Obama Whitehouse Stuck With Windows XP, No IM, No Facebook
Published on January 22, 2009 by Daniel Taylor · 2 Comments
The White House may have nice rugs, but technologically speaking, it’s on some outdated shit:
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.
What does that mean in 21st-century terms? No Facebook to communicate with supporters. No outside e-mail log-ins. No instant messaging. Hard adjustments for a staff that helped sweep Obama to power through, among other things, relentless online social networking.
“It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari,” Obama spokesman Bill Burton said of his new digs.
Worst of all, they were forced to switch from Macs to bullshit old school desktop PCs running Windows XP:
One member of the White House new-media team came to work on Tuesday, right after the swearing-in ceremony, only to discover that it was impossible to know which programs could be updated, or even which computers could be used for which purposes. The team members, accustomed to working on Macintoshes, found computers outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft software. Laptops were scarce, assigned to only a few people in the West Wing. The team was left struggling to put closed captions on online videos.
Guess the White House don’t know that once you go Mac, you never go back. Kind of funny though, how we can spend $6.2 billion dollars on a new aircraft carrier but we can’t get some updated computers into the house where the person who runs the entire country lives?
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Readers Comments (2)
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First, Microsoft hasn’t had a stellar track record with security, so I suspect what has been deployed is very locked down and heavily modified, given the strict record-keeping laws in place.
Trying to switch all of that to Apple is simply not doable in a short period of time. Remember that this is the White House… every spy, agent and script kiddie will be actively trying to intrude.
Yes, the world is rooted in technology these days, and not a day goes by that something supposedly secure is hacked to death. We can take ZERO chances with the White House. None. If that means that Obama has to resort to paper, at least for a while, I’m quite certain he can wrap his head around how to work a pen.
What’s the over/under on how long until the first exposed Blackberry data shows up on the web? There is no such thing as a secure mobile/wireless device. They can always be tracked with the right tools.
While I am sure that the Bush administration was in the computer stone age, it is important to note that the security considerations and the flow of communications has to be carefully addressed.
So, some very smart people will have to work on this difficult balancing act. This is more about mindset, security, interoperability, communication policy, and the transition than about hardware.
Trying to reduce this to “once you go mac you never go back” is too cliche.
The white house will have to put out an RFP, and then, the best submittal will win, if we are lucky.