Upon leaving their meeting, the American officials noticed their BlackBerry's missing and notified the Secret Service. We don't have any indication who the officials were or their strategic level in our government. However, we do know they were in a diplomatic meeting attended by the U.S. President, so it's fair to guess that they were of a quite senior level.

The Secret Service agents reviewed video taken by a surveillance camera and found images of Quintero Curiel lifting the BlackBerrys. However, by this time, Quintero Curiel was long gone. The agents eventually caught up with him at Louis Armstrong International Airport. According to Fox News:

He initially denied taking the devices, but after agents showed him the DVD, Quintero Curiel said it was purely accidental, gave them back, claimed diplomatic immunity and left New Orleans with the Mexican delegation.

We also don't know exactly how long Quintero Curiel had the BlackBerry devices in his possession, but because we know he had to have traveled from the hotel to the airport, we can guess at the minimum time he had unobserved access to the devices.

According to the very helpful Althea at the Windsor Court Hotel, it takes 20-25 minutes to get from the hotel to the Louis Armstrong International Airport. If this snatch and grab was a coordinated intelligence operation on the part of the Mexican government (and we have no way of knowing whether it was or wasn't), 20-25 minutes would have been more than enough time to transfer all the data from the BlackBerry devices to another computer and even transmit digital clones of the devices' content to computers in Mexico.

It is entirely possible that by the time U.S. Secret Service agents recovered the devices, their valuable contents had already been purloined. Even if data on the BlackBerrys was encrypted, a complete digital duplicate of the devices' contents could have been sent to Mexico and it's a mere matter of computer power to sift through the data or attempt to crack the passwords.

Racial stereotyping
As you may have noticed, I've described this event both as a possible national security breach and a possible act of international espionage by a foreign nation against the interests of the United States. That's because a theft took place and stealing the digital equivalent of 166.8 pounds of American documents was, without a doubt, a security breach.

However, because of the unfortunate perceptions many Americans have of Mexicans, this act is being treated more as a joke than as a serious security breach by both press and the blogger community. For example, Bruce Tyson states:

Mexicans are supposed to pick blackberries, not steal Blackberries!

Rick Moore of HolyCoast.com has a very Christian interpretation of the event:

I think they probably let him off thanks to Bush's guest worker program. The growers tell us we have to have illegal Mexican labor to pick our blackberries.

And, William H. Ardmore, under a Web page banner with images of the American flag, covers the story this way:

I'm sure this was just another case of a poor hard working Mexican government employee/thief/spy, coming to the U.S. risking all to better himself.

So now we see that the Mexican Government is showing by example how the average illegal beaner should behave when coming to the U.S., comment crimes, all they will do is return you to Mexico. Bet his co-workers hi-fived him all the way home for have big brass ones.

Even Fox News, which has never been shy about its opinions on the immigration issue, wrote a lead that seemed to imply misbehavior, rather than a more severe security issue:

Whether he was up to no good or simply desperate to play BrickBreaker...

Sadly, with the exception of both the syndicated AP report quoting me and the Times-Picayune, also quoting me, there've been no press mentions of this event as anything other than a misguided theft. Perhaps that's because members of our press don't perceive the security risk in lost BlackBerrys or perhaps they don't perceive Mexico as a country that might be a security threat.

Certainly, this could have been a tragic mistake, as Quintero Curiel claims. But since allies have been known to spy against the United States, it's also possible the New Orleans incident was something more.