Say Goodbye to BlackBerry? If Obama Has To, Yes He Can. Maybe. | Hacker News Reader

Say Goodbye to BlackBerry? If Obama Has To, Yes He Can. Maybe.

nytimes.com

41 pointsdcurtis37 comments

I love the fact that he's the President, but he may not be "allowed" to use email.

The biggest loss may be one they briefly cite: Getting a view from outside his bubble. Cutting a president off from his personal contacts, the ones best positioned to give unvarnished advice, seems like exactly what happens as a president becomes increasingly isolated from the "real" world.

He still has a phone.

Which do you use more and find more convenient, a phone or the internet?

Point taken, but if I was the President and people would stop mid-sex to take my calls and I had a staff to screen incoming calls, I'd probably warm up to the phone.

The law's a bit unfair that all email is public record but no phone calls are, until that changes I don't expect a President to be a big emailer.

I wonder where text messages fall, public record?

I wish this weren't the case. In a government where an embarrassing email is more important than sound policy, we all loose. Yet, from both sides, we cast out politicians for gaffes and misspeaks while leaving those who don't offend and merely mismanage and embezzle to reap the rewards.

Maybe I'm just being pessimistic.

Presidential email is a tough technical problem. The audit trail piece is easy enough, but there's also the problem of keeping the email account clean and secure. Somehow, it needs to provide relatively unfettered access to the president from his close friends and advisors, but not allow the general public or untrusted parties to send messages to it. It should guarantee that emails sent to that account are from verifiable sources. It absolutely must guarantee that emails sent from that account were sent by the president.

Security by obscurity is bound to fail, as an obscure address will leak out quickly. A private-key system (PGP/GPG) is a step in the right direction. All unsigned or unencrypted mail sent to or from that account would be rejected outright (but looked at by staff and saved, of course). In this restricted case, where the number of trusted recipients is manageable, even the public key distribution problem is simple: a Secret Service agent could hand-deliver a CD containing the president's public key to every trusted recipient, and pick up the recipient's public key in return.

Keeping recipients' private keys secure is more difficult. Whereas I'm sure that the NSA or even the White House IT staff can keep the president's private key reasonably safe, a security breach on a correspondent's laptop, with a private key on it, would potentially mean that someone can masquerade as a trusted recipient. That would, at best, lead to the feared PR nightmare and scandal.

"G94B@aol.com"? Yuck.

I thought that was hilarious. The address is oddly fitting.

For what it's worth, '94 was the year he was elected Governor of Texas.

Don't you know that magicians take numbers as names (crowley was 666), RAW and 23?

g94b is obviously a black magic name. Obviously it's the number he was given by Satan when he sucked Satans cock and drank blood to gain power in a skull and bones bilderberger convention. You have a superficial explanation for what is obviously a flag for other black magicians as intent on evil as he is. 94 is the number of children whose blood he had to drink to get power. That it's related to the year was synchronistic. The other black magicians called him 94 long before that.

It seems that this could be an easily solvable solution...there is a way to have BES archive mail via exchange + symantec vault or emc xtender or whatever and he could use white lists + pgp to make sure he is talking to who he thinks he is..but i don't know what the requirements are for this kind of system

As president he could have a totally isolated mail system with a staffer to transfer messages to it after verifying identity.

I forgot that BES sends email through canada

I will be amused if he has to give up his Blackberry. Bush used his power to indefinitely detain and torture people he didn't like -- in a military base in another country... then we complain about Obama wanting to be more productive and send e-mail?

Anyway, I assume Windows Mobile (or Android) will be just as good for him? The government can setup their monitoring server, and he can IMAP from that. In fact, I will set this up and maintain it for free, just because I'm such a nice guy. (I should tweet this -- he follows me on Twitter ;)

Don't Blackberries typically connect to an Exchange server? It's trivial to document/archive them, I think its more the invasion of privacy.

From TA, Obama faces three problems.

  1 All his private mail exchanges will be archived.
  2 Third parties listening on the wire (security breach or PR scandal.)
  3 Potential PR disclosure scandal by someone who had a conversation with him (Lewinsky, anyone?)

He can diminish the amount of personal talks to deal with problem 1 (e.g. something he'd say to his wife.) Having encrypted client server conversation doesn't completely fix 2, doing PGP-style encryption mostly would do (there is still the issue of PDA security, usually it's not good.) But that would make problem 3 even worse as the valid 3rd party can now show the message(s) cryptographically signed by Obama.

This last bit can be addressed with Off-the-Record cryptography as it offers plausible deniability. http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/ But the third parties should have to have a compatible client (that could be a nice filter for randoms :)

Anyway, the NSA can sure give him a PDA-based system better than Blackberry + Exchange, with all that and maybe more.

"Bush used his power to indefinitely detain and torture people he didn't like"

That is not true. Bush himself neither detained nor tortured anyone. Bush is not The Bush Administration, so that example is invalid as it pertains to Obama and him being forced to give up email.

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

A decision has not been made on whether he could become the first e-mailing president, but aides said that seemed doubtful [...] aides said he hopes to have a laptop computer on his desk in the Oval Office, making him the first American president to do so.

That is pathetic.

Must be those Big Email lobbying bucks at work.

I'm missing something - the article refers to the Blackberry in the title as well as all over the article...

The comment about it being pathetic that Obama would be the first "emailing president" or the first president with a laptop in his office is unrelated.

I don't see how that has to be PR. Obama actually uses a Blackberry, Blackberry addiction is so common that there's a term for it (Crackbery) that even my dad would know, and their brand name has almost become a generic substitute for any smartphone with a keybad. Blackberry is the knew Kleenex or Xerox.

I don't think PG would suggest that every time you see a brand name its due to submarine PR.

Just read that essay. Very interesting.

If it's so easy to spot the trend stories coming from a PR agency, surely someone on here could rig up a tweaked memetracker that would isolate them out for public ridicule. Right?

Why? Just because email is effective for normal workers doesn't mean it is necessarily the right tool for the president to use.

Hm, normal workers? I would imagine most CEO's use e-mail... Unless someone can transmit things directly into your brain as you sleep, I think it's pretty hard to argue with e-mail as a way of communication.

The reason politicians worry so much about using email is accountability. They use the phone so the lawyers can't prove anything.

There needs to be some sort of legal exception made for email. It shouldn't carry the same weight as regular correspondence.

Poor guy. I know what it's like to be addicted to push email. It's the primary thing tethering me to the traditional Microsoft stack.

iPhone has done push email for a while now ;) It's a great feature though.

It isn't really "push". It is just a very high rate pull. It really hurts battery life.

Yeah, it's pathetic and Apple has really failed at this. But at least they admit it, and say they are trying to improve.

Also isn't it only through Yahoo?

I know yahoo works with it, and apples own me.com thing, but gmail doesn't which sucks, I think you can setup other email servers to do it.

Apple do still have a way to go though... especially with the battery usage which does suck if you actually use push/3g/gps.

Hardest job in the world just keeps sounding worse and worse =)

Why is this "story" on a major national (in this case international) newspaper? Why is this even on hn? Does the New York Times not have anything more important to report?

I found it fairly interesting that he'd be the first president to have a laptop on his desk, and the first to use email.

That's not really correct. There's still no word on whether he'll be allowed to send and receive emails directly during his term(s) as president. The chances are that the risks will be considered too high to permit it.

If that happens, he'll be in the same position as George W. Bush, who was a fairly prolific emailer before becoming president but was not permitted to use the technology directly while in office.

As an aside, it may not always be a good thing. South Africa's former president Thabo Mbeki was quite well known for having a computer at his desk and a personal email account while in office. Unfortunately, he tended to use his to research crank AIDS activists online, write raving and offensive weekly newsletters on his party's official website and send off diplomatically-unsound emails to newspapers, unpopular researchers and other world leaders. Perhaps it is better to keep a president isolated to some extent.

You say that like seeing your leader's true inclinations is a bad thing.

I was speaking from the perspective of a president's staff.

As a voter, sure. Let them communicate with us directly so we can see who they truly are. Mbeki was recalled before his term was done, in part in response to his perceived arrogance and crazy ideas, both exposed in part through his personal communication to the electorate.

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