Gongol.com Archives: March 2025
March 29, 2025
In 2008, there was a brief spell during which President-elect Barack Obama's enthusiastic use of his BlackBerry raised eyebrows. The device couldn't be made sufficiently secure for his job, it was argued, and the risk of a Presidential PDA getting compromised represented just too great a hazard. Compromise was achieved, and the President got to keep his device. ■ Since then, VIP cybersecurity has been a long chain of embarrassments, from a Secretary of State wisecracking about wiping e-mail servers "with a cloth" to midnight tweets about covfefe. The problems have only gotten worse. ■ It's vital for everyone -- from VIPs to the ordinary citizen -- to realize that digital information can be in one of two states: It's either "in transit" between computers (or other devices), or it's "at rest" (when it's residing on a computer where it can be stored, read, or otherwise accessed). ■ "End-to-end encryption" is helpful for protecting data while it's in transit. Signal is one of many applications to provide that category of protection. But it doesn't protect data "at rest" -- when it's arrived at a destination device. If that device has been compromised (as with something like a malicious screen mirror), then the end-to-end encryption may have provided nothing more than a false sense of security. ■ It has been more than 16 years since the original Obama BlackBerry controversy, and we appear to have made exactly no progress whatsoever in either getting VIPs to take their own protection seriously or in developing and deploying thoroughly hardened personal devices for those VIPs to use (like the super BlackBerry desired by President Obama). It isn't safe to go on this way, and that's a problem which has nothing to do with party identification.
