Trails of tears
Nov 17, 2008 Nuvo-Techno, Social networking, Stragety, Style
Vodkapundit makes the basic point about Obama’s Blackberry. … You want
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Likelihood of Exposure
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November 18th, 2008 at 8:41 am
[...] UPDATE:
November 18th, 2008 at 8:59 am
Gee, image Obama being held to the same level of scrutiny as, say, hmmm, Sarah Palin.
It’s so unfair!
November 18th, 2008 at 9:13 am
Black Barry? Are you allowed to say that?
November 18th, 2008 at 9:31 am
Hmmmm.
What amuses me about this is the charge made by Obama against McCain of not being hip enough to know how to use email.
November 18th, 2008 at 9:49 am
I remain somewhat skeptical. I don’t use a Blackberry and have no interest in being tethered to my email all the time. But I do use wireless internet access, email, and IM for my job and personal life, and I’d be much less productive without them. I do understand the security argument, I’ve worked in IT for years, but I’m not sure that trying to impose an electronic quarantine of the Executive Branch is effective even as a workaround.
Your point about the importance of personal contact is a good one. But even the President can’t be everywhere at once or do everything by himself. He has to get his information from somewhere. Do any of the President’s advisers, aides, cabinet members, etc. use email, Blackberries or other PDAs? Do they browse the web? I imagine they’re leaving trails all over the place, even if discernible only in retrospect. Why would those communications be any less vulnerable to partisan witch-hunts? And it seems like most of the security leaks come from “administration sources” who happily blab all sorts of stuff to reporters under cover of anonymity.
I have a hard time believing that with the resources of the NSA, the CIA and the military the US Government can’t come up with a reasonable plan for electronic communications security. We’ve got to figure this stuff out eventually, or by the time the 2020 elections roll around the President will be shackled to his desk and using an Etch-A-Sketch to govern the country.
November 18th, 2008 at 10:15 am
I think there needs to be a much broader expectation of protecting ‘work product’, even by the President. Keep the records, but have them inaccessible (to Congress or the public) for a 25-year period.
Security is its own issue, though. Who really knows how secure a BB transmission is? Do you want to stake the life of the country on whatever level of security that is? Personally, I’m not crazy about it.
Already, secure facilities in USG offices ban the presence of cell phones, PDAs, WiFi, and anything else that could possibly be hacked. State Dept. will not allow the use of Lenova computers because they are manufactured in China and nobody is reverse engineering all the chips to make sure there’s nothing untoward installed. Just take a look at the process through which the USG buys any equipment to be used in a secure office, from wall clocks to TVs. You might be surprised, you might think it paranoid. You might be right. But the consequences of being wrong aren’t happy ones.
November 18th, 2008 at 10:47 am
There’s really no reason for someone like the President to use a Blackberry. The president generally works out of his home, travels with his staff and is generally in constant communication with the people he needs to be in constant communication with. I don’t think the President is going to be sitting in an airport bar answering the email he missed and accepting meeting requests he recieved while he was at that super-long arms summit meeting.
I can tell you something, I do miss having my calendar at my fingertips when I don’t have my Blackberry with me (and Blackberry Pac-Man has a way of keeping you sane when you are stuck somewhere alone), but I certainly don’t miss working for a Blackberry addict. A boss with a Blackberry is a horrible thing. If you think the stories of Rumsfeld’s “snowflakes” were bad, imagine a President with a Blackberry. Micromanaged chaos.
November 18th, 2008 at 11:57 am
There
November 18th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
As much as we don’t want the official filters to keep important information from the President (like a mendacious bureaucracy), we also must realize that a great danger for a chief executive is information overload. He simply can not get every piece of information, thus he needs his staff to act as his filters for him. That’s why his choice of staff is always so important.
November 18th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
Two points:
Along the lines of Ron
November 18th, 2008 at 8:59 pm
“But even the President can
November 19th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
Of all the reason for the new President not to be able to have a Blackberry, I would think the security implications would be enough. RIM is a Canadian country. Its servers are in Canada. Do you think it wise to have any information going to the president that has been filtered through servers in a foreign country, any foreign country? And no it doesn’t need to be a drop the bomb here message. It could be a “Sorry honey I am going to be working late tonight” message that could be enough to let someone something is going on.
November 19th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
“Its servers are in Canada.”
Yep. And how many of those servers are Chinese too?
You go up to Montreal and they are nearly all Chinese who fled the Chi-Com take over of Hong Kong. Whereas here nearly all of our servers are either Mexican or, if you’re unlucky enough, Greek.
Still, I can say one really good thing for Canadian servers.
If you catch em on a slow day they can really pile on the duck.
Which works out pretty good with the blackberry goose.