Solving Obama's BlackBerry Dilemma

CurtMonash writes "Much is being made of the deliberations as to whether President Obama will be able to keep using his beloved "BarackBerry." As the NYTimes details, there are two major sets of objections: infosecurity and legal/records retention. Deven Coldeway of CrunchGear does a good job of showing that the technological infosecurity problems can be solved. And as I've noted elsewhere, the 'Omigod, he left his Blackberry behind at dinner' issue is absurd. Presidents are surrounded by attendants, Secret Service and otherwise. Somebody just has to be given the job of keeping track of the president's personal communication device. As for the legal question of whether the president can afford to put things in writing that will likely be exposed by courts and archivists later — the answer to that surely depends on the subject matter or recipient. Email to his Chicago friends — why not? Anything he'd write to them would be necessarily non-secret anyway. Email to the Secretary of Defense? That might be a different matter."

Comments

Fangirls of the World Unite!

[fm6]

This wasn't news when Bush was in office and he used a cell phone and a PDA too.

Actually, it was an issue for Bush, though it had nothing to do with phone calls or PDA functionality.

Obama is a notorious IM addict. He pretty much ran his campaign through his Blackberry. Now of course, you can use a Blackberry to make phone calls and track your appointments, but that's not why he's under pressure to give it up. The security wonks don't like the potential for text messages getting intercepted, and the lawyers don't like the legal exposure he'd get if the messages were subpoenaed or FOIAed.

I'm not sure if Bush ever had a Blackberry or a PDA, but he used to be a heavy email user. He went cold turkey when he assumed office. According to his "last email" that went out to all his correspondents, it was mainly about the legal exposure.

An NSA-approved smart phone is probably the solution to the security issue. (See one of the submissions in my sig.) I suspect Obama will just blow off the legal issue. He's supposed to be Mr. Open Government, after all.

Now I wait for my -1, didn't fangirl score.

And you'd deserve it! People who don't like fangirl stories (what happened to fanboys?) have no place on Slashdot!

But this is not a fanchild issue. Obama keeps talking about the dangers of living in the "Presidential Bubble". One way he wants to avoid this is to have a lot of contacts that aren't mediated by his underlings. A Blackberry or other pocket IM device is an obvious tool for this purpose.

I suspect he's being a little naive. He's going to be in charge of the biggest bureaucracy on the planet — does he really think that he can be on a first-person basis with the whole kaboodle? But hey, he's surprised us before!

Re:Fangirls of the World Unite!

[fm6]

OK, I thoroughly despise Bush Jr. (was his final press conference pathetic or what?) but on this one issue you're being a little unfair. The CYA attitude is as old as bureaucracy and as the legal profession. Which, come to think of it, are not really different entities.

A couple years ago I was called into a meeting at work. What was it about? Can't tell you, would violate my NDA. And if I did tell you, it would have to be from memory, because everybody in the meeting was to forbidden to take notes or to write email about what happened in the meeting.

I'll bend the rules a bit, and tell you that it was a really, really trivial legal issue. No bodies were being buried, no careers were at stake. Many companies would have just told their lawyers, "Your problem, do whatever is necessary." But that costs money, and we didn't have money to burn. So we picked the most cost effective strategy, and that involved created an absolutely minimal paper trail.

We were following advice that lawyers give their clients every day: minimize your exposure. That's the advice Bush's lawyers gave him 8 years ago, and that's the advice Obama's lawyers are giving him now. I like to think that Obama will ignore them in the name of open government. But he's a pragmatic guy, so he knows that making that kind of idealistic choice comes at a cost.

Obama's something of an idealist; if he weren't, I wouldn't have voted for him. (I probably wouldn't have voted at all.) But he also knows that if he makes every decision on purely idealistic grounds he's going to have lots of Right Decisions and very little to show for it. Woodrow Wilson can tell you all about that.

No doubt Bush thinks he's the same way: making the idealistic decision when he can, making the pragmatic decision when he has to. The difference is that what Bush considers to be his ideals are morally bankrupt, and his critical judgment fatally impaired.

Re:research in motion

[Xaoswolf]

The Federal Government uses a ton of Blackberrys. The president just seems to be a special case. I don't see why they can't just activate him on an Enterprise Server and have every single thing locked down on it. Hell, they can require a 20 digit password to unlock it so if he does lose it, they have time to do a remote wipe from the server. Of course, after 10 incorrect password tries, the device will automatically wipe itself anyways.

Re:research in motion

[Rich0]

I agree with most of what you wrote. However, it isn't entirely in keeping with the constitution.

The US is not a parliamentary democracy - it is a 3-branch government. The president is actually on equal footing with all of congress within the constitutional bounds of his office. Other than the ability to impeach the president, the congress does not have any particular special investigatory power over the president.

Most western democracies use a parliamentary system of government. The prime minister is the chief executive, but is merely an appointed representative of the legislature. The prime minister serves at the pleasure of the legislature and is fully answerable to it. The relationship is similar to a CEO and the board of directors - the CEO is just a regular company employee that the board has hired to run day-to-day operations.

In the US the president is directly elected, and while there are checks and balances in general the office of the president is completely independent of the legislature. There is a duty to uphold the laws of the US, but no real accountability for not doing so (other than impeachment).

The problem with Bush wasn't that he thumbed his nose at Congress so much as the fact that he was elected (twice!) in the first place. Like it or not more Americans supported him than opposed him (at least up until 2004). You can debate the 2000 election of course, but the fact is that even if he should have lost it would have only been by a slim margain. When a nation supports a president that uses his power in the way it was used, then there is little that can be done to stop it. Like it or not, he had the backing of the populace. Even with the abuses, there really wasn't enough popular support for an impeachment to make it happen. (Just look at how long it took to get rid of Gray Davis in a state known for political activism.)

Honestly, I think I'd prefer a parlimentary proporational democracy to what we have today. However, that isn't the nation we currently live in, and I don't see 3/4ths of the states voting for such a major overhaul of the constitution. So, we're stuck...