Opinions

The BlackBerry presidency?

Examining the politics of e-mail

In print | November 20, 2008

An election news addicted America is beginning to go into withdrawal. Now that the hoopla leading up to Nov. 4 has subsided, Americans are starting to seek out alternate ways to satisfy their cravings for a constant drip of political communiqués, analysis and gossip.

Enter the human-interest stories about Barack Obama. Making the rounds this weekend was a piece in The New York Times on the future of President-Elect Obama and his campaign sidekick, the BlackBerry. Mr. Obama, writes the author, will likely be surrendering his mobile phone and e-mail privileges when he assumes office in January. The reasoning behind depriving the President of his CrackBerry, as the workaholic-enabling devices are known, falls into two broad categories: security and privacy. Let’s look at each of these in turn.

Security has the greatest common sense appeal but, paradoxically, is the least compelling of the arguments against the presidential use of e-mail. The Times quotes Diana Owen of Georgetown University who comments that even a supposedly infallible security system protecting Mr. Obama’s electronic correspondence can be compromised. But a president’s e-mail is no different from any of the other messages being sent in the West Wing, all of which are strongly protected; by Ms. Owen’s logic, no one in the White House ought to be sending e-mail, which is clearly an absurd proposition. And while high-profile security breaches in recent years, such as the publicizing of Sarah Palin’s personal e-mail account this year, have brought this issue to the public’s attention: breaking the security systems of the federal government is hardly a trivial matter. Put another way, there’s a big difference between guessing Sarah Palin’s password and breaking into a computer secured by the NSA. A hypothetical doomsday scenario in which Mr. Obama’s personal correspondence is leaked is hardly cause to rule out e-mail altogether.

The privacy issues faced by a president in regards to his correspondence are vastly different from those faced by individual citizens. The Presidential Records Act, passed in 1978, makes any records created by the President or Vice-President public property. Accordingly, private individuals, lobby groups or interested parties can demand, under the Freedom of Information Act, access to any of these records five years after a President has left office.
There are several important qualifications in the act. First, presidents may invoke up to six restrictions on access to their records, delaying public access for an additional twelve years after they leave office and once the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act come into effect. President Bush, whose administration is already under fire for “misplacing” over five million e-mail messages, has invoked all six. Second, presidents may purge, while in office, records which have no administrative, historical, informational or evidentiary value. Performed in coordination with and under the strict supervision of the Archivist of the United States, this filters out much of the banal, personal communication that presidents would not want exposed.
The complex nature of the Presidential Records Act has led presidents in office after the advent of e-mail to shun it, with President Bush offering a farewell e-mail address to his friends and family to the tune of, “Since I do not want my private conversations looked at by those out to embarrass, the only course of action is not to correspond in cyberspace.”

But Mr. Obama is in a vastly different position than President Bush, whose former e-mail address, G94B@aol.com, harkens back to simpler times when the internet and technology were less pervasive parts of daily life and the political process. From the massively successful use of the Internet in his campaign to his vows to be the first president with a Chief Technology Officer in the White House, Mr. Obama has made himself the first true president of the electronic age. A retreat from his refreshing tech savvy because of procedural concerns would be disappointing for the legions of Americans awaiting a government that is finally up to speed on the technology evolving around it.
It is not the place of The Phoenix to tell the President-Elect whether he should be e-mailing; the decision should be his to make. However, should he choose to become the first e-mailing president, Mr. Obama should seize the opportunity to set a clearly articulated precedent for future leaders to follow.

First of all, the rather ambiguous qualifications for when personal records can be purged should be clarified. Clearly historians and scholars should not be denied the opportunity to get an inside look into the life of a president, but certain things are indubitably irrelevant. Especially given these records would only be coming to light at the earliest five years after a president has left office, the impact of such correspondence is questionable. If Mr. Obama e-mails the first lady about what they will eat for dinner, such correspondence is no more public domain than the e-mail Swarthmore students send each other. But where should the line be drawn? If Mr. Obama were to, hypothetically, correspond by e-mail with his wife about his daughters misbehaving in school, would such knowledge be relevant to the public? It’s hard to say. But, however challenging, it is the job of the Archivist and the nonpartisan National Archives and Records Administration to establish such guidelines.

Second, Mr. Obama should seize upon this issue as an opportunity to overhaul the way the massive executive bureaucracy approaches documentation once and for all. The loss, under President Bush, of several million e-mail messages is appalling, but undoubtedly previous administrations have also mishandled, misplaced, omitted, deleted or otherwise failed to account for some of their records.
If the Obama administration is committed to reversing the reputation of Washington as a den of insider politics and corruption, it should take the first step internally, and use technology as a tool to increase its accountability and transparency. Digital content is both easier and cheaper to archive and organize than print media. As such, Mr. Obama and his advisors should commit to going paperless to the greatest extent possible. E-mail should be seen as an opportunity, rather than a liability, and a president eager to use it ought to be encouraged, rather than spurned.