"Simple" Solutions to White House Tech Woes

There was a good deal of coverage (Washington Post, Fastcompany) in the first few days of the Obama administration of the tech woes experienced by tech savvy Mac wielding incoming White House staffers. Imagine the horror of those former Mac users arriving in a West Wing to old desktop PCs running Windows 2000 and XP. That might send this Mac user screaming and running the other way. Much has been made of all the bureaucracy getting in the way of something, most Americans take for granted these days, sending an e-mail. I also read somewhere that laptops are in short supply because only "certain" people get laptops...uh...what? What is that security through "chained to your deskness"? Much has been made of the requirements that all communications that occur in the West Wing, by staffers, etc. be archived and preserved for history. In my mind all of this boils down to a matter of two issues: technology and policy or regulation. Put another way the how and the why.

Let's tackle the how first. It seems to me that a few technical solutions would meet most archiving requirements. Start with the network topology. What I'd do is essentially create a great wall of the West Wing. In other words you want to route all traffic through a single point which of course makes it quite easy to put a device in the chain that simply archives each 1 and 0 passing through it for the benefit of future historians. Or maybe you might even route that traffic over a secured link directly to the National Archives. This should solve the issues within the West Wing offices wifi, network, etc. route it all through one place and you don't have to worry about laptop or desktop. As far as IM it seems to me that there are several solutions there used in corporate environments which could be configured to log conversations on the server side, etc. Lastly I would mandate all "company" e-mail is sent through a particular server and things could be logged there on the server side as well. With some regulations and fines, etc. for thoese who are found to bypass offical channels. I guess my point here is that everything could be done on the server or network topology side which should lessen the burden on having to configure clients and make things platform agnostic.  In the end if all of these methods fail then can't we still fall back on the NSA? I mean after all they're already logging the rest of America's traffic why should the Americans inhabiting the White House be any exception?

The question remains though what exactly are all these regulations that mandate archival of every character produced by an administration proving anyways? Just because it might the technically possible to archive every bit the administration produces does it make sense to do so? If the West Wing is like any other office it seems to me that what you'll end up with after four years is a couple thousand e-mails that are something to the effect of "In late today. -Rahm ." Well thank god we have that archived away for future generations serious historical significance there.

The bottom line here is this, if it is truly as hard to send an e-mail from the center of the free world as we've been lead to believe then something is very wrong and needs to change. If the regulations make it that difficult those regulations need to go it's that simple. If it's the technology then I am absolutely confident those issues can be overcome as well.

In the end how can our government really be "of the people, by the people, and for the people" if they have to communicate with each other (and US) like some kind of prehistoric primates?