Staff Finds White House in the Technological Dark Ages

If the Obama campaign represented a sleek, new iPhone kind of future, the first day of the Obama administration looked more like the rotary-dial past.

Two
years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential
campaign in history, Obama officials ran smack into the constraints of
the federal bureaucracy yesterday, encountering a jumble of
disconnected phone lines, old computer software, and security
regulations forbidding outside e-mail accounts.

What does that mean in 21st-century terms? No Facebook
to communicate with supporters. No outside e-mail log-ins. No instant
messaging. Hard adjustments for a staff that helped sweep Obama to
power through, among other things, relentless online social networking.