A dominant player, yet Obama needed a special highly modified version to securely access the White House network. A huge amount of work to keep using what he was comfortable with.

Which makes complete sense. He is the most powerful individual in a country of 300+ million people. If he needs a certain thing to keep him operating at peak efficiency and focus, he gets that thing. Period. Unless it violates national security.

Being elected president is not the time to learn a new technology suite. Hopefully most presidents have better things to do with their time than that.

At that level your people have people who have people to deal with that kind of minutiae.

>Being elected president is not the time to learn a new technology suite. Hopefully most presidents have better things to do with their time than that.

At what level does this stop being a waste of time for the person?

I'm not suggesting Obama should have been forced to change, but every else in his administration was forced to change. There's some serious clashing between the need for secure devices and the reluctance to change from old technology.

I think it's fair to ask what the secure alternative platform was. I wouldn't be surprised if it was five years out of date and barely functional. I think the President ought to be able to say "this is crap, improve it".

Hopefully your people's people's people don't interpret "setup e-mail for Mrs. Clinton to use on her Blackberry" as "setup an e-mail server on Mrs. Clinton's existing hardware and configure it on her Blackberrry."

Was there another smartphone platform he could have used at the time that would have been less work to secure? A secure smartphone for the President seems well worth the effort.

I don't know what their preferred phone was at the time, but they were unwilling to go through the same effort for the Secretary of State, instead offering her a choice of non-BlackBerry phones.

This is likely because his modified BlackBerry was a one-off project suited to his security requirements.

My understanding is that internal hardware was removed/shielded, and I assume software modifications were made as well, like only connecting to specific cellular base stations (such as the one in his official vehicle).

Which is absurd, a SOS is mobile far more than a President by nature.

I think the importance of this cannot be understated. The Secretary of State is a nexus of not only extremely sensitive information, but of extremely sensitive information in motion which is also in overseas locations more often than not. If I were into tradecraft, I'd be much more likely to target the Secretary of State than the President for access to (relevant, valuable) sensitive information.

BlackBerry was probably the closest, and I expect they already knew what modifications to make.

BlackBerry was the best thing you could get at the time. Obviously things have changed since then -- BlackBerry hardly exists anymore!

But he did use it secure, not like Trump

As an aside: wow that timeline makes me feel really old

How about the part where we're further away from Win7 in time, than Win7 was from WinXP? It'll be 10 years since Win7 RTM next year!

Yeah, I had the same reaction. This sort of stuff makes me _feel old_. But I'm not actually "old," so what gives?

That's the trap, and Seneca wrote some compelling stuff about recognizing the trap and avoiding it. It is aptly titled "On the Shortness of Life"...

Thanks for that. I had come across some of Seneca's writing before, while researching / reading about Stoicism, but hadn't come across this specific text, that I recall.