The NYT reports the other day that the Secret Service and White House lawyers are trying to strip President-elect Obama of his Blackberry before the inauguration citing a litany of security and legal reasons.
This is wrong.
I’m not impressed with any of the reasons given for taking Obama’s Blackberry away. The idea that hackers could get into his Blackberry and access top secret information is silly. He is not going to be issuing executive orders or reviewing top secret documents with his Blackberry. The notion that a terrorist could somehow track Obama’s location through his Blackberry is also paranoid and impractical. What you are going to end up with is a situation where Obama is constantly surrounded by top aides and advisors where he is the only one in the room who does not have a Blackberry.
And legal fears that Obama’s every text message could wind up being subpoenaed by litigious critics is just something that needs to be dealt with legislatively if it has not been already.
The President needs his personal space to think and breathe and reflect and to essentially be who he is. We don’t want to take the person we just elected and then substantially change him by cutting him off from his support network. We’ve already seen that it is not good to have a president who is locked in a bubble all the time.
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