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Announcer
Get in touch with technology with TechStuff from Howstuffworks.com.
Chris Pollette
Hey there, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. My name is Chris Pollette. I’m an editor at How Stuff Works, and sitting next to me, as always, is senior writer, Jonathan Strickland.
Jonathan Strickland
Hey there.
Chris Pollette
Did you get that message I sent you?
Jonathan Strickland
You know, I would have received it, but my Smartphone was confiscated. I’m not allowed to have it anymore.
Chris Pollette
You know, that was almost true of somebody else that – actually, everybody knows what we’re talking about.
Jonathan Strickland
Yeah, this cute segway stuff doesn’t work well for us, does it?
Chris Pollette
No.
Jonathan Strickland
So we’re talking about our newly elected president of the United States, Barack Obama, who as you may know is something of a BlackBerry fan.
Chris Pollette
Yeah, okay. Admittedly, critics of President Obama have talked about his celebrity status, and how the media spends a lot of attention to it. I admit, I’m a little surprised by how many BlackBerry stories there have been about whether or not he’ll be able to keep the little machine that he has fallen so obsessively in love with, apparently, that he cannot leave it alone. So when I was talking to Jonathan about what we wanted to do for the podcast, I thought, you know, we should talk about why this is actually a big deal, and why it matters whether or not he’s allowed to keep the BlackBerry.
Jonathan Strickland
Right. The times, they are a-changing, so we’re talking right now about a president who was growing up around the whole technological revolution to the point where a lot of these things are things that he’s very familiar with. That’s new to us. The presidents we’ve had in the past, of course they were aware of the technology, but they didn’t depend upon it while they were rising up the ranks in the political system, so it wasn’t so relevant to them personally. Obama, it’s a different story, so we’re already starting to see some clashes between Obama’s new administration and the way things are traditionally run in D.C. The BlackBerry is a good example of that. Why would Obama have a problem keeping his BlackBerry as president?
Chris Pollette
Well, this one actually is a lot less technologically related as you might think. It’s actually more of a national security matter. If you think about it, if you know anything about how email works, you know that, in general, most of send plain, unencrypted emails from place to place, they go from machine to machine, and anybody can get a hold of them technically. I mean, if you’re really trying to. It’s not easy to get a hold of it, but if you know what you’re doing -