How Obama might get his way on BlackBerry

Naysayers aside, President-elect Obama appears determined to take office Tuesday with his BlackBerry -- or at least some PDA -- firmly in hand. Here's how experts say he might pull it off -- and what pitfalls he may be underestimating.

The Presidential Records Act requires retention of the bulk of documents generated by the president for public review at a later date, so any message Obama creates with his BlackBerry would have to be retained and stored, subject to scrutiny in the future. But the larger problem is that the BlackBerry is unlikely to get the nod as the presidential wireless handheld from the National Security Agency (NSA) or other federal entities with a traditional oversight role in top-secret communications security, according to experts.

"The most significant issue here is security," says Randy Sabett, partner at Washington-based law firm Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal LLP. "The number one target of anyone anywhere in the world would be the e-mail communications of the most powerful man in the world, the president of the United States." Sabett, who has worked at the NSA, says that "nation-states, terrorist organizations and criminal gangs" could all be expected to be trying to break into a president's BlackBerry.

There is a version of the BlackBerry that uses AES-256 encryption, which has been approved by the Defense Department for sensitive communications. Research in Motion, maker of the BlackBerry, points to a number of government and third-party security certifications as evidence that its key-management system is secure.

A November 2008 certification by the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information technology in Germany, for example, gave a positive evaluation to the BlackBerry's use of cryptographic algorithms and life-cycle management of shared secrets or keys and passwords.

But for top-secret communications, the NSA has a history of turning to select manufacturers for custom-designed equipment. These include the high-security STU-III phones or the more recent Secure Mobile Environment/Portable Electronic Device program under which General Dynamics built the Sectera Edge smartphone and PDA.

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