Secure communications

The Guardian continues to generate a large amount of copy over the phone tapping and so forth perpetrated by the US (and, I dare say, our good selves). In all of which I detect a certain amount of gamesmanship.

While it is rather bad manners to listen into the private communications of your friends, it strikes me as highly unlikely that the leader of a sophisticated place like Germany would use a bog standard mobile phone or a bog standard email account for anything that was remotely important. She will have a small army of securocrats guarding her lines of communications, which will include, I am sure, impenetrable (if a touch clumsy) mobile phones and emails. Maybe she has to use a special phone rather than the one that her hubby bought at Carphone Warehouse. Maybe she is only supposed to interact with people who also have special phones. But it can be done.