When former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was pushing to get a waiver allowing her to use a BlackBerry like President Barack Obama back in 2009, the National Security Agency had a very short list of devices approved for classified communications. It was two devices built for the Secure Mobile Environment Portable Electronic Device (SME PED) program. In fact, those devices were the only thing anyone in government without an explicit security waiver (like the one the president got, along with his souped-up BlackBerry 8830) could use until as recently as last year to get mobile access to top secret encrypted calls and secure e-mail.

Despite $18 million in development contracts for each of the vendors selected to build the competing SME PED phones (or perhaps because of it), the resulting devices were far from user-friendly. The phones—General Dynamics' Sectéra Edge and L3 Communications' Guardian—were not technically "smart phones," but instead were handheld personal digital assistants with phone capability, derived from late 1990s and early 2000s technology that had been hardened for security purposes—specifically, Windows CE technology.

At the time Clinton was asking for a phone, only the Sectéra Edge was available (the Guardian was running behind in development). But you couldn't just buy the Edge and be ready to go—it required multiple server-side and phone-side e-mail additions, desktop synchronization software, and other supporting products. Since it had both a secure and nonsecure side, it required separate accessories for each of its modes. The "Executive Kit" version of the Edge, priced for government purchase at $4,750, included:

Type 1 Sectéra® Edge™(GSM or CDMA) device plus: Executive Carry Case, Leather Holster Travel Charger, Red/Black USB Cables, Vehicle Charger, Earbud, Stylus 10-pack, microSD Card with User Manual, Spare Battery, Privacy Shield 4-pack, Antivirus Software, Apriva® Email Client and Perpetual Rights fee and Office Suite for Windows® CE

But to support the Edge, organizations still needed to buy the Apriva e-mail server (a separate secure mail server just for mobile users) and mobile management server, annual or perpetual seat licenses for each mail client, annual server support contract fees for the e-mail and management servers, an annual Symantec Antivirus maintenance contract, and different phone modules for US and international use. Plus, the government would have had to pay for training on the servers. Not counting the man hours required from State Department IT, configuring a Sectéra Edge for Secretary Clinton would have cost just over $30,000—not a lot to pay, in hindsight, for secure communications for the person fourth in line for succession to the presidency.

SME PED has been replaced at the Defense Information Systems Agency with the Defense Mobile Classified Capability-Secret (DMCC-S) program, now in its second iteration. And Secretary of State John Kerry was one of the first trial users of the DMCC-S phone—a hardened Samsung Galaxy S4.