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

[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.