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

[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.