Originally Posted by
sorinv Well, the world leaders are not geeks. They most likely use their phones to talk and message, and not much else.
They likely have more secure communications than us, but they shouldn't.
Besides, as we have seen with Angela Merkel's phone, they aren't that secure either. I am pretty sure the NSA can break into Obama's phone and monitor his communications as they most likely do with those of congressmen. Remember Watergate?
Some of us use our phones as laptops, unlike world leaders, some of us actually create IP on our mobile laptops, don't just consume, or use apps, or listen to advisors to tell us what happened in the world today and what is new.
Just because some want to use a large laptop for work (old school), does not mean that everyone is like that. Besides these days, a laptop is almost as hackable and has as many backdoors as a cellphone if connected to the Internet. So you cannot really protect your IP even on a laptop.
So I can see how Obama does not need his device encrypted, maybe only his phone calls and messages. I doubt he creates strategic plans for the South China Sea on his phone.
Second, all men are created equal, even world leaders. They are public figures. They were elected to SERVE. We pay them. If anything, we should all be able to monitor what they do and what they say.
It's a matter of principle. BlackBerry should not intentionally make my phone less secure than the one they give to Obama. Sure, the NSA or whoever then takes that phone and modifies it to add extra protection, but that is a different matter altogether.
Here we are talking about phone companies that intentionally leave backdoors such that the phones of everyone in the public can be decrypted if needed.
We are all considered terrorists and not to be trusted.
A government or state who does that has already lost the trust of its citizens.
That is already a failed state. That's what happened to the former communist countries in Eastern Europe.
Their security services spied on everyone and assumed everyone was a potential terrorist and a threat to the state.
So, to summarize a long posting, this is a matter of principle.
In Canada, the privacy law is the same for everyone, including the prime minister.
It was his dad who said " the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation".
We can extend that now to the smartphones and and computers of the nation. They are just as private as the bedroom, more so because they contain a lot of what we think, who we are, what was only in our brains before.
Short of torture, there was no way to get into our brains, even with a legal warrant.