[webmeister]

Ban government use of instant messages, access watchdog says - Politics - CBC News

This would affect BBM and text messages. There are good points in the article. Information exchanged between bureaucrats and politicians is supposed to be archived for later retrieval. problematic for instant messages of all types including BBM. It would be interesting if BlackBerry could use this opportunity to market Enterprise Instant Messaging more strongly to their gov't clients. Enterprise IM, which leverages on Microsoft Lync/Office Communicator and BES, would fit the bill of a technology with persistent message archiving.

Posted via CB10

[sk8er_tor]

"President of the Treasury Board, Tony Clement, does not agree with the recommendations and has declined to implement them." So they won't be banning it. Besides, most government BlackBerrys have BBM disabled anyway. It's only some staff that want an "off-the-record" way to communicate with each other.

[willowbeast]

As mentioned above most features have been disabled. Heck even the camera in our department.

Posted via CB10

[paper_monkey]

"President of the Treasury Board, Tony Clement, does not agree with the recommendations and has declined to implement them." So they won't be banning it. Besides, most government BlackBerrys have BBM disabled anyway. It's only some staff that want an "off-the-record" way to communicate with each other.

I had a former coworker who would simply send pin messages to people that he didn't necesarily want tracked.

[DigitalMadness]

Governments should use Snapchat instead.

[pmccartney]

Do the 11 federal institutions, her report investigated, record every land-line and mobile phone conversation too.
How about person to person conversations. Are they followed by a stenographer to record those conversations for later use.
If not then this is another moot point and waste of tax dollars.

[willowbeast]

Do the 11 federal institutions, her report investigated, record every land-line and mobile phone conversation too.
How about person to person conversations. Are they followed by a stenographer to record those conversations for later use.
If not then this is another moot point and waste of tax dollars.

No but it security can track all emails received and sent.


Posted via CB10

[webmeister]

The important point here is that the access to information watchdog is raising a red flag about electronic communications in general, basically saying that out-of-band messaging that can't be tracked and archived should be avoided. Of course this is why the politicos are doing this in the first place. Guidelines need to be put into place and enforced such that all official correspondence is easily stored as a matter of public record. Of course normal rules of information sensitivity (Protected A, B, and C) and classification (CONFIDENTIAL, SECRET, and TOP SECRET) would have to be applied but its worrisome that there is so much back channel communication....some of which could easily use email. Email is easily tracked, stored, archived and classified.

[paper_monkey]

The important point here is that the access to information watchdog is raising a red flag about electronic communications in general, basically saying that out-of-band messaging that can't be tracked and archived should be avoided. Of course this is why the politicos are doing this in the first place. Guidelines need to be put into place and enforced such that all official correspondence is easily stored as a matter of public record. Of course normal rules of information sensitivity (Protected A, B, and C) and classification (CONFIDENTIAL, SECRET, and TOP SECRET) would have to be applied but its worrisome that there is so much back channel communication....some of which could easily use email. Email is easily tracked, stored, archived and classified.

Look at the information that came out in Ontario during the investigation into the closure of gas plants and accompanying contract cancellations.. There were government employees using g-mail accounts to communicate about this situation which at the very least indicates that they were concerned that what they were doing was inappropriate so they wanted to try and keep it off the record...

[RyanGermann]

Let me fix that for you:

"President of the Treasury Board, Tony Clement, a pasty-faced weasel of a politician in a government who actively wants to keep the Canadian people in the dark, and does not want public pressure to affect policy positions, as evidenced by their disassembly of StatsCan, de-funding of the CBC, and doing away with the compulsory long-form census, does not agree with the recommendations and has declined to implement them, because sometimes when you're an elected official you WANT your communications to disappear, because you don't want the Canadian people to figure out what you're really up to."

[timmy t]

Why is there no feature for BBM messages to be stored, just like emails, for corporate and government phones? Get on it John Chen.

[canuckvoip]

Governments should use Snapchat instead.

Why?

[qwerty4ever]

Why is there no feature for BBM messages to be stored, just like emails, for corporate and government phones? Get on it John Chen.

BES captures BBM messages but the retention period is very short by default. More importantly BES does not facilitate easy search and retrieval. There are means to archive these messages but it requires custom software to store the messages in a searchable format.

Posted via CB10 from the BlackBerry Z10

[Balti43]

Governments should use Snapchat instead.

hahaha I lmao at this comment, brilliant

[webmeister]

Agreed. And to the naysayers that say that the idea of tracking government communications is Orwellian I say that when you feed at the public trough you are accountable to that same public. Yes, mandated tracking of IM communication is difficult but not impossible. Also agreed that this will force them into other back-channel methods of communication but at least we're making it difficult for them.

[FSeverino]

Do the 11 federal institutions, her report investigated, record every land-line and mobile phone conversation too.
How about person to person conversations. Are they followed by a stenographer to record those conversations for later use.
If not then this is another moot point and waste of tax dollars.

I tend to agree, but I guess they don't want a record if the convos. For example, if you watch west wing or 24 you know how many 'personal' convos are had on the side. But if these are verbal/oral there is no paper trail. I think that is what they are aiming at.

It's ok to do bad things, just don't leave a trail
Go govt!

Posted via CB10

[jdcfinisher]

I hope people that what to keep illegal things in messages secret don't figure out its best to use their own non government ,non corporate phone . A disposable , email address ,computer too. But then people who get caught are usually to cheap to buy their own phone and to lazy to take precautions.

Posted via CB10

[slalom]

Ban government use of instant messages, access watchdog says - Politics - CBC News

This would affect BBM and text messages. There are good points in the article. Information exchanged between bureaucrats and politicians is supposed to be archived for later retrieval. problematic for instant messages of all types including BBM. It would be interesting if BlackBerry could use this opportunity to market Enterprise Instant Messaging more strongly to their gov't clients. Enterprise IM, which leverages on Microsoft Lync/Office Communicator and BES, would fit the bill of a technology with persistent message archiving.

Posted via CB10

This is a suggestion to ban use of IM on computers within the civil service. I believe some companies already do this.