hacking

Only last week Obama expressed his desire to hang on to his Blackberry:

“I’m still clinging to my BlackBerry. They’re going to pry it out of my hands,” Obama said in a broadcast last week televised by CNBC. “You are interacting with people who are outside of the White House in a meaningful way.”

The concern with Obama continuing to use a Blackberry centers around the fear of the device being hacked. McAfee has detected only a few attacks against the RIM device which is credited to the unique network controlled by RIM. While US engineers might be able to build a Blackberry that uses higher levels of encryption than RIM and the wireless carriers, without this special version Obama’s message cannot have confidence of privacy.

“If Obama uses a vanilla BlackBerry, he should use it with the assumption that the world will read it,” said Entner, the analyst. “His counterparts in the capitals of several countries will read it.”

Research In Motion (RIM), the manufacturer of the Blackberry, has enjoyed an increase in sales thanks to Obama’s free publicity.

Read more on The Seattle Times.