June 20th, 2007
Amidst fears of email spies, French officials advised to drop BlackBerries
Despite Research in Motion’s insistence that messages traveling across its network are encrypted against snooping by intelligence agencies, French officials are being adviced to give their BlackBerries the boot. According to ComputerWorld’s Peter Sayer:
The smart phones, developed by Canadian company Research In Motion Ltd., send and receive e-mail through a handful of servers in the U.K. and in North America….This concentration of data poses a threat to national security because of the risk of data interception, according to Alain Juillet, senior economic intelligence adviser to the French prime minister. Juillet, who has held the post since 2003, was previously director of intelligence for the French General Directorate of External Security, the country’s foreign security service.
