In happier times, before things got awkward.
I was curious about the extent to which we had gone prying into sensitive communications by Angela Merkel. Was it an encrypted phone that we may have (the White House isn’t saying whether we did or not) tapped?
Merkel told EU leaders in Brussels on Friday morning that she has two mobile phones. One, a Blackberry, is encrypted and the other, a Nokia, is not. They are used to separate conversations about the government, and those covering the activity of her party, the Christian Democrats (CDU).
She explained that she used a mobile phone funded by the CDU to make calls concerning the party to demonstrate that she would not use a state government-funded phone to make CDU-specific calls.
This is likely the phone that the NSA were listening in on. Any calls made as Chancellor are done on an encrypted Blackberry or encrypted landlines, the Welt newspaper reported on Friday….
I don’t know whether that’s accurate or not. But I liked the fact that somebody out there is at least asking the questions that Tom Clancy would have asked, were he still with us…
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We’d have no problem with the Germans attempting to spy on Obama, right? All’s fair in love and espionage.
Every day in every way it becomes more obvious that there is little difference between Obama and Bush. There’s been no real change. Same coverups, different day.
Doug…when it comes to these questions of the “surveillance state” and especially the role of a free press, many are not stopping at comparisons with GWB…in fact, this recent report by the Committee to Protect Journalists quotes many respected journalists from across the spectrum as saying the Obama Administration’s efforts to control information are the most aggressive they’ve experienced since the days of Richard Nixon.
Oh, if they were trying to listen in on Obama, I expect we’d do the same thing the Germans are doing — make a big fuss, protest in the sternest terms, do a lot of harrumphing about it.
But I don’t think we’d be shocked.
Considering the problems that Blackberry have been having for the past few years, I wonder if Obama still has a Blackberry phone. Blackberry is quickly disappearing into irrelevancy.