I occasionally fantasize about going off on vacation somewhere without email, phone, or what have you. This is inevitably vetoed by my fellow travelers, who point out that, mostly being employed on the web, they can't really just jet off without electronic contact.
But even I quail at the thought of eight years without email, which is apparently what Obama is facing. This drives home, as nothing else could (at least for me), just how lonely and isolated the president must be most of the time.
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
While he may lack email access, he has a colossal staff that will keep him informed (probably better than you or I, if he wants to be) relay messages, and take dictation.
I really doubt he'll be living in a bubble (again, unless he *wants* to).
Hey, if he doesn't want to give up e-mail, I'm sure 47% of the electorate has a pretty good idea of who they would prefer would be without e-mail.....and let's not get ahead of ourselves with that 8 year talk. Come 2012, The One will have 4 years of 100% Democrat-driven record to run on.......and he may provide a bigger target than he cares to think about right now.....
GWB takes a lot of hits for living in a "bubble." But the president is physically and socially isolated from the rest of the world through no choice of his own. It's a shame really. Last night on 60 Minutes BO was talking about how he can't take a walk around his neighborhood alone anymore. He'll be in a bubble for the rest of his life. Such a high cost for being so successful.
I do think these record-keeping laws will eventually be amended/interpreted though to allow for presidential e-mail. SarbOx created a whole industry of e-mail archiving for the private sector, why couldn't it be applied to the executive branch?
Matt:
It's not that they can't save eMail. It's what he might write in them. He might say what he actually thinks, to the wrong person.
Bergamot:
Mr. Obama has condemned himself to (at least) four years pushing on ropes in the fog.
People will tell him what they think he wants to hear.
People who don't want to do what he tells them will ignore him, unless he or one of a limited number of trusted subordinates is there to supervise.
The most astonishing people will ask him for favors, and get all bent out of shape if he refuses.
People in his own party, now that his party controls Congress and the Presidency, will want payback. They will want to cash in. If he tells them "no", they will threaten to desert him, leaving him with no support at all. Do you remember Jimmy Carter?
I do not envy Mr. Obama one iota.
Those of us who are religeous should pray for him. Those who are not should think positive thoughts. He'll need them.
So will we all.
To quote Dr. Evil,
"Boo-frickety-hoo!"
I think this will have to change at some point. If the president can call someone and not have it recorded, he should be able to e-mail or txt them and not have it recorded.
The reason Obama has to stop using email is rather artificial. I imagine some solution will be found within eight years, so whoever gets elected in 2012 will probably be able to use a mobile email tool.
-dk
Ah papertrails.
Wasn't there a big thing when Bush "lost" a ton of emails? We really want to create a privileged paper trail?
I know people are ohhing and ahhing at Obama and are picturing him using email to organize soup kitchens or some shit, but I doubt they would be so solicitous of Bush's privacy to organize Gitmo via blackberry, and rightfully so.
I almost wanted to cry.
Megan must have a very tough private life since she thinks losing email, for her, equals being isolated and alone.
I took a laptop on one vacation in the last 10 years. Never turned it on. Life goes on just fine without email and the internet. I hate to tell you Megan, and and all the other bloggers of every stripe out there: your musings are largely simple entertainment and are a commodity on the internet for one reason: everyone has an opinion.
So take a vacation, leave the tech behind. If you resume writing when you get back, the readers will return. If you decide you've blogged enough - that's fine too.
As for the office of president in general and difficulties of life when holding same: Getting a peek at the President's Book has to cost something right? :)
I think the reporting on this has been silly.
Presidents have avoided email, and they still could. They could also work up a totally secure non-internet to the NSA dungeon and then a relay with automatic filtering and human review before forwarding to the outside.
If troops can send emails, Presidents can too.
The fact that it's reviewed would encourage him to stick to the "Whaaaatsuuup!" and and descourage the "Can't make golf, planning to bomb Iran."
Come 2012, The One will have 4 years of 100% Democrat-driven record to run on.......and he may provide a bigger target than he cares to think about right now.....
Just for future reference, you probably shouldn't use the word "President" and "target" in the same sentence, when the latter is referring to the former. It sort of sends the wrong impression.
I hate to tell you Megan, and and all the other bloggers of every stripe out there: your musings are largely simple entertainment and are a commodity on the internet for one reason: everyone has an opinion.
For what's it worth, not all of us feel that way. I read this blog, and many others, for information and not for "simple entertainment", so perhaps we shouldn't underrate the usefulness of bloggers. And some people's opinions are more valuable than others, as evidenced by the fact that whereas McArdle is paid to offer her opinions here, you and I are not.
Even us lowly personal non-paid doing it strictly for fun bloggers have a small impact... you know the butterfly wing thing?
I think I once convinced someone of the desirability of regularly clipping toenails. Or something. Maybe.
This is why as I'm so grateful to be an Orthodox Jew. Shabbat truly is this type of vacation - there's no computer use, email, television, or telephone from sundown Friday to Saturday night.
but I doubt they would be so solicitous of Bush's privacy to organize Gitmo via blackberry, and rightfully so.
Why not and how is it rightfully so? I see no difference between "organizing Gitmo" (whatever that is supposed to mean) via a private phone call vs. a private blackberry message.
I know, we're still feeling the influence of Watergate, but now that presidents have learned to legally get around record keeping laws, shouldn't we abolish those laws?
Private phone conversations are also not privileged. However, unless someone taped the conversation there would be no record of it and it would depend on one of the parties willingness to talk.
And by organizing Gitmo, I mean if there was a stack of emails that could prove the numerous allegations of torture, international law violations, etc... that Bush is accused of, I doubt everyone would be so solicitous of the poor lil' presidents email privilege.
The president doesn't use email because he doesn't want a paper trail so Kevin Mitnick or Kenneth Star can't get access to the inner circle by means fair or foul. Simple as that. Phone conversations require active recording to create a permanent record; emails just lie around on hard drives waiting to get read. Such is the nature of each; neither is privileged but one is harder to get a hold of as a practical matter and has issues with hearsay as a legal matter. And its the nature of being president (or any other powerful position) that you don't want stacks of potentially embarrassing documents sitting on people's blackberries, hard drives, email accounts, servers, or zipping around the internet. Even if you encrypted them, you'd have to worry about the recipient leaking them to the press, foreign agents, or using them to write a book. It's bad politics to use email, even if its only for complete fluff.
I don't support an email privilege. It's a stupid idea to carve out one particular form of document that is safe from the legal process. If it's got .txt at the end its fair game, but .eml--- that's sacrosanct!
"Wasn't there a big thing when Bush "lost" a ton of emails?"
Actually, wasn't it the Clinton administration that "lost" a bunch of Al Gore's e-mails that were supposed to be turned over in response to a subpoena (I think it was in the investigation of the fund-raising at the Buddhist temple)? The administration announced that it was working just as hard as was humanly possible, but couldn't possibly get the e-mails ready to release until a couple of weeks after the 2000 election (this was with about half a year's notice).
And then there was the whole recount/Florida thing to distract people after election day, and I never was able to find anything on what happened to the e-mails. Were they ever recovered and released?
I would be overjoyed to give up email for 8 years.
As long as I also got an on-call 747 to take me to visit whomever I wanted.
I think that a president becomes lonely and isolated more by the weighty decisions he must make than by any lack of access to technology.
But that's just me.
It can be tough. Grant said the happiest part of his day was getting email jokes from his grandma, before they made him give up the account over that whole Teapot Dome thing.
Consider the numbers of inane emails we get each day, hell, each hour of each day. The pointless text messages, the worthless twitters, the banal, self-concerned, omnipresent myspace, youtube, and facebook posts. Most of us use these services, but when you step back and look at each, isn't so much of it just so much self-indulgent waste? Of course, for a President, is informational needs are far greater. But, really, do I want my President getting EMAIL!? Not really. Something about the white house chief getting twelve emails a day that he can qualify for a 2.5% APR home loan if he "responds to this offer right away" is unsettling.
Hmmm. Being in a presidential cocoon might not be entirely all bad. The POTUS is probably one of the very few who have FULL spectrum access whenever they want it, but NEVER have to read any spam.
Why can't Obama have email?
or to ask the question differently: Why are our laws so stupid.
Obama can write things down, Obama can talk in person, Obama can email or text, Obama can talk over the telephone via a land line or a cell phone, Obama can send a message through another person, etc.
Obviously, it isn't too much trouble for the government to wiretap every single phone call made inside this country. It isn't too much trouble to keep track of every email.
Oh wait, the Bush administration IS able to keep track of every phone call made in this country, if not the world but it is NOT able to keep track of emails written from the White House.
I believe, and please correct me if I am wrong, the reason why the law protects writing and speech is that those laws were written before we had the ability to record everything. Computer communication came after the laws were written and weren't included.
However, there is virtually no difference between picking up a phone and having my voice recorded in zero's and one's and then converted back into a sound that a human can hear and calling over the internet or writing an email.
Why does this country not allow THE President to do his job the way every president of every company does his job?
I seem to remember an interview early in Bush's presidency where he discussed the fact that he would no longer be able to use email to correspond with his daughters who were then at college. It wasn't that he "couldn't" but if he did then each of those emails would potentially be available to the public and that was something that he didn't want to happen. I remember that was something that was very disappointing to him as he emailed them and they emailed him regularly.
The administration announced that it was working just as hard as was humanly possible, but couldn't possibly get the e-mails ready to release until a couple of weeks after the 2000 election (this was with about half a year's notice).
Must have been the same IT folks who set up Obabma's fundraising site....
Well, I remember what life was like before email (for me, up to about 10 years ago). Wasn't so bad. In fact, my hunch is that people are more lonely today now that they spend more time sitting on their rears staring at a computer screen.
Hmmm.
This of course makes the accusations by Obama that McCain was "out of it" supposedly because he couldn't use email, rather delicious.
Frankly I can think of many things I'd rather endure than an investigation by Waxman on the "real meaning" behind a Presidential email involving the words "Hello Kitty". Accusations of feline beastiality or clandestine hookups with streetwalkers would no doubt ensue.
Funny how Chris Dodd is never investigated though eh?
HY-freekin-larious.
Now we're going to be treated with many sob stories as to how hard it is for an empty suit to be President. You think anyone will call him HITLER perhaps? Accuse him of sending our boys to die for corporations? Ayyholes.
Time for the BIG BOY underpants Barry!
I think that a president becomes lonely and isolated more by the weighty decisions he must make than by any lack of access to technology.
Note that Gerald Ford never seemed lonely and isolated, at least until he lost to Jimmy Carter. But Carter had been a submarine captain, which AFAIK is something you have to ask to do, so apparently he kinda liked being lonely and isolated, in a literal bubble even.
is this the sacrifice he spoke of?
NOBODY cares, really.
I do think these record-keeping laws will eventually be amended/interpreted though to allow for presidential e-mail. SarbOx created a whole industry of e-mail archiving for the private sector, why couldn't it be applied to the executive branch?
The point is that it is being archived. All White House emails are routinely archived and text messages are supposed to be saved also. There are no special security issues with him using email (or a Blackberry - you can send proprietary, export controlled, or classified data to a properly configured Blackberry). In fact, there was a major IT contract let by the National Archives to preserve electronic data such as email and word processing documents in a form such that it can be read in the future. They had to get old PCs with MS-DOS, floppy drives, and Word 1.0 on them to read some of the data they have and convert it.
I recall that President GHWB Bush occasionally sent emails to people that emailed the White House with issues. He would do a draft with pen and paper and type it in.
What is odd is that there is no way for him to have a private email address for family to use.
There are no special security issues with him using email (or a Blackberry - you can send proprietary, export controlled, or classified data to a properly configured Blackberry).
That's actually not true. I just wrote about this on PJM a couple days ago. You can send commercially-sensitive data, but BlackBerries, for a number of reasons (like the fact that the servers are outside the US, and the devices themselves are vulnerable to malicious software loads) are only good for "sensitive but not confidential". What's more, the President's emails, even if the contents aren't decrypted, would be a fertile place to apply traffic analysis.
Jimmy Carter was NOT a "submarine Captain." He qualified for diesel-sub command but never commanded one. He resigned his commission at the rank of Lieutenant, in 1954, without ever having finished Nuc school.
As a retired executive secretary who worked for several bosses who couldn't turn on a computer but were always instantly reachable, I can assure you that the president won't be unreachable by email unless he wants that. "His" emails will undoubtedly go to a third party (like an executive secretary) who will read them to him, take his dictated response, and send it along. I think this is more for plausible deniability than to keep him from communicating electronically.
Bubble? Or gilded cage?
But look at it another way: I don't what a President - any president - wasting his time on eMail. eMail is one of the biggest time-wasters for anybody above middle-management level.
I don't want him "surfing the net" either.
If indeed he went through law school, he's used to putting thoughts on yellow legal pads. If he's a fast typist, he could write on a PC - but even that is a time-sink: waiting to boot up, finding files, &c.
There are always the people he'd go to for advice - as he told us during the Rick Warren debates: his wife, his grandmother (now deceased). Maybe he'll think of going to his Cabinet after a few weeks.
Someone already said it, but ... eight years?
Megan, I'm thinking it won't take longer than three months after President Obama is inaugurated for some serious buyers' remorse to set in. For you, and many other Obama voters.
"I occasionally fantasize about going off on vacation somewhere without email, phone, or what have you."
Your jobs may depend on continuous interaction, but for most of us:
Vacation (New Shorter Oxford): "A state or period of inactivity. A time of freedom or respite (from something)."
On a three-week vacation I will (if it's easy) scan email once in the middle just in case there is an emergency in my inbox.
But "going off ... somewhere" is part of the vacation experience; staying umbilicaled to home via email, phone, whatever, is anti-vacation.
I've read that people today don't do as much backpacking, canoe trips, and other outdoor adventures as they did 20 years ago. Now we know why - poor cellular coverage in wilderness areas.
Robert,
I don't get as much email as a lot of people, but it works out to well over 100 messages a day (sometimes over 300). If I went 2-3 weeks without checking, catching up when I got back would be an absolute nightmare. I check email when I vacation just to maintain my sanity upon return.
I work with people who don't do that; they are typically useless for 2-3 days when they get back, doing nothing other than wading through their inboxes.
Eight years? You're getting a little ahead of yourself.
Jimmy Carter:
Yes, he was NOT a captain. When asked about that little fact that is so widely incorrectly reported, he said in effect "I never said I was, if others want to believe that so what - wasn't my place to correct them" By his failure to correct the record, he has allowed a known lie to perpetuate and embellish at best, a lackluster career. What does one expect from a politician...
Eight years? You're already conceding Obama a second term despite the fact that his first term hasn't even started yet?
I think it's going to be difficult for President Obama to live up to people's expectations and consider his re-election anything but a foregone conclusion.
I've been assuming the rule is Secret Service mandated to make it harder to track his movements when he's not appearing in public. Seems like they would be justifiably nervous about their ability to guard against electronic surveillance.
All electronic communications of the president would be the immediate target of friendly and unfriendly intelligence services, and probably non-state actors as well. All parties would be able to bring considerable sophistication to the job, but the state actors would be particularly energetic. You'd be insane to think that every second of his over the air phone calls and every bit of his plaintext email wasn't immediate vacuumed up, or attempted to be vacuumed up.
By way of comparison, imagine the NSA being able to listen in on Putin's chit-chat, or Chavez's. The NSA's being able to listen in on Politburo member's limo phones in the early 70's was considered a huge coup. If the NSA is willing to go to such lengths to tap opponent's lines, you can bet your bottom dollar that the French, Russians, British, Cubans, Chinese, lobbying groups, Judean People's Liberation Front, and people out to embarrass Obama would do the same.