See what happens when you have a little influence?
President Barack Obama’s long, feared nightmare is now over: he will get to be the will be the first president to use a BlackBerry while in the White House — and by all accounts he is Berry Berry happy. ABC reports:
Since winning the election, Obama has argued that he should be allowed to bring his BlackBerry to the Oval Office, despite national security concerns and a tradition of e-mail-free presidents.
On Thursday, he finally got to say, “I won the fight.”
Although Obama will only be able to communicate with senior staff and a select group of personal friends, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs confirmed that officials had negotiated a secure way for the president for the president to hold on to his precious device.
You mean he can’t call me?
“He believes it’s a way of keeping in touch with folks, a way of doing it outside of getting stuck in a bubble,” Gibbs said at his first White House press briefing.
So this will be sort of like a “Friends and Family,” only on a BlackBerry.
This again underscores the generational shift that Obama ostensibly — and actually — symbolizes. President Bill Clinton and George Bush were tethered to the Baby Boomer generation — the generation (my generation, by the way) that brought you pro-anti-Vietnam war polarization carried into the 21st century and fed right into your ears each day on talk radio shows (THEM!!!! US!!!!). Obama is more of the generation that considers emails, BlackBerrys, Facebook a way of life. He has already changed the quaintly-titled President’s Radio Address (“Hey, is he on before or after Jack Benny?”) to the President’s Web Address, using YouTube (as long as they don’t mix Obama up with the singing cats, he’s OK).
But having a BlackBerry is, in all reality, not a simple matter for a President. The Chicago Tribune notes some of the dangers. Boiled down they include:
1. Fear of the email record, which kept Bush and Clinton away from things such as emails and BlackBerrys:
“With all due respect to Presidents Clinton and Bush, they didn’t really grow up with these mobile devices,” Roger Entner, a telecommunications analyst with the Nielsen Company, said of portable e-mail devices. “President Obama is like so many others of his generation—this is the device that helps determine how he perceives the rest of the rest of the world.”
2. Encryption is needed.
3. Hackers can put malicious software on a BlackBerry from afar. Can you image Obama’s reaction if he turned on his BlackBerry and it was hijacked to take him to a porn site? (Hey! There’s Bill Clinton running to get a BlackBerry now!)
4. One kind of software can turn a BlackBerry into a kind of mini-receiver so other people can listen to conversations. (Then people can find out what Obama REALLY thinks of Hillary…)
5. Another software could turn it into a homing device so someone could find out locations. (That would have sunk Dick Cheney and his bunkers..)
6. The Department of Homeland Security found some 16 problems with BlackBerrys.
7. Someone can target the devices he’s talking to.
But, in the end, he got his BlackBerry after officials said no, and he said “Yes I can!”
Cartoon by Frederick Deligne, Nice-Matin, France
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.