Clearly, the Secret Service responded relatively quickly in the New Orleans case and recovered the devices. But because there was no apparent remote destruction capability, the data wasn't secured until the physical devices were. And the devices never would have fallen into the hands of a foreign power had a better procedure been in place.

A final word on plurals
One final note to those curious about the plural of BlackBerry. Is it "BlackBerrys" or "BlackBerries"? The BlackBerry home page normally refers to these things as "BlackBerry devices", but also has postings showing both variants. Given that the AP used "BlackBerrys" and the AP Stylebook is often used as the textbook source for style in university journalism classes, I decided to emulate their usage and go with "BlackBerrys".

Diane Poremsky is the president of CDOLive LLC and a Microsoft Outlook MVP. She's author of Teach Yourself Outlook 2003 in 24 Hours (Sam's, 2003) and coauthor of OneNote 2003 for Windows (Visual QuickStart Guide). For questions or suggestions for future columns, write her at outlook@cdolive.com.