Prior to his
inauguration, Barack Obama was, without a doubt, eagerly anticipating
taking his seat in the Oval Office. What he likely wasn’t looking
forward to was time traveling backward into a workplace riddled with
obsolete technology.
Any tech geek recognizes that modern
technology is far more than a means to an end: Whether we own iPods,
Zunes, MacBooks, iPhones or BlackBerry smartphones, our gadgets have
become intimately integrated into our lifestyles. So you have to feel
the pain of Obama and his team, who drove the most tech-savvy
presidential campaign in history, for having to cope with the White
House’s bureaucratic IT swamp.
"It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said of the White House’s outdated tech.
Here,
we run down a list of what’s known about tech in the White House, with our classic "Wired or Tired?" rating method. This time we’ll start with the Tired stuff first.
TIRED
Windows XP
The White House’s computers are running six-year-old versions of Microsoft software, reports
the Washington Post. Supposedly, the White House’s reasoning for
stalling on upgrades is to maintain security and preserve documents
held under the Presidential Records Act.
Can anyone say "virus infection"? While it’s true the White House dodged
a widespread internet virus in 2007, there’s no guarantee a more
vicious virus won’t eventually infiltrate the White House. There are at
least 3,000 new Windows viruses emerging each day, after all, according
to Symantec.
Why not transition to the Mac? The virus
"threatscape" is virtually non-existent on the Mac; security experts
agree the Mac operating system is architecturally more secure than
Windows out of the box. Run some security software on the Mac and
you’ve easily got a far more secure computer setup in the White House
than if they were running Windows.
As for the documents
preserved by the President Records Act — how difficult can it be to
create backups and transfer everything over? Documents and messages
copy over easily to a Mac system.
Besides, Obama and his team were Mac users before they even stepped into office. Give these people their Macs.
No Wi-Fi
The White House has no Wi-Fi, according to FoxNews. That’s no surprise, given how
easy it is to crack Wi-Fi-encryption schemes.
But
if the U.S. military gets all the cool tech first, the White House can,
too, right? This would be a good opportunity to test out Boston University’s Wi-Fi transmitting light bulbs.
The tech involves LED bulbs, which flicker at imperceptible speeds to
communicate with Wi-Fi enabled devices. This way, a hacker would have
to be inside the White House in order to hack into its network, and he
or she would be made visible under the light.
No Instant Messaging Allowed
White House staff are banned [.pdf, page 11] from communicating via instant messaging, according to Andrew Rasiej, co-founder of the blog TechPresident. That’s for the sake of preventing casual talk from leaking out of the White House and into the web.
That’s
understandable, but some chat clients, such as Adium, offer the option
to encrypt chats, turning your chat logs into unintelligible characters
and numbers if accessed without authorization. Plus, the Obama team has
already proven with the president’s Twitter account that it’s pretty good at handling its own PR, right?
No Screwing Around on Web Sites, Either
Remember
George W. Bush? When he was prez, the White House IT department banned
sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, according to Slate. There’s no word on whether the new regime will reverse those bans, but for now, it’s a fair bet that you won’t be able to friend anyone in the West Wing.
WIRED
iPods
Former President Bush is known to have had an iPod. But there were some restrictions on accessing new music. During
Bush’s tenure, only two people had access to the iTunes Store: The
president’s personal aide, who downloaded tunes onto George W.’s iPod,
and David Almacy, Bush’s director for Internet and e-communications,
who uploaded the president’s speeches to iTunes. (I wonder what was in
Bush’s Top 25 Most Played? Creed, perhaps?)
Flat Screen Monitors and TVs
Theresa Payton, White House chief information officer from 2006, told FoxNews that big, flat displays are widely used in the White House. Can’t see why not—so long as they’re not watching Paris Hilton’s My New BFF during work hours.
E-Mail
It’s
widely known that Bill Clinton sent only two e-mails during his
presidential term. That’s because under the Presidential Records Act,
all correspondence must be archived and eventually made public, so Clinton sensibly kept his more … personal … communications offline. (Of
course, Bush’s political advisers demonstrated there are ways to circumvent the policy.)
Regardless of the rules, it was simple enough for the press office,
with approval from the White House Counsel, to set up personal Gmail
accounts as alternative e-mail addresses, according to Washington Post.
BlackBerry
The president this week achieved a personal victory when he entered the White House cradling his BlackBerry, which many speculated he would have to give up. How
did he pull off keeping it? Protecting it with some sort of super
secure encryption, according to reports. Just what exactly that
encryption is, no one will say — for obvious reasons.
White House staffers are entitled to BlackBerry smartphones as well, according to FoxNews.
Photo: 24gotham/Flickr
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