White House IT locked in the 1980s

Excepting MainFrame computers, 1980s' had little computing for average Joe in White House. WordProcessor Was BIG Deal on Office St. One Poor Child from Secret Service got so peeved at wordprocessor, just ran into traffic, run over, by frustration. So its Been Hard, UpDating White House might be good, just reading reports that are sent from other building be biggest help. Turn OFF Cable TV & on with nternet. TS Drashek

Uhm, it wasn't just a year ago that the Democrats were harrassing the Bush Administration for using external e-mail accounts because he didn't have to retain the e-mails sent there. Now all of a sudden it's a problem NOT to be able to use external accounts?

You can't have it both ways folks. Either you get your crap auditted and use the official venues, or you let them use external e-mail accounts and thus bypass all of the government records laws. You can't have it both ways. But knowing politicians, they will do their damnest to get it both ways.

The Democrats weren't harrassing the Bush admin over using external email, they were harrassing them because the switched INTERNAL servers from the original servers (lotus I think it was)that did automatic backup and archiving to a half-assed exchange setup that required manual backups by dragging and dropping emails to save them. And thus a huge amount of official whitehouse emails during the period around 9-11 and the run-up to the Iraq war.

a slightly different situation, and frankly I wish the Democrats had pursued it much more fervently.

( external email use was a Palin scandal though, was that what you were thinking of?)

The problem is not that they wish to use outside emails instead of official ones. The problem is that the systems in place are not able to provide the needed accounts (both in numbers and quickly enough). They want to use official systems, they are simply way out of date. This is not the political issue you wish to make it. It is a tech issue.

That Washington Post article specifically mentioned Facebook and External E-Mail and Instant Messaging.
All of these are disallowed because of the Presidential Records Act that requires anything going in/out of the White House to be recorded for posterity. The article strikes me as a crybaby article. You can't ask for stuff that's Illegal...well, unless you want to say Rules Don't Apply To Me ;-)

If they truly wanted to fix this, they'd get Lotus Notes and Lotus Connections back in. Lotus has made all this Web 2.0 stuff corporate quality...AKA, the stuff is secure and recorded! Yes, this includes Wikis, Instant Messaging, Blogs, etc.

Oh, but I have followed the issue.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_e-mail_controversy

"The Bush White House e-mail controversy surfaced in 2007, during the controversy involving the dismissal of eight U.S. attorneys. Congressional requests for administration documents while investigating the dismissals of the U.S. attorneys required the Bush administration to reveal that not all internal White House emails were available, because they were sent via a non-government domain hosted on an e-mail server not controlled by the federal government."

The executive branch is so large and has so much IT resources, talent and money that it should be trivial for Obama to find the most advanced Top Secret level IT infrastructure being used anywhere in the executive branch and simply have it implemented/copied in the White House. He could have the White House upgraded within months.

Trust me,
As a DOD employee that spent 1/2 the day today trying to get the idiots that pass for tech support to get email, printers and server access back to my 'new XP' machine (it was NT2000 until 2 weeks ago)... There is no advanced IT infrastructure in the Executive Branch.
BTW, I know what the problem is; however, I don't have the 'permissions' on my own damn PC to fix the problem.

of proportion.

It was more like 'six year old computers" which would effectively mean XP, probably upgraded to SP2, Office 2003 etc. which is pretty much still a standard setup for most office spaces at this day and age. Not a big deal...

...to spend more money and look "cutting edge". We had our first truly American Idol type election and now we are about to have an American Idol presidency where the packaging is more important than the content. We had an election where more money was spent then the last 2 elections and where the winner outspent the loser 3:1. We had an election where 2 candidates both pledged to use campaign financing to minimize the impact of money on elections, and then have one drop dis pledge as soon as he realized he could raise gobs of money (while the press gladly took the extra advertising dollars instead of reporting on why the sudden change of heart)

What exactly is the issue here? Is the stuff non-secure? Inefficient? Outside of generating PR about how "tech savy" (can we get another "I want to keep my blackberry article" PLEASE?) - what exactly is the issue? That is what should be reported on, but facts tend to not make as good a story as the spin and the sound byte quotes.

What happened to journalism?