Understanding the scope of the security risk
We all know a BlackBerry can hold a lot of email correspondence. It can hold phone numbers, contact information, calendar information, and even documents. But how much, exactly, can a BlackBerry smartphone hold? Most of the current models have 64MB internal memory and support add-on flash cards. So, at minimum, they can hold 64MB.

So how much can 64MB hold?

The King James Bible is about 1,120 pages, or about 2.5MB, so a typical 64MB BlackBerry could hold about 25 King James Bible's worth of information. That's the equivalent in strategic U.S. government information of about 28,000 printed pages of data, or seven complete sets of all seven Harry Potter novels.

So, when Quintero Curiel grabbed those two BlackBerry handhelds, he snagged the U.S. government security equivalent of 25 King James Bibles and seven complete sets of the Harry Potter novels. I looked it up on Amazon. The King James Bible weighs 1.8 pounds each. The complete Harry Potter box set weighs 17.4 pounds. Adding it all up, if Quintero Curiel had stolen paper documents instead of BlackBerrys containing the digital equivalents, he'd have to haul 166.8 pounds of U.S. government information back to Mexico.

If you watched spy movies back in the 1960s, you're familiar with the image of the government courier handcuffed to an important briefcase. Today, many key government officials carry BlackBerry handheld smartphones instead. They're easier to carry, can hold a lot more information, and provide excellent, instant, two-way communication.

But what risk could some stuff in a BlackBerry present? Here's the scenario from the book:

A United States Army Special Forces team is set to attack the secret hideout of a top al-Qa'idah operative. The operation has been planned for weeks. No one outside the Special Forces team, Pentagon brass, and senior White House staff knows about the impending attack.

Secrecy is imperative. If even a hint of an attack made its way back to al-Qa'idah, our target would vanish into the wind and years of very dangerous human intelligence work would be for naught.

It's 4am in Washington and the attack is about to take place. The President, Chief of Staff, Deputy Chief of Staff, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and a variety of deputies are waiting in the super-secure, 5,000 square foot Situation Room deep within the basement of the West Wing. You can feel the tension in the air.

6,929 miles away, outside the al-Qa'idah safe house, the tension is even more palpable. Highly trained American warriors are about to do what they do best. With the President's approval relayed to them, the attack is launched.

And that's when everything starts to go very, very bad.

When the smoke finally clears, all but two of the American soldiers are dead, victims of a diabolical trap. The enemy knew we were coming.

But how? How could they know?

Here's how...

Unknown to all but the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, his assistant, and the IT guy who had to fix the problem, the Deputy Chief of Staff's BlackBerry smartphone had gone missing two days earlier. No one was really concerned about security since this particular White House staffer did mostly political work. That's why he never reported the missing BlackBerry to anyone else.

From the IT guy's perspective, it'd be a pain to hook the DCOS up with a new BlackBerry, but other than that, no great loss.

Except, of course, for the American lives. You see, before it went missing, an email message had been sent to the BlackBerry. The email message contained an attachment. That attachment was a converted Microsoft Word file containing a draft of the press release that would be issued after the attack, for the Deputy Chief of Staff's approval or editing.

Although the press release didn't detail everything about what, by the time it was released to reporters, would have been the over-and-done attack, anyone connected to al-Qa'idah, reading it before the attack began, would have been able to piece together some important details - enough to set a trap.

Two days earlier, much of the White House staff had been traveling with the President, staying at a hotel in Tucson, where the President was going to give a well-publicized speech about the environment. Having had only about three hours of sleep (usual for the job), and rushing to catch the plane (also usual for the job), the Deputy Chief of Staff accidentally left his BlackBerry in his hotel room.

When the BlackBerry went missing -- retrieved out of the hotel room by a maid with a nephew who had a brother-in-law in al-Qa'idah, no one knew that the press release would fall into enemy hands.

After all, it was just a BlackBerry.

OK, so the real incident wasn't al-Qa'idah, it was Mexico. And it wasn't a hotel room in Tuscon, it was a conference room in the Windsor Court Hotel in New Orleans. And, hopefully, no troops will die. But can you still see how this is freaky?