I made Obama's BlackBerry

[Jeffrey Walton <noloader () gmail com>]

http://money.cnn.com/2014/05/22/technology/security/nsa-obama-blackberry/

It was a rough day at the NSA in 2008 when President Obama asked for a
smartphone.

"It just really bothered a lot of people -- nobody wanted to put
anything out there that wasn't completely secure," said retired NSA
technical director Richard "Dickie" George in an interview with
CNNMoney.

George's role was to review the BlackBerry's algorithms and write and
engineer diagrams for the phone.

In response to Obama's request, the NSA set up a lab where dozens of
experts performed surgery for several months on a high-profile
patient: the soon-to-be presidential BlackBerry. The course of
treatment was to manipulate the device's innards to weed out potential
threats to secure communication.

In the end, that meant taking most of the fun out of the phone: the
president can't play Angry Birds, for example.

"You try to get rid of any functionality that's not really required.
Every piece of functionality is an opportunity for the adversary,"
George says.

According to George, the president simply wanted a phone that enabled
him to communicate with his advisers. Though the president was a well
known BlackBerry (BBRY) addict at the time, the choice of smartphone
model was the NSA's, not Obama's, George explained.
...
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