“The Department of Defense is expected in coming weeks to grant two separate, security approvals for Samsung’s Galaxy smartphones, along with iPhones and iPads running Apple’s latest operating system, according to people familiar with the matter—moves that would boost the number of U.S. government agencies allowed to use those devices,” Will Connors reports for The Wall Street Journal. “One Samsung executive joked that perhaps once Samsung gets government approval for its new devices, the NSA could get U.S. President Barack Obama, well known as a BlackBerry and iPad user, to take up a Samsung device. ‘You never know,’ the NSA representative, Margaret Salter, responded, according to the notes. An NSA representative declined to comment.”
“The Defense Information Systems Agency, or DISA, the agency that sanctions commercial technology for Pentagon use, is set to rule that Samsung’s Galaxy line of smartphones, preloaded with Samsung’s Knox security software, conforms with the Pentagon’s so-called Security Technology Implementation Guide, according to people familiar with the approval process,” Connors reports. “That would allow it to be used by some Pentagon agencies for things like sending and receiving internal emails, according to these people.”
Connors reports, “Separately, DISA is expected to rule that Apple’s latest operating system, iOS 6, conforms to a different security-requirement guide, these people said. That would allow iPhones and iPads to be used by military agencies for nonclassified communications, like email and Web browsing… Many government agencies—including some divisions of the U.S. military—have already approved iPhones and iPads for use. But the Pentagon certification would allow more security-sensitive government agencies at the Pentagon to start using them, and would allow more widespread use of the devices across government agencies… The two smartphone makers have to go through a different vetting process because Samsung’s phones rely on Google Inc.’s GOOG -0.50% Android operating system. Because that is used with an array of device makers, and is based on open-source software, it can be more vulnerable to security breaches. Apple’s operating system, meanwhile, is proprietary and viewed as more secure.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Convicted patent infringer Samsung’s (Google Android with yet another random coat of lipstick) security, or lack thereof, is a joke and the DoD would be smart to continue doing nothing more than laughing at it.
Furthermore, we’d say that it would be silly to even suggest that a U.S. President would choose an inferior foreign phone over an American product, except that, embarrassingly, this one does so already.
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