“Will Obama Have A Computer?” Seriously?

Wait a doggone minute … Bush had an iPod?!?!?! What did he do with his 8-track?

I think that resistance among the White House staff to giving Obama a computer, blackberry, etc. is largely due to record-keeping laws. When Obama verbally conveys something to one of his aids, there's no permanent record of that conversation. But Obama's emails, text messages, and perhaps even browsing logs are all be subject to record-keeping requirements. I believe that Presidential records generally end being made public some years after that President leaves office. More importantly, these records are ripe for being subpoenaed and raised in Congressional hearings. Even if Obama never does anything wrong, there's still a lot of risk inherent in him using computers and mobile devices for communications, so it's not too surprising that Presidents have been averse to using technology for on-the-job tasks.

Fair enough. That's part of what I had in mind when I said, “If Obama decides not to implement whatever legal or technical changes would be required for him to … [have] a computer on his desk…” If recording-keeping requirements come from executive orders, he could change those with the stroke of a pen. But of course if (as I think you rightly suggest), the issue is statutory recordkeeping requirements, he'd have to get Congress to change the laws. I hesitate to suggest anything specific without knowing more about what the laws actually require, but if the current law effectively prevents the president from using a computer at all, and forces him to rely only on oral communication, the law probably isn't striking the right balance.

If so, I hope he's willing to invest political capital in changing the law—something that might not go over well. The Republicans might try to use that against him and, indeed, I'd want to be very sure the pendulum doesn't swing too far in the direction of secrecy, either.

But again, is he serious? We'll see.

But if Obama were to seek to amend record-keeping requirements by exempting some of the President's electronic communications, wouldn't that have transparency activists up in arms? I presume that one of the justifications for record-keeping mandates is that they promote government accountability and transparency by making it easier for Congress and the Courts to scrutinize executive branch conduct when wrongdoing is suspected. Remember how the Bush Administration was criticized by many observers (including Tim Lee) for doing a terrible job keeping records of the emails of White House staffers? Obama would probably get more slack since openness has been one of his central priorities, but I still doubt that he'd want to open the can of worms that would accompany a campaign to ease Presidential record-keeping rules.

Yup. It's a real pickle.

But to demonstrate the absurdity of requiring that every word be kept, ponder this: Now that voice-to-text recognition works pretty darn well, why not have a voice recorder capture every word The Great Man says and transcribe it? Why should we record all written words, but let the spoken word disappear into the ether?

This isn't “embarrassing.” This just shows that they were taking reasonable security precautions. Retention issues aside, there are good reasons for all of these restrictions.

You can understand the “power of the Internet” and also understand that it's not a good idea for the President to use it personally.

And no, I'm not kidding.

Older executives have long had what amounts to a keyboard-phobia (keyboards were something for secretaries to use). It wouldn’t surprise me that Obama’s predecessors in office may have been afflicted by it. I suspect Al Gore sent a few more emails while VP than Clinton did — he understood the importance of the Internet from its early days.

I’ve seen photos of Obama with a laptop, and of course his election staff was highly connected.

Many of the other restrictions listed (e.g., no access to the iTunes store or Facebook) probably fall under Appropriate Use restrictions. These computers are government property, after all, and belong to the taxpayers. Using them to surf the web or go to the iTunes store is the sort of thing that cause cranks to complain about the waste of taxpayer money.

Their are security issues with the President having his own blackberry, and even a computer. Not that he shouldn't use the internet every once in a while to stay in touch.

Of course, what the president should be doing each day, to maximize his time, precludes most uses of a personal computer.

Though the “in touch” thing is worth pursuing–recall George Herbert Walker Bush's mis-step when he saw a scanner at a supermarket (in 1992) and said something like “This is amazing technology–someday many supermarkets in America will have this technology” not realizing it had already been standard for at least 5 years, when he'd said that.

It actually doesn't demonstrate any absurdity at all — certainly historians would love such material (and voice-to-text isn't necessary to achieve it). Past Presidents have tried to preserve every word spoken in the Oval Office, after all (perhaps to their regret).

I'm always amazed at the phone logs and diaries that end up coming to light during scandals — it makes me wonder if record-keeping requirements go beyond keeping communications to include requiring that people take additional steps to record oral communications beyond what they might do otherwise.

My point was that it seems that we now have the technology to record everything the president says. Of course, we've long been able to record most of what the president says in audio form, but that's not a particularly valuable record since it couldn't be easily searched. But today, we could record everything, convert it to text and index it. So the cost of finding a particular keyword would be very low.

Yet we don't do this–but we do require logging of what he types (and reads?) onscreen, which has the perverse effect of causing him not to use a computer at all.

You only speculate that it has this chilling effect. If so, it's probably a small price to pay for accountability.

For what the President does — indeed, for what most managers do — having a computer on their desk isn't very important. For the President's staff, it's more important, and even there the computing infrastructure is evidently fairly poor (though I think computer security has been the bottleneck there, not the need to keep records).

I suspect that security is the main concern. Internet communications are easily wiretapped by anyone who's interested, and it's not acceptable for the US president to communicate over such means.

Protecting private communications among family and friends from disclosure is a secondary concern that needs to be addressed somehow as well.

There is bad news about W's father:

What if basically all racial-minority people would subscribe to the interpretations that George Herbert Walker Bush committed monstrous, racist, hate crimes while he was the President of the United States?

It will eventually come out: it is only a matter of time.

Respectfully Submitted by Andrew Yu-Jen Wang, J.D. Candidate
B.S., Summa Cum Laude, 1996
Messiah College, Grantham, PA
Lower Merion High School, Ardmore, PA, 1993

(I can type 90 words per minute, and there are thousands of copies on the Internet indicating the content of this post. And there are at least hundreds of copies in very many countries around the world.)
_________________
“If only it were possible to ban invention that bottled up memories so they never got stale and faded.” Off the top of my head—it came from my Lower Merion High School yearbook.

There is bad news about W's father:

What if basically all racial-minority people would subscribe to the interpretations that George Herbert Walker Bush committed monstrous, racist, hate crimes while he was the President of the United States?

It will eventually come out: it is only a matter of time.

Respectfully Submitted by Andrew Yu-Jen Wang, J.D. Candidate
B.S., Summa Cum Laude, 1996
Messiah College, Grantham, PA
Lower Merion High School, Ardmore, PA, 1993

(I can type 90 words per minute, and there are thousands of copies on the Internet indicating the content of this post. And there are at least hundreds of copies in very many countries around the world.)
_________________
“If only it were possible to ban invention that bottled up memories so they never got stale and faded.” Off the top of my head—it came from my Lower Merion High School yearbook.

The user deleted this comment.