Tag: WHITE HOUSE

Apparently, most bloggers have never had corporate jobs. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs' offhand remark last week that Twitter is blocked on White House computers prompted the legion of tech-blogs to go into full-on shaming mode in regards to the White House's IT policies. During an interview on CSPAN, Gibbs quickly answers a question about Twitter by explaining that the micro-blogging service is ...

When's the most embarrassing moment possible for your cell phone to ring? During a church service? How about a college lecture? A funeral, maybe? Nope, nope, and nope. Try being the poor sap whose phone not only rang, but quacked, during a recent press conference by President Obama. During a live broadcast of a speech about gay rights yesterday, a White House correspondent's cell phone quacked ...

The White House is preparing to create a new office that would coordinate cyber defense and offense, the New York Times reported yesterday. The new office would report to both the National Security Council and the National Economic Council and would manage a multi-billion dollar effort to safeguard governmental computer networks from attack. In addition to protecting government equipment, the ...

Remember that new Chief Information Officer (CIO) that President Obama recently appointed? As was the case with many of the other seemingly ill-vetted appointees, it now seems like Vivek Kundra too has a couple of skeletons in his closet that almost stopped him from accepting the position for the newly created post. As with Tom Daschle, Nancy Killefer, Charles Freeman, Ron Kirk, Timothy ...

Vivek Kundra has been named the first Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO) by President Obama. The CIO for the White House is a newly created post that will carry a variety of responsibilities, not the least of which is overseeing how the technology budget is spent by the federal government. Kundra will be responsible for making sure that federal agencies are able to communicate and share ...

Certain things should not happen at certain places. For example, an eight-hour, e-mail-crippling server outage should not occur at the White House. Unfortunately for everyone in the new administration, though, that is exactly what happened Monday, reports CBS News. White House aides had just switched over to their official government e-mail addresses when the outage hit and were immediately ...

Well, it looks like Obama's staff has a major adjustment ahead of it. The team involved with the most tech-savvy presidential campaign and transition in the history of the country hit a brick wall Wednesday when it showed up for the first full day of work at ol' 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Just how bad is it? Obama spokesman Bill Burton described the transition as "kind of like going from an Xbox to ...

Before Obama was even sworn in, WhiteHouse.gov, one of the most valuable assets the White House has in the age of the Internet, was handed over to his control. The site has received a face lift so that it more closely resembles that of Change.gov, the site for Obama's transition team, replacing the Bush-era WhiteHouse.gov, which was a static page with little chance for user interaction and a ...

Barack Obama's aides learned Friday they'll have to give up one of their favorite means of communicating with each other, the media, and the outside world: the near-ubiquitous instant message. The new White House lawyers say any communication involving government business that is sent via instant message will become a part of the official record and therefore subject to The Presidential ...

Watch more YouTube videos on AOL Video Last week, the First Family issued its annual White House Holiday video, complete with appearances by Olympics Gold medalists Michael Phelps and Nastia Liukin. The Bushes' selection of the Olympics as this year's theme struck us as a tad bizarre at first. Certainly, many folks in the U.S. adore gold medalists Phelps and Liukin, but really, what in the ...

Here's one that's bound to get your tinfoil hats in bunch. Mike Connell, a former senior White House IT worker, and key witness in an investigation surrounding an alternate (read: secret) White House communication system and an election fraud case in Ohio, has died after his private single engine plane went down on his way to DC last week on Friday night (December 19). Connell was responsible ...

Remember all those e-mails that went missing at the White House? The Bush administration is hoping you don't. According to an internal memo leaked to the Associate Press (AP) the government is pushing forward with its recovery "effort" the only way it knows how -- completely half-assed. According to the memo, the White House is missing as much as 225 days worth of e-mail that just so happen to ...

The White House is no stranger to controversy surrounding lost e-mail, but the latest bit of information might be the most shocking yet. Following a court ruling, the Bush administration must institute a recovery plan to restore what U.S. Magistrate Judge John Facciola fears may be large volumes of missing communications from 2003 to 2005. In an effort to deter the court from pushing forward with ...