There’s talk that Barack Obama will have to give up doing email once he moves in to the Oval Office.

[…] The US president-elect is likely to give it up, aides told the New York Times, because transparency laws would open his correspondence to public view. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W Bush both gave up e-mail in office, but Mr Obama will be the first BlackBerry user to occupy the White House. He took mobile e-mail everywhere with him on the campaign trail.

[…] "I think Obama is the first president who is addicted to the BlackBerry like the rest of us, and there’s a lot of presidential records and archive rules on what gets stored and what doesn’t," former Clinton press secretary Joe Lockhart told the Associated Press.

A final decision on whether Mr Obama will become the first e-mailing president has yet to be made. He is expected to be the first to have a laptop on his desk in the Oval Office.

So the concern is mostly to do with those transparency laws as well as worries that some hacker could get around all the safeguards in place.

I would have thought that the USA, with its desire for change as manifested by the result of its general election and its limitless tech savvyness, will find a solution to all such things.

And I say what a great opportunity to change the game. Make the system work for the user, not the other way around. Can’t be that difficult, surely.

Where there’s a will.