FYI, his blackberry is subject to the Presidential Records Act, and though he gets to keep it, he can only email with a select group of friends and staffers, and the thing has unparalleled security.

Anyways, I've seen a lot of tech blogs begging the WH to get more tech-savvy and use their blog better and use twitter better. The problem is that government always moves slowly, thanks to bureacracy and slow, inefficient decision-making processes. But the most important thing to realize is that the Obama staff has much higher priority things to work on right now. They've already made big strides in developing WH.gov, their blog, youtube account, twitter, etc. Other than that, I think they have more pressing problems to work on...

I'm a member of the Executive Branch (but I don't want to say which cabinet department. We don't have a Secretary yet, and nothing has changed) and it's much worse than you think. Paranoid Bush Administration policies have focused for years on security and CYA for senior officials, to the point where everything is clamped down tight and taxpayers' money is frequently wasted. Social media? ha! Not only are we not allowed to use Facebook, Twitter, etc., we are not even allowed to access those sites using our government PCs and networks. Same with webmail. I'm curious how those staffers you mention in your post were able to "route messages through their personal Gmail accounts." Access to gmail? Here it's blocked. Yahoo, delicio.us, google documents, basically anything resembling social media or modern web interactivity? Blocked. Curious why it was blocked? "Click more information to learn more about your access policy." and that click leads to "Security risk blocked for your protection." That's it. When we order new PCs and servers, they sit in storage for approximately one year -- that's right, just until the warranties run out, to say nothing of mounting obsolescence -- because the IT offices are too busy running security checks and blocking access to everything they can think of to handle the backed-up installation queue. Vendors offer assistance, in the form of free system evaluations or trials of new products. No, sorry, that's a security violation. There's a spam filter in place, but you're not allowed access to the removed emails, and they won't tell you the rules that determine what is blocked. You can put in all the IT help tickets you want, but you're likely to just get back an email saying your problem was resolved. And what was the resolution? "Problem was evaluated per security policy." And on and on.

I'll make no excuses for the Bush administration. However I will say that it will take some time to evaluate and institute secure equipment and policies for new technology for this administration.
This is the kind of result you'll get when you're slamming the latest technology into action pronto -
Today's breaking news on Obama's BlackBerry from a Wall Street Journal article on Fox News.com (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,483005,00.html) -

... "Microsoft, however, has questioned the wisdom of the president relying on a device whose maker is based in Canada.
"You would be sending your data outside the country," says Randy Siegel, a Microsoft enterprise mobile strategist who works on federal government projects. "We wouldn't want the casual musings or official communications of the most important person in the world being intercepted by others."
Even if RIM routed information through a U.S. data center, the devices aren't built to NSA's security specs, he says. RIM declined to comment.
Siegel argues that a better alternative would be a National Security Agency-approved device, such as the Sectéra Edge." ...

I think the federal government should have the latest and greatest technology ... with the latest and greatest security.

I'll believe the source I've quoted above. As for Canada being a threat, I don't believe it is but I wouldn't want any info ending up on servers located in another country. That is not security and there is no control of that info.