French government bans BlackBerrys: fears US and UK spying

by Thomas Ricker, posted Jun 20th 2007 at 8:29AM

Put down those freedom fries son, there's a xenophobic firestorm abrewin'. According to France's venerable Le Monde newspaper, French government officials have been banned from using the uber popular BlackBerry devices for fears of foreign spying. Specifically, the issue has to do with the fact that RIM's servers reside in the US and the UK. In other words, they fear US and UK spies. We kid you not. Of course, RIM responded with the usual assurances of security going so far as to say that even the US National Security Agency couldn't view the content of any Blackberry communicated data. Hell, its networks have even been cleared by the UK government and NATO for sending sensitive data. This is not going to be pretty.

[Thanks, Rahul]

Filed under: RIM

Tags: blackberry, Culture, france, french, rim

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

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Mo @ Jun 20th 2007 9:02AM

I'm surprised that a very pro-American Sarkozy allowed this to go forward.

That is, if this isn't some sort of silly hoax or comment taken out of context. I mean, if a government doesn't allow certain devices to be used in federal buildings, they're more than within their rights. Using smartphones in a work environment is a privilege, not some inalienable right.

Neutral

elfguy @ Jun 20th 2007 9:13AM

I don't think its a case where they fear "spy" will come and get them. But think about it, you have possibly confidential or sensitive information from top business and government officials, residing outside your country, controlled by foreign companies. What happens if the US government decides to ask RIM to hand over data for some court case, or decides to pull an AT&T and start screening for potential terrorist emails, without asking for France's permission?

Neutral

OzzieDog @ Jun 20th 2007 10:02AM

Oh come on now from a country that's main colors are yellow and white.

Highly Ranked

Pete L @ Jun 20th 2007 10:22AM

@elfguy:

Firstly, emails should not be exchanged between 2 parties without strong encryption if security is critical (especially if they're being sent between servers). Messages are usually exchanged between servers in plain text or unecrypted form and many people have an opportunity to intercept them in transit (not just the ISPs in question).

Secondly, RIM's servers do not see messages in their unencrypted form. If you use a blackberry with BES (which is what virtually every government and businesses uses if they use blackberry), the message is encrypted between the blackberry and your mail server, i.e., RIM never sees the plaintext version of the email. They can't simply hand it over to the government. They don't even know who it is being sent to.

Now I suppose you might theorize that blackberry put a backdoor in their encryption software. However, this is pretty absurd for two reasons. One: blackberry's whole business depends on people being able to trust the encryption. They would lose lots of business if it ever leaked out. Two: If backdoors are what you fear, then you really need to examine _all_ devices, software, services, etc -- not just blackberries (and I'm certain RIMM has recieved far more scrutiny being the prefer provided for numerous security concious entities). By this same rationale, the French shouldn't use Exchange Server, Lotus Notes, Cisco routers, etc because they can't be absolutely certain no one has put in backdoors.

Neutral