Mr. Rove needs to send the message to Ms. Perino and he can't send it to her EOP.GOV account. And he can't send it to her on GWB43.COM because, as she mentioned in her March 27, 2007 Press Briefing, she doesn't have one:

Q How many people have those accounts?

MS. PERINO: I think it's a handful, I don't think it's a lot. Obviously, the Office of Political Affairs, because they straddle these -- both worlds. I know I don't have one.

So where does that message go? It's going to go to a private email account Ms. Perino uses. It could be a Gmail account. It could be a Hotmail account. It could be an account from her own ISP. But for sure, it's not a secured account.

So the message leaves Mr. Rove's BlackBerry and travels via a secured wireless connection to RIM's servers. Then, this message with information about the President's confidential travel itinerary goes from a RIM server over the open Internet, completely unencrypted, to Dana Perino's personal email account.

Of course, she decides to reply. As with many email messages, the original email message content is included, so the President's confidential travel itinerary now goes, via completely open and unencrypted SMTP, from Ms. Perino's ISP to the Postfix server run by SMARTech in Chattanooga. From there, it may be encrypted and forwarded to RIM, and from there to Mr. Rove's BlackBerry.

But the damage has already been done. What was once the President's confidential travel intinerary has just traveled all over the open Internet for anyone to intercept. What if someone did? This is the ultimate nightmare for the Executive Protection Service, charged with protecting the President from harm.

There are so many variations to this scenario, including messages containing negotiation strategies, war management strategies, and any other form of official White House business that, instead of traveling over official, secured White House communications systems, is now completely open to the world.

Through an abundance of caution and a perfectly reasonable desire to abide by the law, the President's political staff could be, unknowingly, throwing caution to the wind -- and possibly putting us all at risk.

Back in World War II, the Allies made enormous advances against Hitler's forces in part because of an extreme effort to crack the encryption used by the Nazis. The codebreaking efforts done at England's Bletchley Park, especially the cracking of the Enigma code, is widely credited with shortening the war.

Despite all the efforts by our modern-day United States military and security establishments to keep our own plans secure and secret, all of that work could potentially be undone simply because our nation's most senior leaders are forced, by law, to use non-government systems for communicating anything with an even remotely political element.