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edge

With all the recent questions near Hillary Clinton's e-mail usage while serving equally Secretary of State, some have wondered why she didn't just take more than one email account. An issue she'south pointed to is but not wanting to comport more than than i device. Your phone probably syncs more than than one email business relationship, so this might sound fishy, but the world was a very unlike place in 2009.

The Obama administration's security protocols limited people to one email account on a BlackBerry. If you need something more than secure, the NSA would suggest the Sectéra Edge, which is what it told Clinton to apply. Clinton fought to get permission to use a BlackBerry for authorities email. She settled on using her ain e-mail accost for everything, which as we at present know has become a point of contention. It'due south worth looking dorsum at this insane example of high-security mobile hardware, peculiarly as the government continues to fight over encryption. The Border looks at showtime like an old BlackBerry or Treo, but looks can exist deceiving.

The Sectéra Border was adult by General Dynamics under direction by the NSA as office of the Secure Mobile Environs Portable Electronic Device (SME PED) program. Information technology could place encrypted calls to trusted devices and access top hush-hush networks. It had secure and non-secure modes, and certain ports and hardware accessories only worked with one or the other.

Information technology'southward not really a "smartphone" by any definition we'd employ today, and information technology cost a whopping $4,750 per unit. You got some cases and software with it, but yikes. It also had an SD card slot, which for a device focused on security seems like an interesting choice. This device ran a special hardened version of Windows CE that supports the necessary protocols to access classified information on authorities networks. Windows CE had a small-scale app ecosystem, but none of them could be installed on the Sectéra Edge.

Sectéra Edge

Simply buying the Sectéra Edge for government personnel was just the offset step. The phone also needed to exist connected to a Apriva email server specifically for mobile devices. That also means private licenses for each user and annual antivirus maintenance contracts. It is estimated that setting up a unmarried user on the Sectéra Edge would cost the government about $30,000.

General Dynamics discontinued the Sectéra Edge several years ago as the Defense Mobile Classified Capability-Secret (DMCC-Due south) plan came out. DMCC-Due south phones don't demand to be designed from the ground up around security. Instead, commercial phones tin can run DMCC-S tools with features similar GPS, the camera, and Bluetooth disabled. Secretary of Land John Kerry was one of the showtime to use a DMCC-S telephone, a Samsung Galaxy S4. Information technology's no Milky way S7, only at to the lowest degree it's actually a smartphone.