They’re not sending. They’re receiving.
Seven million people worldwide may be addicted to them but the French government has said “non” to Le BlackBerry, fearing US intelligence agents could be snooping on state secrets.
The concern is that information sent from a BlackBerry gets routed via servers in the United States and Britain, and that this poses “a problem with the protection of information”.
Research In Motion, the company that makes the handheld devices, poured cold water on the French fears, saying there was no way that the US National Security Agency could see the content of messages that were transmitted .
But Paris is clearly not convinced. France’s General Secretariat for National Defence first declared the ban on BlackBerrys 18 months ago but recently had to send out another reminder.
Would an American corporation actually lie about cooperating with our government to spy on us? Couldn’t be. Right?
I recognize Karl Rove, and I’ll guess one is LIbby. Who are the other two?
Joe Hagan and Steve Hadley – the latter is Bush’s national security advisor, the former is part of our free and independent media.
RIM is a Canadian Corporation. They wouldn’t lie eh?
They’re saying this like NSA can’t snoop their standard email system too. The only difference is that the Blackberry is portable.
3. Dr. Funbags,
There’s no such thing as a Canadian corporation, a U.S. corporation or a French corporation, just to name a few. By their very nature, they are large ‘C’ Corporations and they owe allegiance to no person and to no country except The Nation of the Bottom Line and (as an outside possibly) the shareholders.
Corporations are legally individuals and I can’t recall who said it first but there was a book around a few years ago diagnosing Corporations as psychopaths, which they indubitably are.
In fact, I’d replace ‘shareholders’ with ‘senior management’, as I doubt many shareholders have any say at all in what Corporations do, although they’re all allowed to vote on pre-decided options.
Would RIM allow access to their Servers? Hell, yes! Why would they even care about a mere person’s privacy unless it impacted on the Bottom Line?
That’s the entire basis of the problem of no privacy on the Internet, amongst other places. Who do you think is promoting, financing and installing all those damned spy cameras all over the place?
Right. AT&T wouldn’t lie, either. Even while renovating an office suite just for the NSA.
WTF is with routing people’s e-mails or other messages thru one company’s server anyways? Are they trying to force dependence on their services only? Can’t you configure this device to work with your own personal server? If the former is true then they got what they deserve and I’m happy I don’t own one…
Does this mean that there’s one place we can go to get copies of all the White House’s “lost” emails. Unless of course the Bush administration found some way to make sure that they were excluded from being snooped on.
After all, you can’t be too careful when you’re running a major criminal enterprise.
Does BlackBerry let you encrypt your email? Surely as long as the content is encrypted it doesn’t really matter whose server is being used as long as you use a long enough key….
Rove’s latest
lieexcuse for being unable to provide emails to Congress is that he lost that Blackberry – the one provided by the RNC.Bet the dog ate his homework, too.
Maybe if RIM renames it “Roquefort” then the French would love it.
Oh for a smart bomb that zero’ed in on groups of Blackberries
7: The thing is, they don’t need to route through RIM’s servers. You can set up your own Blackberry server just for your company that uses the corporate email system (like Exchange, for example.) to control the data. I think the real problem they have with the device is that somebody could take it into a sensitive area and type out & send classified information without anyone knowing.
Le french – have nothing interesting to Le hide.
I was under the impression that RIM was a Canadian comapny….
also, who care what the French think? screw em