Work or off the shelf?
Hmm. The work one is guaranteed to be insecure because work will have installed spyware.
A random "pick one up at a shop" phone is unlikely to have spyware installed.
Which would you trust your life to ?
Even the Secret Service won't use company-issued phones
It seems like nobody wants to carry a work phone and that includes even those charged with protecting the US president. The US Secret Service’s extremely lax mobile phone security practices - including using unsecured personal devices during mission operations - put America’s leaders’ and agents’ lives at risk, according to a …
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Sunday 28th June 2026 13:20 GMT ThatOne
Re: Trump phone?
What would be more fitting for the American secret services than a phone 150% made in the USA by honest, god-fearing, hardworking American workers?...
Disclaimer: Above statement(s) is/are an example of "sarcasm", shouldn't be taken literally and don't reflect my personal opinion.
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Saturday 27th June 2026 01:02 GMT MachDiamond
Par for the course
There's no penalty for circumventing security protocols for any sort of comms in US government. The real problem is interception of communications before the President arrives. Advance intelligence on timing, routes and so forth would give a terrorist cell or hostile nation-stage group time to plan. Once the President or other VIP is someplace, it's often reported so the agent's phones are less of a proxy although still an issue.
There's no mention of the specific deficiencies of the GFE that's driving the staff to use their own phones. They can't load their instaPintaTwitFace account app?
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Saturday 27th June 2026 01:50 GMT Blazde
Re: Par for the course
There's no mention of the specific deficiencies of the GFE that's driving the staff to use their own phone
Presumably almost no everyday apps work on it, because almost all everyday apps require you to hand over vast amounts of compromising info to data brokers who'll very swiftly sell it on to foreign actors or home-grown nutjobs with enough money.
Some good, now somewhat old analysis on this including a big section on national security threats, "Criminal organizations could use this data to build profiles on and subsequently target prosecutors and judges" "Foreign intelligence organizations could acquire this data .. to build profiles on politicians" and "Data brokers could also be hacked" (which has since happened). They don't quite list risk of Executive assassination but they may as well: https://techpolicy.sanford.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Data-Brokers-and-Sensitive-Data-on-US-Individuals-Sherman-2021.pdf
The sensible thing would be to stop these companies gathering this kind of data, but I suppose we'll see how 'the chief information officer trying to do a better job communicating to employees that the use of personal devices is not allowed' goes instead.
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Saturday 27th June 2026 10:51 GMT eldakka
Re: Par for the course
> There's no mention of the specific deficiencies of the GFE that's driving the staff to use their own phones. They can't load their instaPintaTwitFace account app?
From the article:
Plus, they used personal mobile devices as hotspots to provide internet access for government-issued laptops, or to access websites blocked on GFE phones.
The implication being that they can't use the GFE phones as mobile hotspots for GFE laptops. And that some sites are blocked. As a (non-US) government employee who works in IT, I can't tell you how annoying it can be to be researching an IT issue only for pages on the topic being blocked by the proxy server because it's a "blog" site* - which is where most useful IT discussions occur. Luckily there is a process to get access to blog etc., but it's a pain and has to be renewed every year.
* they use a commercial proxy package that has various categories for sites, e.g. news, blogs, file sharing, social media, adult, and about a score others. A site can have multiple categories. So while 'news' sites are allowed, if it also has a 'social media' tag then it'll be blocked because of that (I remember once there was an all-staff email about the secretary giving an interview on Facebook and encouraging staff to go read it. When it was pointed out that as a social media site Facebook was blocked, another email came out acknowledging that and then encouraging staff to read it when they went home...yeah I don't think many staff did that on their own time).
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Saturday 27th June 2026 11:29 GMT You aint sin me, roit
Porn. The answer is always porn.
Those websites blocked on GFE phones... you know which ones they are.
And if not porn then probably other sites you wouldn't want showing up on your work phone's browsing history... gambling sites, predictive sites, escort agencies... and we're back to porn.
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Saturday 27th June 2026 14:25 GMT doublelayer
Re: Porn. The answer is always porn.
You're assuming the sites on the list were put there for a reason. That is not always the case with filter lists. For example, at $employer, we use Google services, GSuite for documents, Chrome as the browser, unsurprisingly, Google as the search engine. A couple years ago, I got a reminder that Google search has really gotten worse. When I started using DuckDuckGo over a decade ago, it was worse than Google but I put up with that for the privacy benefits and continued to use it from then on, so I hadn't seen the changes very much until I found myself repeatedly failing to find things that shouldn't be difficult on work searches. So when I needed information and couldn't get Google to cough it up, I decided to go to DuckDuckGo for that search, and found that it had been blocked by my employer for reasons unexplained.
I don't know what happened to put that on the block list. It wasn't all search engines other than Google, just that one. I didn't raise it as a problem, but it did disappear from the blocked list almost a year later, equally unexplained. Sometimes, lists are not created with good reasoning or contain weird errors.
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Saturday 27th June 2026 16:22 GMT Roland6
Re: Par for the course
>” * they use a commercial proxy package that has various categories for sites…”
Used one of these as requested by a client organisation, only problem the National Lottery site was blocked as a gambling site(*); they received funding from the National Lottery and hence had to access other parts of the website to report and administer the money flow.
(*) a test of the filter, showed it only blocked the national operators, not the less well known smaller operators…
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Saturday 27th June 2026 21:40 GMT MachDiamond
Re: Par for the course
"Used one of these as requested by a client organisation, only problem the National Lottery site was blocked as a gambling site"
Well, it is. It's also not something that needs to be accessed by a Secret Service agent from their work phone. Does the National Lottery operate it's own backend or is it seconded to a contractor?
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Saturday 27th June 2026 21:38 GMT MachDiamond
Re: Par for the course
"The implication being that they can't use the GFE phones as mobile hotspots for GFE laptops. And that some sites are blocked."
If that's an issue, having the rank and file work around the hurdles by using non-secured devices is a problem. What sites? Porn, social media, gambling, banking/finance/investment? Most employers would rather employees are not accessing any of these sites, but for some agency such as The Secret Service, it must go further than "discouraged". Nothing is more secret than real-time intelligence. Ask Bin Laden or Maduro (since he's still alive to answer without postmortem communications).
If it's on FB, it's likely not that important. When it is, somebody else can go look at it.
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Saturday 27th June 2026 06:22 GMT Sproggit
Apple, Tree...
Just a bit of speculation on my part, but I wonder how much of this has actually been driven by Secret Service personnel and how much has been driven by their protectees?
President Trump famously won't use email, doesn't like to put anything in writing, prefers to do everything in person when he can and by phone call when he can't meet face to face. I'm far from the first person to note this, but President Trump operates using the exact same techniques adopted by the New York mafia when they didn't want NYPD to know what they were "getting up to". So I have to wonder if the push-back against GFE has come directly from agents involved or if it is part of a broader resistance to leaving an audit trail? Cough.
A bit off topic - but I think also worth mentioning in this context - does anyone remember the LIBOR scandal from around 2012-2014? For those who don't, LIBOR was the "London Inter-Bank Overnight Rate" and that was the interest charged by one bank lending to another bank so that the borrowing institution could meet it's BASEL-II (now BASEL-III) liquidity obligations - introduced after previous financial meltdowns. What happened was that a small group of traders figured out a way to literally rig the LIBOR market - to set the interest rate and make more money for their (lending) banks.
What was quickly forgotten - or not even reported - in the wake of the LIBOR scandal was the way the scheme was implemented... It was done using SMS messaging, private email accounts and uncontrolled Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels. Traders used these unofficial and un-monitored communications channels to defraud other banks. If you're interested, here's a BBC article that includes some of those exchanges:-
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21358362
Point being that in the wake of the LIBOR scandal, financial regulators the world over immediately notified banks that such practices would be prohibited. All access to webmail and external IRC was banned. Anyone in a "market sensitive" role who had a need for a phone was issued with a corporate mobile... and anyone who *didn't* need a corporate mobile often lost the ability to make or receive external calls and to send or receive external emails.
What interests me is not the obvious case of a government basically declaring, "Do what I say, not what I do..." and ordering companies to adopt security practices far more strict than the *Secret Service*... but the fact that there isn't already clear, unambiguous and tight regulation in place to prohibit this.
Donald Trump - often rightly - gets a lot of criticism for his disregard for protocol and his bull-in-a-china-shop approach to doing and getting what he wants... but my sense is that when we look back on this period fifteen or twenty years from now - assuming we're able to do so - we'll see the issue more as a failure to act when it was clear that action was necessary. The first Trump administration clearly became vulnerable to hostile nation state actors - the multiple Chinese nationals caught, tried and convicted of trying to enter Mar-A-Lago during the four years that Donald Trump was out of office, for example...
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdfl/pr/chinese-national-sentenced-prison-entering-restricted-grounds-mar-lago-and-lying-us
It just seems surprising that, given this backdrop, that members of the Secret Service haven't been told that a failure to use GFE at all times is not just a sackable offense, it's a *prosecutable* offense, on the grounds that it places their protectees at risk. It's amazing that on-duty Secret Service staff aren't subject to much more strict operational rules. Not, I would like to make clear, to suggest that such rules aren't in place (I don't know if they are or not, but it seems unlikely that guidelines would not exist), but that they aren't being rigorously followed.
And it's worth noting how President Trump has singled out certain Secret Service personnel - Anthony Ornato, Robert Engel and Sean Curran, for example - have been brought more closely in to the President's orbit. It certainly seems like the Secret Service are adopting the same sort of practices as their principle charge...
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Saturday 27th June 2026 09:51 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Apple, Tree...
Well let's face it, who is going to arrest the Secret Service?
Ok, someone probably can, but it's always going to be a highly subjective matter. All it takes is for someone to have carried out a threat risk assessment to justify "irregular" equipment usage, and it's then readily portrayed as fully justified, nay, necessary. And believe me, that can very much absolutely be the correct decision; threat environments of any sort are by definition not under one's control, and it's no good assuming that the bad guys will play nicely so that your slow-to-procure GFE holds up against them. That then rather questions the motivations and intentions of the arresting parties; they have themselves become a threat.
It's the same in IT. Say a company has a policy of using a specific suite of virus checker / security product. If you as Chief Information Security Officer of the company finds that it's compromised and that you can fix it by doing something not on the books, and you do it, you're more likely to get thanked and praised (or at least, you should do in any healthily run corporate environment; not always guaranteed).
Of course, where this can get messy in public office is that the obligation to record is now extremely high. A threat mitigated garners little praise. A recording obligation sidestepped as a result - no matter how minor, and no matter how little on-the-ground consequence - is a definite wrong (or, so someone somewhere has decreed). Consequence; you're in trouble for having done a job well.
It's this kind of environment - whether that's corporate or governmental - that deters good people from working in that role. And so, you don't get good people in that role. As soon as you have an environment where there is no allowance, no latitude given to how people do that job, the enterprise is doomed. And, perversely, you end up with someone terrible in the role who is prepared to break a lot of rules, and will enjoy doing so.
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Saturday 27th June 2026 14:32 GMT doublelayer
Re: Apple, Tree...
There's another plausible explanation for Trump to prefer phone calls: he's 80. He's far from the only person I know who dislikes written communication, biased towards older people and those who were higher in companies at the time. I think part of the reason is that it's now common to be taught to type, but in his day, it was less common and mostly taught to administrative staff who would take dictation. If you can't communicate by text quickly or accurately because you spent the first 40-50 years of your life either writing longhand or speaking, it is logical to prefer talking. If you do prefer that and you run the place, you can usually make people go along with your preference. That doesn't mean this is the reason, but it probably is one of the options.
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Sunday 28th June 2026 04:11 GMT doublelayer
Re: Apple, Tree...
That's an interesting interpretation of my post and a couple assumptions you're using. I admit that I do not monitor Trump's social media posts, so I cannot say how fluent they tend to be. However, I do remember a few times when they were covered in media, examples which frequently included typos, sometimes severe ones. Another thing I remember being a problem on occasion was multi-part tweets coming very slowly, perhaps because someone was not very fast at typing accurately? It is confirmed that some of those social media posts are written by other people as one thing I do know from experience is that, whether or not your defense of his typing capability is correct, one thing he often isn't capable of is writing a sentence that consistently stays on a topic or acknowledges facts he can't be bothered with.
Irrespective of whether my or your assumptions is accurate, it appears to be you who is making excuses to defend your supposition. Whether or not Trump is one of them, you are surely aware of people who refuse to type for the reasons I said. The examples appear with regularity on this paper, more often if anecdotes from comments are included (the boss whose PA is tasked with printing out all the emails, then typing all the replies, is a perennial tale). If you interpret any suggestion that there's a possibility other than what you said as a defense, you will leap to incorrect conclusions far more often than you likely want to and end up using weird arguments to turn possibility into certainty even though you weren't certain when you began.
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Saturday 27th June 2026 07:09 GMT Sproggit
A Bit OT
So yes, this is a bit off-topic, but... I notice that the article included a shot of several Secret Service personnel with Air Force One in the background.
Not sure if anyone caught it, but a "new" Air Force One - the $400 million 747-8 gifted to the President by Qatar - was rolled out on Friday.
There are pictures of the new aircraft here:-
https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/air-force-one-qatar-destined-140904834.html?_guc_consent_skip=1782543665
and here:-
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/06/24/us/trump-air-force-one-design
And if you're looking at those images and thinking, "Hang on, I thought that Air Force One was always painted 'Robin's Egg Blue'?" then you would be right, since that is the color scheme that has been in use since the livery was established by President Kennedy in the 1960s.
But.
It costs *at least* $150,000-$300,000 for the most basic paint job for a 747... For more detailed work, such as for Air Force One - the cost can easily run in to millions of dollars.
Wild guess: President Trump expects that this new color scheme will be unique to his aircraft and his presidency. Having been told that the 2 new 747s ordered to replace the existing, original Air Force One will be delayed beyond the day he leaves office, it's just possible that President Trump has decided to have this Qatari-sourced plane painted in the color scheme he wanted, since he's already declared that it was a gift to him personally and that he will add it to his Presidential Museum when he retires. Cough.
Handy way to get your bung of an aircraft refurbished and painted at no cost, eh?
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Saturday 27th June 2026 21:45 GMT MachDiamond
Re: A Bit OT
"since he's already declared that it was a gift to him personally and that he will add it to his Presidential Museum when he retires. Cough."
I don't think that he can accept such a gift due to gift value regulations for government employees/officials. I got a load of grief when I paid for lunch when out with a person from the FAA. It was a social outing, nothing to do with work and we didn't discuss anything work related. I made her pay for lunch the next day so we were even. This was basic sustenance, not a fancy meal.
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Sunday 28th June 2026 12:12 GMT Sproggit
Re: A Bit OT
Here's the thing: President Trump has already been given the OK by his own Justice Department (I know, what a surprise, right?). See here:-
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/05/14/politics/bondi-justice-department-trump-qatar-747
https://www.yahoo.com/news/pam-bondi-round-constitution-trump-184210851.html?guccounter=1
President Trump has already said that he intends to keep the aircraft when he steps down from serving as the 47th President and that he intends to add the aircraft to his "Presidential Museum". In so doing he used the example of President Regan, who had a Boeing 707 that served him during his two terms and which was retired from service in 2001. The aircraft was permanently installed at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, California.
Of course, the key difference here is that Reagan's 707 had been formally retired and was at end-of-life... while the 747-800 gifted by Qatar was originally manufactured in 2012, but which was effectively given a complete overhaul over the last year and is essentially a "re-manufactured" aircraft. I can't say for sure that all the timed-life components will have been replaced, but it's reasonable to assume that most of them have.
Which doesn't mean, of course, that President Trump intends to keep using it... just that should he wish to do so, he'll effectively being inheriting a 2-year-old aircraft where he was the only previous user...
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Saturday 27th June 2026 08:15 GMT harald-hardrada
Paranoia Anyone?
I read somewhere (link lost!) that EU diplomats coming the USA have a standard approach to technology:
(1) Clean empty laptop (no data)
(2) Clean smartphone (no apps or data)
....sometimes they (allegedly) don't bring any technology hardware with them at all..........
....but head into the nearest Apple store and buy new.
Interesting is it not that William Burroughs (way back when in Morocco) should get it SO right:
- "The paranoid is a person who knows a little of what is going on."
Sigh!
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Saturday 27th June 2026 12:32 GMT blu3b3rry
Re: Paranoia Anyone?
TBH that just seems sensible given the attitudes that seem to be applied at the US border in the past year or so.
I'm not an EU diplomat (and my work-supplied laptop remained as it was normally) but I did take the precaution of cleaning up my personal laptop and phone with resets / fresh Ubuntu installs before travelling just in case some overzealous border agent wanted to be nosy.
All my stuff happily stored on my Proton drive while I travelled, and subsequently downloaded at the hotel once I'd arrived.
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Saturday 27th June 2026 13:03 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Paranoia Anyone?
Standard routine for travelling users using Apple gear:
- anything critical is installed via profiles (that gives them their own security container)
- any profile is deleted prior to crossing the border (takes about 10 secs and is untraceable)
- for any non-profile work on MacOS, use the guest account as it fully resets on logout
- under no circumstances is the operating profile to be restored if the device has been handled by authorities
In general, any device that has been handled by border authorities is no longer trusted for confidential work. It's not worth the risk.
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Saturday 27th June 2026 09:28 GMT midgepad
can't have it both ways
People nowadays expect to have a phone/terminal wherever they go.
And when they come back they likely need it to get their transport or accomodation.
So they could use the company phone for personal stuff.
Or they could carry their personal phone, which is most of the security hole before they even use it.
If they have both, they'll get mixed up, that looks like a creditably low percentage of times.
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Saturday 27th June 2026 11:26 GMT MatthewSt
Re: Why?
I've seen this in the UK. Hospitals are quite bad for mobile reception for various reasons, and the police aren't allowed to connect their equipment to unsecured WiFi networks. Their choice is to go outside or use a personal device. When you're there supervising someone going outside is not always a practical option.
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Sunday 28th June 2026 13:16 GMT ThatOne
Re: Why?
> the police aren't allowed to connect their equipment to unsecured WiFi networks.
...and VPN technology is way too complicated and expensive, isn't it.
Disclaimer: Above statement(s) is/are an example of "sarcasm", shouldn't be taken literally and don't reflect my personal opinion.
(Didn't downvote you.)
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Saturday 27th June 2026 13:52 GMT Terry 6
web blocking is a big hammer
I know nothing about security.
I do know that some local authorities do this on educational PCs. With good reason, probably. But when I waned to locate a cartoon for a training session I was prepping the one I wanted was blocked, because it "contained humour"
And when I was searching for some pictures of Roman/Greek ceramic tiles the sites I went to were blocked, because some of the 2000 yr old tiles had images of naked fighters.
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Saturday 27th June 2026 15:24 GMT Marty McFly
Presidential level privacy
There is a very real and legitimate need for digital privacy in Secret Service protective detail operations, regardless of who is in office. Those agents, in performance of their duties, should not be tracked or monitored in any way. Any compromise of that digital privacy presents a potential risk to POTUS and other protectees.
We, the Great Unwashed Masses, should be entitled to pursue the same level of personal digital privacy. It may not be cheap or free, and nor should it be. I should have the option to allow a technology to monetize me by selling my data & information to a data broker, in exchange for free access to that technology. Or, I could opt to pay for the technology and have my digital privacy absolutely ensured.
The problem in this article is not Government employees loading the wrong apps on their phones, or using personal devices. The problem is a technology industry which has evolved a primary go-to-market strategy around penetrating a user's identity and selling that to the highest bidder, and the next highest bidder, and everyone else who is willing to pay the price.
If we accept that a Secret Service agent's digital identity should be private by virtue of their job duties, then the rest of us should at least have the option to attain the same level of digital privacy.
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Saturday 27th June 2026 21:46 GMT Taliesinawen
Government-issued devices lacking capabilities
> Secret Service agents routinely used personal cell phones to communicate with law enforcement and each other, including during protective operations in the US and overseas, because their government-issued devices lacked the capabilities they needed to perform their missions, according to a federal review ordered after the 2024 assassination attempt against President Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Couldn't they get the NSA to knock up a relatively secure phone for all government departments. I mean that is its mission to secure America's communications (via its Information Assurance mission).
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Saturday 27th June 2026 23:13 GMT Springsmith
Pity the secret service men...
Pity the secret service men... with their need for the "Best Lap Dance Bar Near Me App".
Or is it an "addicted to TikTok and can't be away from their family WhatsApp group" thing?
Seriously what app can they _need_ to carry out their duties that isn't available on their work phone? And isn't it someone's job to make sure it is available (or audited and rejected)?
In the days before mobile phones, a phone call to the wife every couple of days was all the personal phone calls I was ever allowed to claim on expenses.
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Monday 29th June 2026 04:47 GMT Uh, Mike
Paging Hillary Clinton
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used her personal email because the computers at the Department of State were hacked.
China stole all the SF86s. If you know what an SF86 is, you know why they need to be protected, but they were there for the taking.
The trouble was, it was classified information that the Department of State was failing to protect classified information.
So Hillary couldn't explain why she wouldn't use their hacked servers without committing a crime.
Not that I find her particularly virtuous, but she did keep the secret that there were no secrets.
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Monday 29th June 2026 11:52 GMT APro
Your one job...
... is the security of the subject you're guarding. During your shift - or 24/7 when outside your home country - you forfeit access to non-critical "civilian services". That's the nature of the beast.
This actually applies to all services - military, intelligence, police. You sign up to protect - no matter the personal cost.
The US Army learned this wearing smart watches in the middle east. Russia learned the hard way with mobile phones in the Crimea.
If it emits radiation with no hard switch to stop transmissions, ban it under court-martial/dishonorable discharge or jail time.
