New York Times Highlights BlackBerry Workspaces Software as Way to Prevent Colin Powell Hack

The e-mail hack of former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, which revealed a number of embarrassing opinions and national secrets, has Washington D.C. politicians scrambling for solutions, reported the New York Times on Thursday. They range from deleting personal Gmail accounts to moving back to flip phones.

The newspaper suggests, however, that politicians might do best by adopting solutions used by another industry requiring high secrecy: Hollywood.

“Studios have turned to a new class of companies with names like WatchDox that wrap screenplays with encryption, passwords and monitoring systems that can track who has access to confidential files,” writes the Times.

BlackBerry Workspaces (formerly known as WatchDox) software is used by 5 out of the 6 largest Hollywood studios to keep their most important intellectual property – the scripts – under wraps.

The software’s ability to control the sharing and printing of high-value documents such as screenplays as well as its ability to embed digital watermarks into documents is not only prized by Hollywood, but also private equity firms, healthcare companies, sportswear firms, and government agencies.

BlackBerry has also recently released an offshoot software of Workspaces called BlackBerry Workspaces Email Protector. It gives IT managers the ability to easily set policies to automatically encrypt and add digital rights management (DRM) controls to all files sent through their e-mail portal. Read BlackBerry Workspaces Product Manager Dan Auker’s blog on Inside BlackBerry to get an overview.