Congratulations, here’s your IBM model 60

January 22, 2009

I’ve been watching a few posts about the "changes" Obama is going to make as he takes office, and smiling at the culture shock some of his staff are going to face in transitioning into the whitehouse.

First, Obama doesn’t want to give up his blackberry – so here’s a little conjecture of what a presidential one might be like.

http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/01/12/exactly-what-would-a-presidential-mobile-look-like/

Also it seems that as staffers take their new offices they are finding outdated equipment/software, few laptops, and restricted external access.

http://valleywag.gawker.com/5137084/technologys-white-house-of-horrors

To those of us in security (and who have had to work with the government), this is none too surprising.  The name of the game now is security and access control – having laptops (that people can walk away with), external accounts (where data can be dropped), and external access (where "bad things ™" can come in from) is simply a no-no when dealing with sensitive information.  Although Facebook may have been a serious tool during the campaign to reach out to people, now it’s an uncontrolled medium where data (both incoming and outgoing) can be missed – the presidential records act means that any communication from the president or vice-president has to be recorded (and personal accounts can circumvent these – remember the trouble Sarah Palin got into when she had one "work" and one "other" email address [which got hacked into]).  Updates to software/technology in those highly-restricted environments are often very slow because it takes time to determine the impact of such changes.

It looks like some of these issues are already being dragged into the 21st century

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/ExecutiveOrderPresidentialRecords/

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