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Comment by boomboomsubban | Hacker News Reader

This issue is huge in politics. The entire Clinton personal e-mail scandal was essentially her unwilling to give up her BlackBerry, something Obama was unwilling to give up too. These people learned how to use some technology decades ago, and will continue using it no matter what other issues it causes.

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Check your timelines. Obama was elected in 2008, and BlackBerry was the dominant player in the market at that point.

Also, he DID swap out his phone for a secured one, and his staff instituted a number of security protocols to keep it secure.

As an aside: wow that timeline makes me feel really old

Yeah, I had the same reaction. This sort of stuff makes me _feel old_. But I'm not actually "old," so what gives?

That's the trap, and Seneca wrote some compelling stuff about recognizing the trap and avoiding it. It is aptly titled "On the Shortness of Life"...

Thanks for that. I had come across some of Seneca's writing before, while researching / reading about Stoicism, but hadn't come across this specific text, that I recall.

How about the part where we're further away from Win7 in time, than Win7 was from WinXP? It'll be 10 years since Win7 RTM next year!

A dominant player, yet Obama needed a special highly modified version to securely access the White House network. A huge amount of work to keep using what he was comfortable with.

Was there another smartphone platform he could have used at the time that would have been less work to secure? A secure smartphone for the President seems well worth the effort.

BlackBerry was probably the closest, and I expect they already knew what modifications to make.

I don't know what their preferred phone was at the time, but they were unwilling to go through the same effort for the Secretary of State, instead offering her a choice of non-BlackBerry phones.

Which is absurd, a SOS is mobile far more than a President by nature.

I think the importance of this cannot be understated. The Secretary of State is a nexus of not only extremely sensitive information, but of extremely sensitive information in motion which is also in overseas locations more often than not. If I were into tradecraft, I'd be much more likely to target the Secretary of State than the President for access to (relevant, valuable) sensitive information.

This is likely because his modified BlackBerry was a one-off project suited to his security requirements.

My understanding is that internal hardware was removed/shielded, and I assume software modifications were made as well, like only connecting to specific cellular base stations (such as the one in his official vehicle).

BlackBerry was the best thing you could get at the time. Obviously things have changed since then -- BlackBerry hardly exists anymore!

Which makes complete sense. He is the most powerful individual in a country of 300+ million people. If he needs a certain thing to keep him operating at peak efficiency and focus, he gets that thing. Period. Unless it violates national security.

Being elected president is not the time to learn a new technology suite. Hopefully most presidents have better things to do with their time than that.

At that level your people have people who have people to deal with that kind of minutiae.

>Being elected president is not the time to learn a new technology suite. Hopefully most presidents have better things to do with their time than that.

At what level does this stop being a waste of time for the person?

I'm not suggesting Obama should have been forced to change, but every else in his administration was forced to change. There's some serious clashing between the need for secure devices and the reluctance to change from old technology.

I think it's fair to ask what the secure alternative platform was. I wouldn't be surprised if it was five years out of date and barely functional. I think the President ought to be able to say "this is crap, improve it".

Hopefully your people's people's people don't interpret "setup e-mail for Mrs. Clinton to use on her Blackberry" as "setup an e-mail server on Mrs. Clinton's existing hardware and configure it on her Blackberrry."

But he did use it secure, not like Trump

Fwiw - Obama didn't use an off-the-shelf blackberry; he used one that was modified such that it complied w/ with government security standards.

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

> The entire Clinton personal e-mail scandal was essentially her unwilling to give up her BlackBerry

The main scandal was her violating FOIA. There were some additional security concerns, but her running on a platform of undoing civil rights era legislation was the bigger issue.

>but her running on a platform of undoing civil rights era legislation was the bigger issue.

I feel like this needs more explanation

FOIA is civil rights legislation from 1967. Clinton's entire campaign was based around the premise of rolling back those sorts of civil rights era protections, which is why she didn't turn over her email to the state department as was required by law.

Some? She mishandled Top Secret/SAP emails on her unsecured server.

https://www.businessinsider.de/hillary-clinton-email-server-...

No, she destroyed devices, used Bleachbit to delete evidence and they still found ~ 70 secret and top secret emails on her server. There is also evidence of a cover-up. The Russia narrative is also bogus in the case of the DNC hack they even refused to give the server to the FBI.

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