Tech Turns Partisan

The first big partisan issue in the new administration has arrived. Oh, you might think it would be Republican pushback to President Barack Obama’s move to reshape U.S. international policy by closing Gitmo, pursuing a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and naming new diplomatic envoys to the Middle East and Afghanistan-Pakistan. But no. It’s not. The issue is over whether the White House needs to be dragged into the current century by updating the technology it uses.

As Paula Bernier reported today, the young-ish, relatively hip team that’s just moved into the White House (I picture all of them looking like the Mac guy in the Apple commercials) is finding itself dealing with a crumbling tech infrastructure and policy that includes no use of outside e-mail.

The President and his White House staff won’t be able to use IM or log onto Facebook, although Obama is being allowed to keep his BlackBerry. There are even PCs that are running Windows 98, the rumor goes. And the Web site, touted as the transparency vehicle for those wanting to know what’s happening at the top, with blogs, ongoing news updates and the like, is still pretty much the same as it was, though it now will be searchable by Google et al. Even the basics seem out of whack: Staffers are dealing with dead or misrouted phone lines, reportedly.

But Fox News is reporting that all of this is rubbish, saying the White House runs on Windows XP (wisely, not Vista), BlackBerries, Outlook, laptops and flat-screen TVs.

"When I got there in 2005, I was given a BlackBerry, a cell phone and a pager," David Almacy told Fox. Almacy ran the Whitehouse.gov Web site and was the administration's Internet and e-communications director from 2005 to 2007. “I gradually got it down to just a BlackBerry as the newer models incorporated phone functions, and I can tell you that White House staffers have their noses buried in their BlackBerries at all times. They can't put them down for very long because something could happen.”

So the problem might just be the logistics involved in the changeover — technology obviously has changed a lot since the last transition back in 2001, as Almacy points out. But this has all the makings of a Bush-Obama catfight, if you ask me.

"It's a shame if they're having problems moving in," sniffed Theresa Payton, former White House chief information officer, to Fox News. "We began to prepare for the transition well ahead of the election cycle. Our aim was to leave it in better shape than we found it."

“It is what it is," grumbled a White House staff member meanwhile, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "Nobody is being a blockade right now. It's just the system we need to go through."

Regardless of who wins this partisan snipe-fest (or at least, that’s how I like to imagine it), the question is very relevant: how can you steward a 21st century world when you’re sequestered by a lack of latest, greatest technology?