Advisers used to sleek laptops are confronting clunky computers with six-year-old software, writes Denis Staunton
BARACK Obama may have won the battle to keep his BlackBerry, making him the first sitting US president to use e-mail, but his senior staff are struggling to adjust to the startlingly low-tech culture of the White House.
Mr Obama’s election campaign was the most technologically advanced the United States has ever seen, using not just e-mail but instant messaging, social networking sites and text messages to stay in touch with millions of supporters.
Like the president himself, senior advisers were constantly fingering their BlackBerries and within the Obama high command, instant messaging was the favoured form of communication.
Inside the White House, however, instant messaging is banned and staff have been warned that any messages they post on networking sites like Facebook and Twitter could be viewed as official White House communications.
The Presidential Records Act demands that White House documents be made public five years after a president leaves office, and lawyers for the administration believe that e-mails and instant messages could be covered under the legislation. The casual style of such communications can lead users to forget that they are writing rather than speaking, and White House lawyers fear that embarrassing exchanges could fall into the public domain.
The fear of such embarrassment is only one reason behind the efforts to persuade Mr Obama to give up his BlackBerry; the Secret Service also fears that the device could pose a security risk.
Under a compromise worked out this week, the president will use a specially encrypted device which will almost certainly have the GPS function disabled so that the BlackBerry will not send out a signal that could reveal Mr Obama’s whereabouts.
During the 1980s, Secret Service personnel told their charges not to wear pagers because they feared the devices could be used to track the wearer’s movements.
Only a handful of close friends and advisers will have Mr Obama’s BlackBerry e-mail address because the Presidential Records Act covers messages to as well as from the president.
“It’s a pretty small group of people,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters.
The ban on instant messaging is only one adjustment Mr Obama’s staff will have to get used to as they settle into a White House equipped with clunky personal computers with six-year-old software rather than the sleek Macintosh laptops most have used until now.
“It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari,” Obama spokesman Bill Burton said this week.
White House internet access is limited to a number of approved websites and staff are forbidden to use external e-mail accounts. The Obama team was, however, spared the inconvenience faced by staff arriving after former president George Bush’s inauguration eight years ago: they discovered that the letter W had been removed from many computer keyboards.
Mr Obama has promised a new era of transparency, ordering that the Freedom of Information Act should be interpreted with a bias towards disclosure rather than concealment. There was little evidence of the new openness during his first few days in office, however, with Mr Gibbs dodging questions and sticking closely to speaking points during his first press briefing.
Television networks were outraged by the president’s decision to release only a still photograph and an audio recording of his second swearing-in on Wednesday and the mystery surrounding the ceremony has helped to keep wild conspiracy theories alive on the internet.
When Mr Obama made a surprise appearance in the White House press room to greet reporters, he became irritated as one journalist asked him a political question.
“I came down here to visit. See, this is what happens,” he said.
“I can’t end up visiting with you guys and shaking hands if I’m going to get grilled every time I come down here.”
Happily for the president, most members of the White House press corps were content to cling to their traditional, deferential role, and his smile returned when a fawning cameraman called out: “I’d like to say it one more time: ‘Mr President’.”