The NSA wanted Hillary Clinton to use this crazy secured Windows CE phone

The NSA wanted Hillary Clinton to use this crazy secured Windows CE phone
With all the recent questions about Hillary Clinton’s email usage while serving as Secretary of State, some have wondered why she didn’t just have more than one email account.

With all the recent questions about Hillary Clinton’s email usage while serving as Secretary of State, some have wondered why she didn’t just have more than one email account. An issue she’s pointed to is simply not wanting to carry more than one device. Your phone probably syncs more than one email account, so this might sound fishy, but the world was a very different place in 2009.

The Obama administration’s security protocols limited people to one email account on a BlackBerry. If you need something more secure, the NSA would suggest the Sectéra Edge, which is what it told Clinton to use. Clinton fought to get permission to use a BlackBerryfor government email. She settled on using her own email address for everything, which as we now know has become a point of contention. It’s worth looking back at this insane example of high-security mobile hardware, especially as the government continues to fight over encryption. The Edge looks at first like an old BlackBerry or Treo, but looks can be deceiving.

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

It’s not really a “smartphone” by any definition we’d use today, and it 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 government networks. Windows CE had a small app ecosystem, but none of them could be installed on the Sectéra Edge.

Simply buying the Sectéra Edge for government personnel was just the first step. The phone also needed to be connected to a Apriva email server specifically for mobile devices. That also means individual licenses for each user and annual antivirus maintenance contracts. It is estimated that setting up a single 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-S) program came out. DMCC-S phones don’t need to be designed from the ground up around security. Instead, commercial phones can run DMCC-S tools with features like GPS, the camera, and Bluetooth disabled. Secretary of State John Kerry was one of the first to use a DMCC-S phone, a Samsung Galaxy S4. It’s no Galaxy S7, but at least it’s actually a smartphone.