They're considered munitions by government employees, because of the encryption keys they're loaded with. Government employees have to 'check them in' and out like their service weapon, and aside from the encryption, don't really do anything special.

Oh, and they sell for something like $10,000.

Do you have a source for this? I'm genuinely curious, since I thought the "crypto == munitions" policies all died off years ago.

As far as maintaining proper records of who has which device, I say "bravo!" Just like stolen and lost laptops fueled much of the last 5-6 years' ID theft fears, I think mis-appropriated mobile devices will cause a whole lot of people a whole lot of stress as more and more critical information finds its way into pockets and purses.

I work for a government agency, and we have to deal with these from time to time.

As to Niels, I wish I was sarcastic, but I wasn't making any of it up. They are 'considered' munitions, and are treated as such, but really, it's just a matter of what happens if the phone got into the wrong hands. They do have a remote kill feature, but that incurs delay, and isn't foolproof.

As for the proprietary tapes, that may be true at some agencies, but I've only seen Travan tapes in use in practice.

let me help you with that, I think he was missing one of these: </sarcasm>

BTW, as I recall, most of Uncle Sam's krypto is 40-bit symmetric based on algorithms that predate Diffie-Hellman. They still have couriers carry the keys on specially made (aka, archaic) tape drives from point to point under two-man integrity and hand-cuff the briefcase to the courier. So Dr Strangelove. Skype is be better than that. A lot better. Here's a starting point if you want to find out about mil crypto. Check out the KY series, especially KY-58, 68, and 90, as I recall. A more complete listing here http://hereford.ampr.org/millist/m25.html