Originally Posted by
edyb We can discuss cryptographic strengths and robustness of the math for academic reasons, but the truth is if the NSA wants to nail you they will find another easier way. Governments will and have taken people into custody and used non-cryptographic methods to squeeze out information from "wet-ware" (i.e. you) faster than "hard-ware" (i.e. your phone or laptop) if they suspect something. Or they will find your associate and make deals or pit you against the other person by lying to them and saying that the other person ratted on you to get a better deal. Anyways, by the time they have your phone in their labs and trying to crack it, or crack you, you are already in pretty deep doo-doo.
We have TrueCrypt and other software available in the open-source world that people can download and very strongly protect their files. The cat has been let out of the bag... and keys can be made longer and longer if needed. Not sure about the legality in some places for whether you are allowed to use certain software or not, or export it to certain countries. But the source is available for rigorous mathematical and algorithmic scrutiny and people can build it and make it even more complex.
The rest of the monitoring of internet and phone network packet filtering by NSA is likely to pick up important text keywords (or voice translation) out of background chatter on suspected bad guys to figure out their next moves to get a bust. I'm sure there are also GPS or network tower data to track movement of bad guys or associates, or to correlate to criminal activities in areas. It is all part of a data "cloud" the criminals surround themselves with and which NSA can use to discover trends or patterns. The average joe public is not exactly going to tip off the NSA or set off any alarms.
We have more to fear from carriers and corporations than NSA, with software like Carrier IQ found to have been installed on many smartphones a few years ago and logging keystrokes and web-searches on your phone. No doubt it was the device manufacturers bending to the will of carriers who wanted to monitor the data usage and trends of their customers and forcing Carrier IQ software to be buried into the default OS preloaded on their devices.
As to the security of BlackBerry, I am sure the Pentagon bought 80,000 BlackBerry's because they are such good environments to develop apps on, right? And not at all for security. I think not. While nothing is impenetrable, the bottom line is BlackBerry has built a robust and stable OS out of QNX, with powerful cryptographic algorithms and has a small enough user-base that hackers would much rather be interested and stand to profit from their efforts on iPhone and Android systems. There are jailbreaks on iOS and Android rootkits, but BlackBerry QNX has NONE. We know even the latest PlayBook OS has no rootkit since DingleBerry was stopped at an earlier version 2.0.
And as to the ORIGINAL POST saying "society is not recommended"... BlackBerry is available to anyone who wishes to buy it, and they can have the same security as Obama. People do not care about security, or I should say they care more about certain apps and features than security. Corporations and government which want their employees to be productive on a limited number of apps, developed in-house, with central device management across their organization will be fine using BlackBerry and have both security and productivity for the task at hand.