Mon, November 17, 2008

Joe was nice enough to point out an interesting NYT article about Obama's (ugh) BlackBerry, and the concern that he may have to surrender it because the Presidential Records Act requires executive communication to be archived and available for review. Interesting stuff.

First of all, I love it that now we care about the Presidential Records Act. When Cheney was hosting e-mail off-site at GOP servers to evade discovery in the Valerie Plame trial – servers that conveniently "lost" thousands of messages – it was apparently no big deal. Also, who among us hasn't at one time or another set up an auto-forward for all our mail? Obama could read and respond on his BlackBerry, with copies of everything going to a backup server to satisfy the PRA.

Other concerns are even more laughable:

Diana Owen, who leads the American Studies program at Georgetown University, said presidents were not advised to use e-mail because of security risks and fear that messages could be intercepted.

"They could come up with some bulletproof way of protecting his e-mail and digital correspondence, but anything can be hacked," said Ms. Owen, who has studied how presidents communicate in the Internet era. "The nature of the president’s job is that others can use e-mail for him."

The implication being: hackers are brilliant, but none would think to break into the account of the guy who's writing and receiving e-mail for Obama. Genius.

Not everything that's wrong with big, dumb, snarled, bureaucratic government can be solved by more efficient communication, but a lot of things can. At worst, it sure wouldn't hurt. This will happen eventually – it might as well be now. (And are you telling me the NSA and the CIA haven't figured out secure enough e-mail to keep hackers out? This isn't like that kid guessing Palin's Yahoo! password.)

(I mean, I know you, personally, aren't telling me that – but still.)