Your Cell and Your Berry: Tools of the Enemy

According to Joel F. Brenner, national counterintelligence executive and mission manager for counterintelligence for the director of national intelligence, in the new electronic information world, your cellphone or BlackBerry can be tagged, tracked, monitored and exploited by a foreign intelligence service between the time you disembark from a plane in that country's capital and the time you reach the airport taxi stand. Cellphones, he said, are great devices for sharing information, "but the mike can be turned on when you think it is off." An iPod's ear buds can be converted to a recording device when not in your ears. Brenner described thumb drives as "the electronic equivalent of unprotected sex" and the biggest source of what he calls "ETDs," or electronically transmitted diseases. Those vulnerabilities are increasingly exploited in the intelligence world as demand increases for the sharing of collected information and the resulting analysis. Brenner noted the countervailing pressures within the intelligence community and society in general to share intelligence as well as restrict it. The "propeller heads" who invent new "cool" ways to transfer information in the intelligence world, Brenner said, are similar to those in civilian companies: They believe in openness, not secrecy, and therein lies the problem.