[devilsadvocate]

Dennis! Good to talk to you again, fellow Linuxer and all-around intelligent guy.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

In fairness, every government wants a back door like that. Some are simply a bit more blatant than others.

"Every government" can keep on wanting. The minute someone caves to that type of request without a warrant (or whatever the non-American equivalent of due process may be--assuming such a thing exists), I start losing faith in humanity fast...that's a problem, because I don't have much to begin with at this point.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Mind you, if I were a bad guy engaged in things I didn't want a government to know about, I'd think twice about using Blackberries or any similar device to coordinate with my associates, unless I could be sure that all such communications used innocuous phrases that were meaningful to the associates but not to government snoopers reading my electronic mail.

I believe there was an old mom's saying to the effect of "If you don't want it on the front page of the New York Times, don't say it on the phone" or somesuch. In fact we just got done discussing this in my SE571 InfoSec class; as it happens, RIM put up some pretty convincing data to show the Secret Service that the BB's encryption was strong enough for President Obama to continue using one. Now it appears that security is for sale.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

And what passes for moderate Islamic states (which the Saudis and the UAE are) may be even more paranoid about people like Al Queda and the Taliban than we are. The Saudi regime, for example, came to power by overthrowing a previous government perceived as having drifted too far away from Islamic principles. The Wahabi strain of Islam practiced by the Saudis is fairly fundamentalist, and while the Saudi royalty are cosmopolitan, they remember just how they became rulers, and don't want the same thing happen to them. I suspect similar motivations in the UAE.

Welcome to Saudi Arabia. To set local time, take UTC and subtract 600 years.

Because really, who would want to overthrow a government which allows near-persecution of its own women? </sarcasm> The modern world is no place for fundamentalism of any stripe, yet we seem to have as much of it now as we did during the Crusades. On the other hand, I dig that whole death-penalty-for-rapists thing they have, so maybe it's all a matter of perspective.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Android has neat stuff, but from what I've seen, getting root is a non-trivial undertaking. A friend bought his wife and daughter Droid phones, but got a Nokai 900 for himself because he could get root on it.

Droid X was rooted 3 days after it was released
It does take varying degrees of skill to do it, but I think that's for the better actually. Imagine Linux being declared a security disaster because 35,000,000 Ubuntu users figured out how to run as the root user...

Again, the issue of RIM selling out to governments isn't the reason I'm giving up on my BlackBerry; it's just the final reason. If I was that concerned, I could use my own encryption via HTTPS, tunneling, or whatever. RIM is getting behind in the consumer arena and I don't have to worry about corporate email push--the other thing BBs were so good for. I like the idea of having more control over a device; I found some NetBeans Android plugins and I already have a Java background so I'm looking to have some fun with this thing.