no surprise - even a liberal White House is technologically conservative...

[acroyear]

Obama Staff Arrives to White House Stuck in Dark Ages of Technology - washingtonpost.com:

If the Obama campaign represented a sleek, new iPhone kind of future, the first day of the Obama administration looked more like the rotary-dial past.

Two years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, Obama officials ran smack into the constraints of the federal bureaucracy yesterday, encountering a jumble of disconnected phone lines, old computer software, and security regulations forbidding outside e-mail accounts.

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.

"It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said of his new digs.

Comments

[tchwrtr.livejournal.com]

I'm also not surprised...and I hope they can manage to shake things up to drag the government into the late 20th century, at least.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

up to a point - remember the White House is the #1 cracker target in the world, getting more cyber-attacks than the Pentagon.

[klytus.livejournal.com]

They should be allowed to use things like IMs for *internal* use. But allowing access to external chat services and blogs just makes it *way* too easy, by accident or intent, to compromise Classified material.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

oh i agree, though the IM server should be an internal server (and nicely, jabber servers are free and easy to install for a decent IT team and worth with a lot of other free open source clients like pidgin).

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

except, perhaps, if it's a machine that's on a separate network entirely. My thought is of having a separate external email / blog / chat physical room. Whatever monitoring of twitter and such happens from there. If someone wants to send something out to blog/facebook/twitter, they get up and walk in there, and no, they can't bring in an external hard drive (but the flash memory is so very small now...)

And you can send text messages to twitter from phones.

but true, there's a reason many secure areas don't allow thumb drives and suchlike in and out.

[dacuteturtle.livejournal.com]

Working in the government, yeah, this is normal. I don't expect to see anyone until day 3, as the first two days are filled with required orientation.

Also note that most businesses and organization, schools excepted, have no institutional procedures to handle mass user changes. Do you think any big company can turn over the entire senior office without glitches? I doubt it. There are simply a finite number of people who are qualified/authorized to sort these things out. They can't call in outsiders for a few days. They just have to tread water until they sort the surge out.

[thatliardiego.livejournal.com]

Recall also that the Clinton administration operated off of the most up-to-date Lotus system, and when the Bushies took over, they purposely pulled that out and went to an older version of Microsoft Entourage (specifically to get around the records requirement in the Presidential Records Act). They were in the process of doing this right around 9/11...

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

I had not known that. Wow.

[greendalek.livejournal.com]

This is monumentally unsurprising --when I worked for DOJ in 1999-2000, most computers around the place were STILL ancient noisy boxes with arcane operating systems, with attached keyboards and green text on black background. Windows 3.11 machines were few and far between but were easily the most sought-after. The Feds were FAR more concerned about Y2K than the private sector, that's for damned sure.

I am put in mind of a scene from the movie adaptation of Tom Clancy's "Clear And Present Danger" when Harrison Ford steals a couple of files from a colleague's computer at the CIA, and it's a clunky OS with unfriendly-looking text and nail-bitingly slow processor time. I assure you that IS how government computers look. It's probably one of the few times Hollywood got that sort of detail CORRECT.

This really is the NORM for government. And frankly maybe it's better this way --a more technologically up-to-date Federal infrastructure would mean they could f&%$@ with our lives that much more easily.

Keep 'em in the rotary-dial age, that's my view. *grin*

[piraterogue.livejournal.com]

Actually the government agency I work for replaces my computer every three years, all our software is up to date (with the exception of the database/ computation software but that's because what we have Works).

[piraterogue.livejournal.com]

The regulations for Federal government computer usage is designed for information security. Too many back doors in external e-mails and such. Especially in the white house where sensitive information is handled all the time.

You should see the records keeping requirements we have to go through and I don't work with Any sensitive information.