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Team Obama Told to Ditch Instant Messaging

Obama's staffers give up their favorite lifeline

By Amelia Atlas, Newser User

Posted Jan 18, 2009 6:15 PM CST

(Newser) – Team Obama will be chatting in the hall and by phone, Politico reports, because instant messaging just got the boot. Lawyers told them this week that programs like AIM and GChat, still staples of their daily operations, can't be used in the White House. "They just told us flat out we couldn't IM in the White House," a senior staffer said. "It sucks," said another. "It's really going to slow us down."

Experts say casual IMs can be embarrassing when they're released—and they will be, by law, 5 years after the president leaves office. So will any government information that staffers post on Facebook and Twitter. One officlal fears that the IM ban will put "the president and all of his top staff into a bubble. They're living in the hothouse" without IM, he says, "and strange plants grow in hothouses."

[Images (3)]

[Quotes (2)]

Barack Obama holds his BlackBerry before holding a conference call with supporters gathering at an event in Charlotte, N.C., in St. Louis, Mo., Monday, July 7, 2008. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

Obama adviser David Axelrod, background, will have to abandon his prolific use of instant messaging. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

Ryan Kopiasz, a Barack Obama supporter, works on his laptop computer at the Obama 2008 campaign headquarters in Anchorage, Alaska, Tuesday Sept. 23, 2008. (AP Photo/Al Grillo)

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IMing encourages a kind of casualness in conversation that will be the bane of the lawyers down the line.
- Reginald Brown, former associate White House counsel for President Bush

There should be ways for the President's staff to take advantage of the latest IM technology—otherwise they're living in the hothouse, and strange plants grow in hothouses. - Tom Blanton, the director of the National Security Archive

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Team Obama Told to Ditch Instant Messaging