November 22, 2008
President 2.0
Much has been written this week about President-elect Barack Obama having to give up his Blackberry once he's president. He doesn't have to, but Newsweek explains why he should.
Statutes say that any official correspondence from the president becomes property of the office, not the man in it. The rules were drafted at a time when the president's sole communication was on paper, and there wasn't that much of it.
But now, with things like e-mail and instant messaging, the most mundane messages from or to Obama would become government property, and much of it would eventually be accessible to the public under the Freedom of Information Act.
For this reason, Obama earlier this month started to wean himself from his BlackBerry. If he wanted to, he could choose to keep it. But if he did, he'd have to acknowledge that a historian decades from now could study just how much time the president spent bantering with pals or gushing about the White Sox.
"He'll be restricted by how much information about him will become public property," says Lawrence Lessig, founder of the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford. "This is an area where the statutes are far out of date for the current technology."
Security officials also worry about Obama using the device for official business, fearing a hacker could gain access to internal deliberations.
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