Thread by @nimkef

3 April 2016

As Mr. Obama prepares to leave the White House early next year, one of his legacies will be the office information technology upgrade that his staff has finally begun.

nytimes.com/2016/04/04/us/…

On Air Force One, administration officials sent emails over an air-to-ground Internet connection that was often no better than dial-up modems from the mid-1990s.

Part of the problem? Responsibility for WH technology has long been divvied up between four agencies, each with their own chief information officer: the National Security Council, the Executive Office of the President, the Secret Service and the White House Communications Agency

That led to a series of Band-Aid solutions over the years, as one agency or another has attempted piecemeal upgrades to White House gear.

In 2014, WH aides accompanying Obama on his summer vacation struggled with balky laptops as they tried to revise a presidential statement, they could not get tech support from the WHCA because the agency’s staff members were not authorized to log in to computers issued by the EOP

Anita Decker Breckenridge was determined to fix the mess, and by March 2015 had hired David Recordon, who designed and maintained the office technology for Mark Zuckerberg and the other employees at Facebook, as the information technology guy for the White House complex.

One of his first tasks was trying to map the miles of Ethernet cables and phone wires inside the walls of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The team of technicians eventually discovered and removed 13,000 pounds of abandoned cables that no longer served any purpose.

“They had been installed over the decades by different organizations using different standards, different techniques, from different eras,” Recordon said. “They were finding these pipes that just had bundles of cable that had been cut off over the years, no longer used.”

The new phone system, the first since the Clinton years, is all digital, with built-in speakerphones and speed-dial buttons that can be changed online. Many aides now carry the most recent iPhones. Mr. Obama, however, still carries a specially modified, highly secure BlackBerry.

Forgotten passwords are no longer an irritant now that the White House has started requiring users to log on with a chip-enabled smart card and a pin code.

Recordon’s team also designed a new web-based system for admitting visitors to the West Wing that can be managed securely from any computer, including ones outside the White House complex.

Joe Hagin, the deputy chief of staff for Mr. Bush, recalled having to replace the phones in the presidential limousine after Mr. Bush complained that he had not been able to make a single phone call from his motorcade over an entire weekend.

“He said to me, ‘What the heck would happen if there were a true national emergency?’ ” Hagin recalled. That fear came true months later on 9/11, when communications glitches plagued the government and led to new equipment in Air Force One and the first BlackBerries in the WH

Ms. Breckenridge said she was hopeful that Mr. Obama will leave to his successor’s staff a building that is more useful in the Facebook and Twitter era, or whatever comes next.

Hagin recalled discovering a basement room in the West Wing filled with telephone switching gear technicians said could be replaced with a unit the size of a dorm-room refrigerator. But everyone was nervous about cutting the wires because no schematics or design guides existed

Replacing the equipment took a full two years.