Obama's BlackBer

Not that I want my president to be spending countless hours obsessively e-mailing with his BlackBerry, but this has always bothered me:

For security reasons Barack Obama was initially told he would need to give up his mobile.

Or maybe not. Apparently the president-elect is feeling a bit too constricted inside the presidential bubble, which is understandably tightly controlled by the Secret Service.

[. . .]

Obama says it's a problem for him to give up the BlackBerry and other ties. "You know, one of the things that I'm going to have to work through is how to break through the isolation and the bubble that exists around the president. And I'm in the process of negotiating with the Secret Service, with lawyers, with White House staff and....''

If the national security apparatus of the United States government, those thousands of people who can spend millions of dollars and have years and years of experience, cannot protect the e-mail integrity of the president of the United States, I'd say we have a much bigger national security problem than anybody has ever wanted to admit.

Maybe the fear is not unfounded. The hoaxters are no longer content with Nigerian or raffle scams. Now, they're e-mailing people that they've been hired as hit men, but the recipient can get off the target list for a mere $8,000. And who knows how close nuclear-armed India and Pakistan got to war because of a fake phone call to Pakistan purporting to be from an Indian official.

Perhaps we ought not let any communication reach the president unless it has been screened by a dozen people. That would also have the advantage of slowing down the government a tad, which some of us wouldn't mind.