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Obama Keeps His Blackberry (And Gets a Sectera)
InternetVoting writes "After all the controversy surrounding Obama's Blackberry, word has come that he will get to keep it. Few details are available and neither the National Security Agency nor the White House are talking. The current rumor is that the Blackberry will be used exclusively for personal use and a Sectera Edge will be used for official communications."
The main reason for the President himself to not to have something like a personal BlackBerry or other personal communications devices -- ones which is he is publicly known to have, anyway -- is simply the high-profile nature and symbolism of the target. It doesn't matter that other federal agencies and the military use them for one purpose or another.
This is the case even with all the compelling "finger on the pulse of [insert subject du jour here]" and Information Age tempo arguments. The fact is that the President will have an army of aides who can all have their fingers directly on the multitude of things that the President cares about and needs to know about.
And in the event that a case is made, internal to the administration, that the President -- now or in the future -- really needs to have his own personal communications device(s), that fact in itself -- not to mention the specific equipment and carriers -- doesn't need to be, and, frankly, shouldn't be, publicly disclosed.
Also, from the article:
This is for a variety of reasons, but security is not necessarily one of them. For example, an IM service offered by the DNI's Intelligence Community Enterprise Solutions group does provide instant messaging services using the open Jabber protocol up to the TOP SECRET/SCI level.
Since Obama is commander in chief of the military shouldn't he be able to use the same technology (Blackberry) they use? If our national defense is entrusted to a product why would that not be good enough for the boss?
The Washington Post had a truly idiotic story today entitled: "Staff Finds White House in the Technological Dark Ages" that seemed (to me) silly. Among the statements: " The team members, accustomed to working on Macintoshes, found computers outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft software." seemed the silliest in that it implies that six-year old software (WinXP?) is "old". The author needs to be told that just because newer is available doesn't mean there is a business sense to use it! From the article: "What does that mean in 21st-century terms? No Facebook to communicate with supporters. No outside e-mail log-ins. No instant messaging. Hard adjustments for a staff that helped sweep Obama to power through, among other things, relentless online social networking." The young'uns should learn there are reasons to make those things unavailable. Like, uhhh, security? Think back to when Clinton took office and his minions were saying the same kinds of things about the WH phone system left by Bush 1...that is used "dial phones" (for christ's sake!)...and everything had to go through the WH switchboard. There was a reason for that as the Clintonites found when they "modernized". Suddenly the WH began leaking info like a sieve when the "new technology" was adopted. Watch for the same thing to happen here! For the record: I didn't vote for Obama or McCain but it seems like this article was another kick at GWB.
To put my comments in their proper context, it's a good idea to disclose that I'm Canadian.
Having said that, I understand the national security concerns with Obama using a Blackberry. Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't all Blackberry traffic pass through RIM's servers in Waterloo, Ontario. Given the fact that such information can be intercepted on foreign soil should be worrisome to a U.S. security agency such as the NSA.
Other smartphones don't appear to have that problem. Perhaps the NSA can persuade Obama to get an iPhone instead? :D
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So goes our karma into off topic land. I think it should be in slashdot that any technical post is NEVER off topic!
I'll bite. No. Which shell can?
Powershell for Windows does. It can do this because in Powershell the operating principal of piping is not a text stream but rather collections of objects. In the case of my signature statement,
ls |where {$_.Length -gt 2000}|format-table Name, Length
Powershell returns a list of file objects, then, applies the filter function where to it, and the notation $_ is obviously ripped off from Perl, and -gt, well, is to avoid ambiguity I guess with the redirection operator (cheesy parser, anyone?), and then, that gets you a list of filtered file objects. That list then is pumped through the format-table operator, which, uses the name and length arguments to project the given list into a table of just name and length columns.
It's a pretty big advancement in shell technology, for sure, but its not so fancy or capital intensive that a bright person could not make a better FOSS version for Linux.
This is my sig.
If your wife was shooting you a text on your personal phone about waiting for you naked when you got home would want that sent out to a company wide distribution list. Give the man his personal belongings let him worry about using it properly and trust him a bit. I didn't even vote for the guy but this has been one of the stupidest arguments since the initial debates. We deal with this everyday at work, not on a grand scale like the presidency but the same principal, maybe worse we are always so scared of HIPAA around here.
Where do you draw the line?
Here's my line:
Is he still the President? Record everything.
No longer the President? Stop recording.
Its a volunteer position, and he is there to serve us, not the other way around.
Don't confuse President with CEO.
To hear people on Slashdot talk positively about marketing / sales people. In any other case, you'd have a dozen posts about "those stupid sales weenies told some stupid president that we have to make this thing 'secure' and do it in 3 days with no extra help".
What those whining programmers sometimes fail to see is sometimes the sales/marketing staff know what they are doing. If I was RIM management, I sure as hell wouldn't want to loose the president as a client, bitching programmers be damned.