BlackBerry Is the Only Phone Secure Enough for German Officials
Mobile security has become a major concern of the German government, ever since Edward Snowden's leaks revealed last year that the NSA had tapped German Chancellor Angela Merkel's cellphone. They are now taking steps to protect themselves against wiretaps of this sort, and have turned to BlackBerry to help.
Interior ministry spokesperson Tobias Plate told the Financial Post, "We have a federal authority for information security and they checked several smartphones, and the only brand that was approved by them is the BlackBerry smartphones… it’s the security of the device."
BlackBerry recently announced the purchase of SecuSmart, a German security company specializing in preventing phone tapping. As the Huffington Post reports, "Secusmart provides high-level voice and data encryption for governments, businesses and telecommunications service providers." Now, 3,000 BlackBerrys are being designed with this technology for the German Federal Ministry of the Interior.
BlackBerry has also recently launched secure BBM. As The Wire reported in June, BBM Protected offers an encryption key for each end of the message. This means a hacker will have a very difficult time breaking into the message. BBM Protected allows for a fully encrypted, and therefore much more private, messaging conversation.
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Between the recently updated anti-tapping technology and the encrypted messaging service, BlackBerry is mounting their comeback on the strength of their secure services for government officials. Perhaps even Obama will keep his BlackBerry.
This article was originally published at http://www.thewire.com/technology/2014/07/blackberry-is-the-only-phone-secure-enough-for-german-officials/375259/
