Everyone should come together and give a big sigh.
Weep for the poor, hard done by staff in the Obama administration. Get this, they don’t have access to Facebook or their personal email accounts on their new Whitehouse computers.
Two years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, Obama officials ran smack into the constraints of the federal bureaucracy yesterday, encountering a jumble of disconnected phone lines, old computer software, and security regulations forbidding outside e-mail accounts.
Aaawwwww!
Welcome to the real world people. This is basic IT security and they’d find the same sort of restrictions in any medium to large organization with a halfway decent IT team.
Allowing the daily operations of the White House to be spread across Facebook pages and having sensitive correspondence sent on Yahoo email accounts would be hugely dangerous grossly irresponsible. As Larry Seltzer noted on eWeek,
You can’t follow the security business over the last few years and not come away knowing that workstations have to be locked down, that access to public services needs to be restricted to those which have been specifically vetted and, perhaps, with which specific security arrangements have been made.
But the part that really bothers me is the whining about outside e-mail accounts. If I started a job like this and found out I might not have an e-mail address for a few days I would be pretty angry and reach out for some solution. But didn’t we just go through a series of e-mail scandals in the Bush White House part of which was related to the use of outside e-mail systems? Officials were called to testify before Congress and threatened with criminal penalties over that. And Alaska Governor Sarah Palin came under much criticism for using a Yahoo e-mail account for official business. An ABC News story said at the time: ‘By using non-governmental e-mail systems, “Your information is out there available, beyond the official mechanisms there to protect it,” said Amit Yoran, the nation’s first cybersecurity chief.’
Yes things change when you move from a campaign or a Senate Office to the White House. Of course it does, it is one of the most — if not the most — powerful offices on the planet. Suck it up people! You’re dealing with out national security now. Get over your selfish desires and realize that there are 306 million people depending on your ability to help the new administration govern in a professional, secure, and circumspect manner.
