BlackBerries: Why Were They Popular Phones? Why Did Hillary 'smash' them?

Over on Truth Social, someone posted the "smash with a hammer" story about Hillary Clinton and her cellphones. What was the fascination with BlackBerries? Here's a possible reason: VPN-like encryption

As I wrote in a recent Telegram post, I sometimes serve as “tour guide to the entrances of deep rabbit holes.” I was inspired by that recent comment on Truth Social to write this; so here’s another guided tour.

---

Long before the mainstream world developed an interest in “VPN” technologies (Virtual Private Networks) the concept was already very well known in certain CyberTech arenas.

For instance, a technique like this has long been used on Cisco routers to create “secure” networks for companies or organizations that use public Internet network infrastructure to tie together private data networks between satellite offices of theirs; while the specific implementations may vary, the underlying concept is the same.

You may use a modern VPN yourself—or you may know that tech-obsessed coworker or relative who insists that you have to use one to keep your privacy on the Internet.

What few people stop to think about is who, exactly, is behind these modern VPN companies and why you should trust that their technology actually does what they want you to think it does; i.e., why you should trust that their VPN is “bulletproof”.

If you didn’t write the code yourself or at least read through it—you can’t really know for sure, can you? Always ask the right questions. And always assume you’re not getting the full truth.

Anyhow, on with the story. Basically, a VPN is a technique that theoretically “cloaks” your internet traffic by shrouding it inside an encrypted “data tunnel”. As your traffic flows over the Internet from point A to point B through this dedicated “tunnel”—which is one that you or your IT organization have some hand in configuring—it is theoretically not possible for interlopers to snoop on your data as it sloshes drunkenly through the open Internet like Amber Heard coming home from Taco Bell at 3am with an upset tummy.

Think of a VPN as an armored Brinks Security Truck for protecting your private data as it traverses public Internet networks.

OK, back to my skeptical stance: “impossible to snoop” is too strong a wording for me to describe what VPNs do. Let’s just say its “extremely difficult” to crack these sorts of encrypted tunnels, at least for most hackers and for most agencies, outside of a select nameless few. I’m going to stop a little bit short of calling any encryption technology completely “secure,” because I’ve been around too many blocks too many times through the decades to be naive.

“Hello, Hillary? This is Durham. Pack your bags for Gitmo…”

Among the first mass-market device companies to support this sort of encryption technology in a very thorough, easy to use, and seamless way was a Canadian company, RIM Technologies, the maker of the once-popular BlackBerry phone.

BlackBerry phones used to be all the rage. Business Insider, among other news sources, ran stories in 2016 about an FBI report in which it was claimed that an aide to Hillary Clinton smashed phones with a hammer, among which were BlackBerry phones.

According to that report, there were “13 mobile devices used to possibly send emails using Hillary’s private email server” (a few of which, of course, were never recovered. Because Hillary of course.) These were often BlackBerry phones, until the iPhone became the favored phone of the elite.

So, what was behind the fascination with Blackberries? Well, as luck would have it, in the years around 2008-2012—while I was an Executive Director of Information Technology for an enterprise supporting 10,000 staff and 85,000 students—I installed and supported a “Blackberry Enterprise Server” (BES) for about 250 high level executives. So I have an idea why they were popular among a certain crowd.

At the same time, I also managed a team that setup and operated an Enterprise Microsoft Exchange Email server, and I was sometimes given the assignment of doing public FOIA requests. So I know more than a little about the “Stonetear” email header scandal, and also the “James Corney” stuff. But that’s a story for another time…

Anyway, as a result of my experience with the BES, I have a good idea why BlackBerry devices were so popular—especially among a certain elite crowd.

Back in the day, BlackBerry phones were sometimes called “CrackBerries”, because they were a slick, well-designed communications device that supported voice, email and a form of “text messaging”. Other cell phones of the day couldn’t touch them in terms of utility. They were particularly addictive to certain types of users who liked to be constantly in touch; they had a full QWERTY keyboard for typing, which at the time was quite unique.

They also had a rolling wheel on the side, because at the time there were no touch screens yet. Some people used to get thumb blisters from constantly using their BlackBerries. Because of their ease of use, they were quite popular among the business elite and the political class, and for a time RIM was a Tech Stock darling on the Nasdaq.

Here’s what Business Insider wrote back in 2016 about Hillary:

So now let’s shine a bright light on a few key details to see what’s interesting about this.

Unlike iPhone and Android phones today, which rely on “cloud hosted” services for email, documents and messaging, (Gmail, Office 365/Outlook, Apples iCloud), BlackBerry phones at the time were a sort of private “walled garden” technology.

All of the data (a BlackBerry user’s documents, email, and messages) were stored on their device and/or their own organizations internal BES server, and all of the traffic between a user’s BlackBerry device and that privately-owned BES server was encrypted.

In many cases, while you were at work, the traffic between the BlackBerry and the server didn’t even need to go outside of your own organization’s internal data networks; BlackBerry devices could use Wifi networks inside of your company or organization to reach the BES without ever needing to use the public Internet infrastructure.

If you had to go to a meeting and you lost access to your own Wifi network, the BlackBerry would switch to a “data plan” using AT&T or Verizon or whatnot (which most of us rely on today) to reach the BES server through your organization’s firewall; but even when this happened, the traffic was still wrapped up in a secure VPN tunnel.

For those of you who know anything about the modern surveillance state (which I wrote about recently in The Surveillance State is Worse than You Think and also in Truth Social and Starlink) you’ll already start to perceive what the problem is here.

BlackBerry’s were actually too secure.

BlackBerry phones, and the way they worked with the BlackBerry Enterprise Server, slammed the door shut on the surveillance state types—they couldn’t as easily eavesdrop and tap communications like they were accustomed to with these encrypted data tunnels—and they were none too happy about that.

Well, they weren’t happy about it, at least with regard to your communications.

For their own communications, of course, they preferred a different set of rules. Rules for thee, not for me.

The experts back then were perfectly happy advising their government and political friends to use BlackBerry devices—and host their own email servers in the bathrooms of their residences—precisely because of this “protection from eavesdropping.” That’s why you saw people like Barack Obama and Hillary using CrackBerries.

Because they knew these things were protected from surveillance.

So what motivated Hillary’s staff to physically smash the devices? Well, for devices that use encryption to work, they rely on something called Public Key Cryptography; without getting into too much detail, suffice it to say that each “end” of a communications channel needs a set of “public and private keys” to encrypt traffic going out and to decrypt data coming in. It’s more complicated than that, but this will do for now.

Because the BlackBerry devices had “public and private key” certificates on the device used for encryption, if those devices were smashed to bits such that investigators could not retrieve the private and public keys (data files on the device) — then messages — or locally stored documents — which may have been sent to others (through the BES) could not be decrypted. Smashing the phone was an attempt to “throw away the keys” to keep certain documents, emails and communications forever unrecoverable from investigators.

It is interesting to note that BlackBerry phones are no longer a thing, and only iPhones and Android phones remain standing in the marketplace—both of which rely on surveillable carrier networks (AT&T, Verizon, etc.) and surveillable endpoint cloud services hosted by mega Corporations (Microsoft, Google, and Apple) that are beholden to the FBI and NSA.

No more walled garden communications systems are in existence…well, until Starlink phones that use the Starlink system to communicate come into existence, which may bring this sort of privacy back into the hands of the masses.

A development that “they” will fight tooth and nail, in case you hadn’t noticed.

As Paul Harvey used to say…. “and now you know…. the rest of the Story.”

Subscribe now.