Norwegian Prime Minister Trapped In The Walled Garden; Uses iPad

The reports are rife that the Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg is running the country through his iPad.
 
CNN goes to the extreme and reports, "When Norway's prime minister found himself stuck in New York as a volcanic cloud grounded flights to Europe, he fired up his new Apple iPad and did the job remotely.

CNN found this story worth mentioning not because the Norwegian prime minister was using a dumbed-down computer to communicate with his office, but that he was using the iPad. There are leaders around the globe who use laptops and phones while traveling to stay in touch with their teams but apparently the iPad has more news value than anything else.

Cnet reported, "It's very normal for a prime minister to travel abroad, so this is not different from the other travels, it just lasts some days more than expected," Stoltenberg told CNN. "We have the Internet, the mobile phone. I also use an iPad, which is excellent."

This is a bad example of governments using closed source or proprietary technologies over which they do not have any control. 
 
Apple, despite creating some good-looking and innovative products like the iPhone, creates vendor-locked, closed source technologies. Apple has full control very every app running on the iPad. In a situation like this, how secure would it be for the leader of a country to use such a device to run his office, which may have a lot of back-doors?
 
http://www.flickr.com/photos/statsministerenskontor/)" class="caption" style="padding: 5px; margin-right: 5px;" src="/sites/default/files/userfiles/image/Generic/Norway.jpg" height="200" hspace="5" vspace="5" width="300" align="left" border="2">Personal preferences are acceptable for an individual, whether he or she is a prime minister or a president. But governments should use Free Software or Open Source technologies which ensure that the leader is in control and not some CEO of that company which decides what runs or not on that device.

Since the iPad and other Apple products are tightly integrated within Apple's control mechanism, it could be a major security risk for national leaders to use such devices for official work.

Even the champion of vendor-locking, and closed source technology, Microsoft, expressed their concern over Obama using the Blackberry. “You would be sending your data outside the country,” says Randy Siegel, a Microsoft enterprise mobile strategist who works on federal government projects. “We wouldn’t want the casual musings or official communications of the most important person in the world being intercepted by others.”

However, Microsoft concerns supposedly had more to do with the 'spotlight' Blackberry would get by being carried by the president than security, as Blackberry is a Microsoft competitor.

However, Randy made it a point to say that it is not OK for leaders to use such devices.

Let's hope that governments would make better use of taxpayers money instead of getting locked inside some walled gardens. Let's hope they would choose Free and Open Source technologies, which would at least ensure their sovereignty.

The Norwegian prime minister should be OK with running his country from within the walled garden as long as he doesn't enter Israel over a layover. His iPad, and thus his control over the country, would be confiscated by Israeli customs officers, as Israel has banned the iPad owing to wi-fi compatibility issues.