will not be familiar with the mobile and always-on technologies such as the Blackberry (many of Obama's advisors are much older than he is), so from his administration, that could be a source of some leaks. But I don't see it with the President himself.

I want to make two technologist comments here. First, the Blackberry is a smartphone. So it accepts downloadable applications. I am quite sure, that both RIM the maker of the Blackberry, and various US defense industry IT companies, would be happy to develop a "US President level" secure email and messaging platform, more encrypted than the standard RIM Blackberry service, and yet fully capable to run on a modern high-end Blackberry and let the President have his gadget and its functionality. I would also expect that most companies would love to do this for modest costs, adapting from an already secure messaging platform, if they can then tell the world that its their solution which powers the President's Blackberry. I would guess that application would be very popular among top CEOs in the world, on their communciations.

Secondly the Blackberry is not the only handheld with a full qwerty keyboard and good messaging. While probably no phone is quite as good at it for emails, as the Blackberry, many others are even better at SMS for example (Nokias like their E-Series are typically masters at this. Nokia smartphones run on the Symbian platform) and many similar form-factor smartphones are on the Windows Mobile platform etc. And for the non-technical, the look of a similar form-factor "wide" texting phone with full alphabet keypad, will look exactly like a Blackberry even if it happens to be a Nokia E-61 or say a Samsung i770 which runs Windows Mobile. A partial solution or compromise could be that the President can't have a "RIM Blackberry" handset, but could have another device that is equivalent, allowing real time email, SMS text messaging, IM instant messaging and twittering, in his pocket, and on a good alphabetic keypad. So if the RIM smartphone operating system would happen to pose a problem, there are the rival operating systems from Symbian and Microsoft which would expand the options for a similar device.

BLACKBERRY AND THE PRESIDENT'S LOCATION

The bigger problem comes from pinpointing the President's position. The RIM Blackberry is a smartphone, a mobile phone. It has the same standard technological connectivity of any other mobile phone to the network, via the cellular telecoms infrastructure. What many mobile phone owners do not know, is that numerous times per second, the phone in your pocket transmits to the network your location. It is not only happening when you make or receive calls, nor is it only happening when you send or receive messages. The mobile phone updates continuously its status with the network. All cellular phones operate this way. The only way to hide its location, is to turn it off (or into the "flight safe" mode which disconnects the radio communications).

Back to Barack and his Blackberry. So the network will have to permanently monitor President Obama's Blackberry as it does for the millions of other cellular phones in the Washington DC area. If he wants his connectivity, with it comes location tracking, automatically and irreversably.

PINPOINT THE PRESIDENT

This causes a significant security risk to the President. It is totally possible for some unscrupulous person or persons to infiltrate a telecoms network and then gain access to the control centres of the networks to get real time permanent monitoring of the President's Blackberry. The work requirements of mobile phone networks control staff are nothing like national security classifications. As we do not go anywhere without our phones, so too you can be pretty sure wherever President Obama's Blackberry is, that is where the President is within arm's length of the device. If you want to aim a bomb or rocket or missile or mortar and know where his Blackberry is, this would give a great targeting opportunity to terrorists.

Most of the time, most networks only give an accuracy of 100 meters or so (300 feet) of where a phone is. But this is close enough. You'd pretty well know which hotel or which villa or which palace or which restaurant etc. It does mean that someone has to know the President's personal phone number, but if he is already communicating with his supporters, then the phone number is going to be widely disseminated if he continues on this mode.

SO LETS CREATE FAKE OBAMAS

Ha ha, I am reminded of the stand-in fakes that Saddam Hussein had hired, who would make public appearances on his behalf if he feared being shot at. There are rather easy ways to game the system from the security side if we want to keep the First Phone secret from the network. 

All it needs is for a virtual copy of this phone with some typically not used features as normal people don't need to have multiple phones with the same number. But this is techncially easy, typically done with a technology called a VPN (Virtual Private Network). For all outsiders the phone would seem like the same number, and behave just like a normal Blackberry. But rather than one, there would be for example six "Obama phones" and have all phones copy all incoming messages and incoming calls to each Obama phone. He could place calls or messages out of any one of them, and it would always look and feel the same to the people receiving the calls and messages.

So the President would receive the identical messages at the identical time, to all phones. No matter which phone he uses, he would have access to all incoming messages (and calls). All would ring simultaneously. Then lets say there are 6 such Obama phones, every morning the Secret Service would assign randomly one phone to the President, and the other five Obama phones would go to that day's decoy detail, so five secret service agents would walk around with the Obama phone in their pocket, ignoring the incoming messages and calls. If there were heightened security concerns, such as on foreign travel, the Obama phones could be swapped several times during the day. The phones can even be programmed to send occasional automated messages to random fake phones, so the decoy phones would seem to be used during the day at random moments.

From the point of the network, there would be no way to know which of the six identical phones was with the President, and which were with the decoys. Yes, perhaps if one were to do a deep analysis of the given calls and messages, yes, perhaps one could spot which of the phones was with the President, but this would require a far deeper level of hacking into the network and actively monitoring these phones. So yeah, I think technically, it is moderately easy to create a secure communciation environment around a smartphone like the Blackberry, and also to create ghosts to fool any hackers or spies to not know for sure which phone was with the President at any one point in time.

COMMUNITIES DOMINATE

So why does he want it? The current president didn't have a Blackberry. The previous presidents have managed to live just fine without permanent wireless connectivity to their electorate.

Note first, that communciation is a vital link. Think of the "hot line" the red phone to call directly from the White House to the Kremlin during the cold war? There is inherent value in immediate communications. The US president has 24 hours a day, in his detail, wherever he goes, even while on vacation, the one military escort who carries "the football" or the briefcase with the nuclear launch codes and connectivity to the nuclear missile control. Is it important? Yes. For decades the US President has felt it necessary to have 24 hour connectivity to nuclear weapons, in case of the USA facing a nuclear threat.

There are times when speed of connectivity is important. Well, what of the incoming President? Barack Obama has made his campaign one of the people, to do it together, and to let all participate. Is it not consistent with that philosophy, that the President would also want to remain to be in contact, and permanent connectivity, with the American people? Yes. The fight that President-elect Obama has waged for his Blackberry shows this intent, he wants to remain to be connected. Communities Dominate personal security.

The various Presidential pundits and analysts and experts this past election cycle have said many many times that the President becomes isolated in the White House, and detached from the people who elected the President. This is partly due to constraints in time - the world is full of giant crisis situations from Iraq and Pakistan to Iran and North Korea to Israel and Gaza to gaz with Russia and Ukraine to pirates of the Somalian to obviously the world economic crisis. And he has to run the world's biggest government and most powerful military with bases in dozens of foreign countries and obviously the world's biggest economy.

So the campaigning candidate has a lot of interest - and significant time - to connect and communciate with the electorate. But once in office, the US President is an incredibly stressful and all-consuming job. I do think it is good simply for the healt of the President, that his term is limited to 8 years, it would else kill many Presidents from heart-attacks and stress of the office.

THE APPEAL OF SECRECY

Anyway, part is time. But the other part is the secrecy machine that is government everywhere in every country. Even the US (and other major democracies) have lots of honest real secrets worth keeping (for a real concrete example, the present location of US navy's nuclear missile submarines while on patrol in the oceans of the world; these have to remain hidden and their current location a secret). That then creates a philosophy of secrecy, where official secrets are easily used to hide incompetence, mistakes, and even true abuses of power. The higher the position in the government and the longer the political career, the more there is a tendency to prefer secrecy. VP Dick Cheney was a prime example of extending the secrecy to as many areas as possible. Try to hide as much as possible to avoid scrutiny and public discussion about what the administration was doing.

I am sure - I don't know, I am guessing, but this seems obvious to me - that the fact that outgoing President George W Bush was not using email, was primarily for this reason, to keep things secret. Emails are too easily forwarded. But if something is only said in the Oval office, and there is a leak, then at least they know who were the people who attended the meeting, to discover the leak.

There is another side-effect of the isolation. When the President is cut off from "normal" communication with normal people, he or she becomes dependent on those who advise the President. This includes the cabinet, the bureaucracy and the White House advisors. The President gets a far smaller circle of contacts to give advice, which includes mostly technocrats who can claim long term professional competence in a given area of knowhow (say the regional experts of the former Soviet Republics in the State Department who can talk about the details of Uzbekistan vs Kazakhstan vs Turkmenistan). So there is an assumption that these people "know better." It is far too easy for the advisors to eliminate alternate viewpoints even when holding the best of intentions, simply to try to focus the discussion on given policy to the main points, on a tight agenda of very limited time with the President. All viewpoints are not going to be considered.

ALLOWS INFORMATION MANIPULATION

A far more sinister problem is when some administration advisors decide to exclude valid viewpoints to prevent discussion and take the chance away that their favoured choice is to be selected. Many have suggested that President Bush 2 had been a victim of this kind of manipulation of his information sources by advisors, some of whom have been quite ruthless and unscrupulous (VP Cheney's chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby was convicted of crimes while in office).

The point is that if you deny the President and his administration of information, it easily leads to group-think, where similar assumptions and beliefs lead to a common view, which seems like a broad consensus but is actually a minority view held by a niche population. Presidents in the past have fallen for this kind of mistakes, from the Bay of Pigs with John F Kennedy to Iraq with Bush 2.

If the President had unfiltered contact to the outside world, it would first of all expose the President to alternate viewpoints, including many which are totally unfeasible, but every so often, may give a fresh idea. Like Alan Moore says, nobody is as clever as everybody. Communities Dominate.

Secondly, if the advisors know that the President gets unfiltered info from the outside, it means that the advisors have to be far more diligent in covering the significant issues truthfully and honestly; it would be a major embarrassment personally for any Presidential advisor if the President asks for missing information in a given briefing, which is something "the general public even knows." ie what is on the blogs for example.

OBAMA BEING DIFFERENT

The Obama campaign was the most transparent and open and inclusive of any in US history. He has said numerous times he wants to continue that when in office. He has said, for example, that all legislation will be put online prior to being decided, and will be open to comments from the public. So the electorate can see what his Administration is doing.

With this, he is now fighting to regain control of his beloved Blackberry. First, it is a great sign that he is willing to fight for this. At least so far, he has not given up on hope that he can remain in contact with the people. But secondly, I think it reflects a difference in the attitude we see with Generation C (Community Generation) and older generations, that they value the connectedness. It is an inherent benefit, there is pure gain out of being connected. Not only being able to call out and send messages, but even more importantly to be "reachable" and be able to be called and to be able to receive messages.

I don't know how much this is also a clever ploy in the balance of power between the incoming administration and the entrenched Washington machine, but if there is a method to this madness, that is also welcome and to be supported. I noticed that for example President Bill Clinton has come on the side of Obama that he wishes Obama wins this battle and gets to keep his Blackberry.

We'll see how it goes. I'm sure we'll know soon enough. But I also think it is funny, that the most powerful man on the planet has to fight for the right to keep his phone. You'd think its his decision and that is it. He'll just sign an executive order saying, the President may use a Blackberry ha-ha.. But clearly its not that cut and dry. Lets see if he gets to keep it. I think his Presidency would gain from Barack Obama being able to continue to be connected.

Comments

[OlliS]

Tomi, that bit about being able to pinpoint the US President's location by cracking into the telcom's computer system… I think you just gave birth to a hundred techno-thrillers.

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Ha ha, great point OlliS

Thanks! Yeah, maybe I should try to turn my James Bond addiction into fiction-writing? Do a bit of the spy thriller meet techno thriller mash-up? But yeah, ha-ha, this is an obvious area someone should explore in a spy thriller..

Thanks

Tomi Ahonen :-)

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