BlackBerry banned from French bureaucracy
The Prime Minister office just issued a recommendation inviting employees of the various French Ministries not to use BlackBerries anymore. The reason is national security: informations exchanged between French officials could be intercepted by the Americans through the NSA, which has infrastructures in the UK.
Most of the people working for government, or at least advisors in power position, are used to BlackBerry. This decision comes after the French Ministry of Economy and Finance put the system in place for its own teams back in 2006. Official in charge of this project said: “today, BlackBerry is the most robust and secure product on the market (…) There is a lot of misunderstandings (…) There are also fears related to the myth of servers being deployed and located outside the national territory (…) It would be ridiculous to ban it. People would buy one with their own money, which would be worse. We should rather devise in-house solutions with servers which we can configure, secure and control”.
The Prime Minister office statement is not mandatory, it “invites” people to get rid of their smart phones. Considering the fact most of the people involved come from sectors like banking or private industry, and have been using it for years now, it seems absolutely sure they will manage to use it one way or the other, even if not openly anymore. Would that be better?…
June 21st, 2007 at 6:33 am
Funny that RIM, the maker of the BlackBerry, is Canadian. No one ever suspects the Canadians…
June 21st, 2007 at 4:23 pm
Strange, then, that European regulators have cleared the use of mobile phones and BlackBerry devices by passengers during flights. And even more ironic that according to the New York Times today, “The first aircraft to go into operation with the system will probably be a short-haul Airbus A318 operated by Air France.” Perhaps the French will simply be exporting their BlackBerry users to the United States.