Ask HN: POTUS Wears a GPS Enabled Fitbit Surge. How Secure Is That?

5 points·kiddz··5 comments

POTUS also walks around with a cellphone. At least as safe as that.

According to the Guardian [0] Obama's phone is specially hardened by the NSA, so maybe not necessarily?

[0] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/28/which-phon...

I guess it depends what "security" we're discussing.

I was talking about passive signal noise which could be used to locate a potential target (e.g. pick the president's vehicle from the identical ones in the motorcade). Even a hardened phone will still leak EM radiation.

If we're talking about informational security, well, I don't know why we would. The Fitbit doesn't sync realtime and most of the president's meetings are public. So while it would be extremely embarrassing, I don't know how compromising it would be.

The Surge GPS is turned off except when doing a GPS-enabled exercise like bicycling or running, so as you commented earlier the phone is the weak link here. The Fitbit Surge can be ignored.

In his show with Bear Grylls he said he can't carry a phone for security reasons as they are too easy to track. So I font know if his desire to have a phone has been overridden as I do recall him insisting on keeping this in his early presidency.

Though I thought not having a phone for anti-tracking is strange as he borrowed his aides phone for the photos. So couldn't 'whoever' simply track his inner circles phones? In which case he may as well carry a phone and an agent secures the phone for anything where tracking could be an issue?

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