Barack Obama's Blackberry Will Be Confiscated on January 20, 2009
Being the leader of the free world is pretty cool, but there is one big drawback: you don't get to use a Blackberry anymore. Barack Obama is almost never without his: he has it attached to his belt and gets emails all day and late into the night. He also loves to text message friends. But all that will come to an end when he is sworn in as president on January 20.
There are two reasons the president of the United States doesn't get to use a personal email or text service. First, there's the security risk. And second, under the Presidential Records Act all of the president's correspondence is entered into the official record and will ultimately be made available for public review. That kind of puts a damper on an IM conversation between friends, that's for sure. Right before he took office President Bush had to send a sad goodbye email to all his friends explaining why he was signing off his AOL account.
Mr. Obama is the second president to grapple with the idea of this self-imposed isolation. Three days before his first inauguration, George W. Bush sent a message to 42 friends and relatives that explained his predicament.
"Since I do not want my private conversations looked at by those out to embarrass, the only course of action is not to correspond in cyberspace," Mr. Bush wrote from his old address, G94B@aol.com. "This saddens me. I have enjoyed conversing with each of you."
But in the interceding eight years, as BlackBerrys have become ubiquitous - and often less intrusive than a telephone, the volume of e-mail has multiplied and the role of technology has matured. Mr. Obama used e-mail to stay in constant touch with friends from the lonely confines of the road, often sending messages like "Sox!" when the Chicago White Sox won a game. He also relied on e-mail to keep abreast of the rapid whirl of events on a given campaign day.
Mr. Obama's memorandums and briefing books were seldom printed out and delivered to his house or hotel room, aides said. They were simply sent to his BlackBerry for his review. If a document was too long, he would read and respond from his laptop computer, often putting his editing changes in red type.
His messages to advisers and friends, they say, are generally crisp, properly spelled and free of symbols or emoticons. The time stamps provided a window into how much he was sleeping on a given night, with messages often being sent to staff members at 1 a.m. or as late as 3 a.m. if he was working on an important speech.
In the modern world, it seems kind of ridiculous that the president of the United States can't text message his daughter to say hi without it becoming a national record. But that's the law and there are good reasons for that law. All the president's correspondence is saved for posterity. We guess it's more of a "public office" than we ever realized.
The other issue is whether Obama will become the first emailing president. For official correspondence he can send email from a government address and it will all be recorded on the White House server. He has said he wants a laptop on his desk in the Oval Office, which will be yet another first in this new administration.
