Monthly Archives: May 2014

President Obama's BlackBerry was more difficult to create than you'd think.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney)

"It just really bothered a lot of people -- nobody wanted to put anything out there that wasn't completely secure," said retired NSA technical director Richard "Dickie" George in an interview with CNNMoney.

George's role was to review the BlackBerry's algorithms and write and engineer diagrams for the phone.

In response to Obama's request, the NSA set up a lab where dozens of experts performed surgery for several months on a high-profile patient: the soon-to-be presidential BlackBerry. The course of treatment was to manipulate the device's innards to weed out potential threats to secure communication.

In the end, that meant taking most of the fun out of the phone: the president can't play Angry Birds, for example.

"You try to get rid of any functionality that's not really required. Every piece of functionality is an opportunity for the adversary," George says.

According to George, the president simply wanted a phone that enabled him to communicate with his advisers. Though the president was a well known BlackBerry (BBRY) addict at the time, the choice of smartphone model was the NSA's, not Obama's, George explained.

What functionality the president's phone actually possesses is secret -- and the NSA won't even confirm that he can use it to send a text or write an email (but it's a pretty safe bet it isn't used for Oval Office selfies).

Related: Let's talk about text, baby

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NSA guy who made Obama's BlackBerry