I hope he gets to keep the BB. We can't have a system that keeps technology away from our leaders. I did an interview with political consultants who told me their clients in congress had to fight to get access to Twitter. Our representatives shouldn't have to fight to stay in touch with the world.

I don't think, for a member of Congress, that Twitter == staying in touch with the world. Perhaps for their staff, as a networking tool.

According to the political consultants, was it the actual representatives fighting for Twitter access, or their staff?

I could really give a crap whether or not he keeps his friggin' Blackberry.

I'm a little more concerned with how he handles pressing issues like our failing economy, safety, and health care.

So if he handles them in a way you're dissatisfied with, you'd rather him be further insulated from the opinions, suggestions, and questions of the public?

I think it's incredible that given the entire resources of the American state they can't give the president secure access to his email.

... Through Canadian servers :).

With good crypto the server could be in Iran and it wouldn't matter.

I disagree. There's a big difference between having the ciphertext and having nothing. Big keys buy you time but that's just it -- it's time. Government secrets often outlive the design parameters of commercial crypto by decades.

To me it's surprising he gets a commercial cellular/smartphone at all. As much as we all just assume the systems are private and secure, it's really just not that way.

I agree, but it's ironic nonetheless.

I don't quite understand this. So someone in, say, Australia, sending email to someone else in Australia, has that mail routed via Canada?

If so, why?

RIM works by syncing all your email with their servers and then pushing it out to your blackberry with their own protocols. They do this because they were pushing email long before such capabilities came built into MS Exchange.

Wow. What I don't understand is, why do they still do this? Push IMAP is pretty popular, and there's a bunch of other proprietary solutions (as you mention) that also don't have this issue, which is problematic for private enterprise as well as governments.

Am I the only one who finds it odd that the President will have to _fight_ over whether or not he can do something in his personal life? It seems to me that if we believe him to be intelligent enough to run the country, we must assume he is intelligent enough to override a decision about his personal safety.

If it was just his personal life, then sure. He uses his blackberry for far more than just personal stuff though.

His family and friends will be targets of interest for certain people now. While it's (comparatively!) easy to provide surveillance and security for homes and other key places, people in motion are harder to protect.

We don't expect one individual to understand every problem in complete detail, but we _do_ expect them to appoint (and listen to) experts in each relevant field. Security of people in the private sector is probably very different than military security, and I bet government administration security also has a third set of objectives and concerns. This guy's life sits at the intersection of those three problem spaces.

Refusing to do as he's advised would be a jackass move, possibly endangering close friends up to crucial government secrets.

This strikes me as being a PR thing - Obama being a 'man of the people' while accepting that it's a good thing because the emails would be discoverable.

He can sneak a few emails on the side like cigarettes.