Jan 22nd, 2009 |
President Obama won a small victory this week, getting to keep his Blackberry, but it’s not your standard-issue Curve or Storm that will hang from the President’s hip, rather he will use a Sectera Edge, made by General Dynamics, and NSA approved at a cost of several thousand dollars. The Obama administration, ripe with 20-somethings, with the first Presidential blog, and masters of Facebook, has also been told that instant messaging is no longer allowed. How can arguably the most important distributed organization in the world function effectively in today’s world with out access to even the most basic collaboration tools? Marc Ambinder notes that Obama’s aides have been advised to use the telephone for important communications. Will they at least have access to a unified communications dashboard that displays availability?
Well, they don’t call it the “ship of state” for nothing. Changing course for this dreadnought will take time.
The incoming administration has a different perspective regarding the balance between transparency and secrecy than the previous. For eight years or more, the default position has been near total lockdown of even the most mundane information. The reasoning has been, that if there was even a remote chance that some detail could be used as intelligence or leverage against national security, then it’s been kept behind the curtain. If keeping something behind the curtain meant foregoing some advantages of cutting-edge tech, then so be it. That’s the ingrained momentum that the new administration has come up against.
To the Obama administration, the secrecy/transparency balance will certainly shift, but it will take time to analyze what information can be brought out, levels of security, need to know, and so forth. Although there is an understandable and justified desire to roll back much of the Bush era secretiveness, I imagine that stringent analysis will ultimately reveal that some of the paranoia with regards to communication technology was indeed warranted, and the policy will reflect that.