By David Gewirtz
Oh boy! Here we go again. Another senior government official has had his BlackBerry stolen by another foreign intelligence agency. But this time, it's not an American official. According to the U.K.'s The Sunday Times a senior aide to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown had his BlackBerry stolen by Chinese intelligence agents while on a trip to China back in January.
"Shall we shag now, or shall we shag later?"
The story gets particularly juicy because the senior Downing Street aide got caught in what's probably the world's oldest intelligence ploy, the "honeytrap". No, I'm not talking about the rock band from Coventry, I'm talking about an intelligence scam where a particularly hot woman is used to lure a particularly horny guy into some form of compromising position.
In the case of our bollocksed-up British horndog, he was approached by a Chinese woman while in a Shanghai hotel disco. He agreed to return to his hotel with the woman -- and the next thing we know is he reported the BlackBerry missing to the Prime Minister's Special Branch protection team the next morning.
According to another unmentioned senior Brit official, the incident had "all the hallmarks of a suspected honeytrap by Chinese intelligence."
Karl Rove's missing BlackBerrys
The intelligence risk of lost BlackBerry's first came to our attention when I reported that former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove had lost his BlackBerry device more than once in Where Have All The Emails Gone?.
At the time I wrote the book, the intelligence risk was merely a scenario. As I wrote the scenario, a BlackBerry accidentally got left in a hotel room, to be stolen by a maid with ties to terrorist organizations.
My first draft actually had the BlackBerry stolen by a hooker who'd picked up a senior White House official, but because I wanted to spotlight the security risk and not get everyone hung up on the idea of a White House official with a hooker, I changed the scenario to use a less controversial thief.
And yet, life imitates art.
The Mexican theft of U.S. government BlackBerrys
Back in April, I reported that Rafael Quintero Curiel, lead press advance person for the Mexican delegation, was caught stealing BlackBerry devices belonging to White House staffers who were attending meetings between U.S. President George W. Bush and Canadian and Mexican leaders in New Orleans.
