Category: Edward Snowden

Sometime ago, I attended a training conducted by a German police officer on media security. He advised using Blackberry cellphone because messages are secured and cannot be intercepted.

I don’t harbor any illusion about security officials bothering listening to my phone calls or snooping on my messages. But I don’t like the idea of government agents intruding into private activities of people. That’s one of the reasons I chose Blackberry.

But one of the exposes of American IT expert Edward Snowden, formerly with the Central Intelligence Agency who is now in Hong Kong uncertain of his future, revealed that Blackberry is not at all that secure.

Among the documents shared by Snowden with media showed that leaders and other delegates to the G20 summit in London in 2009 “had their computers monitored and their phone calls intercepted on the instructions of their British government hosts,” according to the Guardian.

The Guardian also said, “Some delegates were tricked into using internet cafes which had been set up by British intelligence agencies to read their email traffic.”

G20 is composed of 20 finance ministers and Central Bank governors from 20 major economies: 19 countries plus the European Union.

Included in the G20 are countries that belong to G8 a forum for the governments of eight of the world’s eleven largest national economies. The eight are Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States. Large economies that are excluded are Brazil, India, and China. On Monday, there will be a G8 summit in London.

The Guardian report on the breaking by UK’s intelligence of the Blackberry cellphone security: A detailed report records the efforts of the NSA’s intercept specialists at Men with Hill in North Yorkshire to target and decode encrypted phone calls from London to Moscow which were made by the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, and other Russian delegates.

“Other documents record apparently successful efforts to penetrate the security of BlackBerry smartphones: “New converged events capabilities against BlackBerry provided advance copies of G20 briefings to ministers … Diplomatic targets from all nations have an MO of using smartphones. Exploited this use at the G20 meetings last year.”

The Snowden document gives doubt now to the one attribute that Blackberry, a Canadian brand, is noted for.

It will be remembered that in 2010, Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Middle East thought of banning Blackberry because communications through BB are encrypted and cannot be monitored. Saudi authorities said “this hinders efforts to fight terrorism and criminal activity.”

After discussion with Saudi Arabia’s Communications and Information Technology Commission with BlackBerry manufacturer Research in Motion the ban was reconsidered.

In this day and age of technology, we should be ready to accept that nothing can be kept secret.

As online denizen Tongue-Twisted said, “What Snowden revealed was not entirely new and unknown to everyone. In fact he did not even pass/leak a single top-secret document that proves his claims. It did confirm, though, that what others before him came out with wasn’t pure fiction.

“The first docu I saw on this topic was probably in the mid-90s, where CIA agents being interviewed with their faces miraged and voices synth-scrambled telling how the Defense department employed massive listening stations – humongous computer farms spread throughout the country that scanned phone calls, emails, letters, journals and everything printed and broadcast, and now maybe – texted. Looking out for keywords that earlier have been red-flagged by the security agencies. I think they called it Project Phoenix then.

“Then came the Bush era when Americans willfully surrendered their freedoms to government in exchange for security through the Patriot Act. The activists went as far blaming Bush and his cohorts as the real culprits on 9/11 because they say gov’t needed the people to agree to give up their rights for their own good.

“It demolished, however, America’s image as the paragon of freedom and beacon of democracy – everything we’ve been taught about human rights and of a government that feared its own people was a nothing but a whole bunch of bovine excrement.

“Just like Bradley Manning, Jules Assange and the rest of the whistleblowers against gov’t, Edward Snowden will suffer the same fate as we are already too familiar with.”