The appeal of being in an exclusive group is that you know there are a bunch of people who are just dying to get in but can’t. Scoring an invite to Vanity Fair’s post Oscar party meant you were one of the entertainment elite. Having a black card aka the American Express Centurion signified you had reached the upper echelon of success. The coolest clubhouse was Herb Allen’s annual mogul fest in Sun Valley where business and political titans like Bill Gates, Barry Diller, Tony Blair and the Google boys rubbed shoulders and talked shop. Well no more. Reality TV stars can sneak into Vanity Fair, every bank now offers an above platinum card and in this economic climate the depressed attendees at Sun Valley will probably be snorting lines of Xanax.

There is a new it group one so ultra exclusive that the usual “masters of the universe” couldn’t buy, beg or bribe a membership. It is not the Skull and Bones club nor is it the mythical Illuminati those are so passé. It is the phone number and personal email address of President Barack Obama. I know what you are thinking; what is so secret about that. Our email can be found on friends’ computers, iTunes, Amazon or bank accounts, all are goldmines of personal information. We leave paper trails as wide as the autobahn whenever we go online and any black hat hacker with enough determination and Red Bull could dig up all they wanted to know about anyone, anywhere within a week. But the public and the President are not in the same boat. Imagine a morning where your computer has crashed and your cell has no signal then imagine it lasts 4 or 8 years and you pretty much the life of the commander in chief. When one signs on to become leader of the free world it requires they give up those daily networking freedoms we take for granted like Twitter or Facebook. The desk in the oval office doesn’t even have a computer. How ironic that the top executive in charge of managing the most advanced nation on the planet has less access to personal technology than a small business owner in Hyderabad.

While we think of our email inbox as confidential, privacy doesn’t exist once you are sworn in. According to the 1978 Presidential Records Act all written correspondence made while in office is part of the official record and after 5 years of stepping down it can be subject to scrutiny, subpoenas or pubic review. So to prevent any indiscretions it was deemed safer not to leave any paper trail that could come back to bite an formerpres in the derriere. Citing the risk of potentially embarrassing private letters coming to light, the ex President George W Bush famously sent a farewell email from his old address G94B@aol.com when he left the Texas governor’s mansion for the White House. He recently signed back on after a hiatus of 8 years. The President’s office has an army of people who fetch, receive, sift through and present him with documents according to a specified hierarchy. If he wants to know his approval rating, it is there from all the major polls, there are media gophers who scour the papers, watch the news and compile notes so he can be briefed on what is happening around the globe every morning. And say he needs to send a bouquet to the first lady he can simply have a staffer order one and even fill out the card with “Sorry I forgot date night” or “I swear that intern is just a friend”. Another aide can fill his iPod with appropriate play lists for either his morning jog or for going to war. And why would he need a laptop when he can dictate memos and speeches to a secretary? So a long standing argument against an a tech savvy president was that there was no need to get one’s hands dirty when one is busy keeping the world from going nuclear. This was the way has always been done and would have continued were it not for Obama and his BlackBerry.

It was ubiquitous throughout the campaign. The then senator and presidential hopeful was constantly photographed tapping away or talking on the device, which he carried on his belt like a gunslinger in a Western. It kept his finger on the pulse of the nation and offered access to unfiltered raw information, as the circle surrounding him grew smaller and more restricted. Working professionals and teens could relate to the image of a guy sending a text or reading email because they did that on a daily basis as well. Briefs and documents were seldom printed out but rather sent to his phone for review and he would reply from either the BlackBerry or his laptop. It was quick and saved a bunch of trees. A network of college and professional friends sent messages that kept him abreast of the latest news so he often knew what was going on before he received the official memos. However it was expected that if elected he would follow protocol and surrender the device but what was not taken into account was the attachment users have to their “CrackBerries”. It is a hard habit to kick cold turkey. Remember when the network went down and people had anxiety attacks? Once the instant gratification of personal tech gets a hold of you, a disconnected life seems unimaginable.

Obama fought a long and hard campaign to bring change to Washington (we are talking about being allowed to keep his phone and use a laptop not about the election). The victory comes with a list of compromises. Aside from the “something you write can later be used against you” issue there is the S factor. Security or rather lack of it is the most common argument against allowing the President to have unfettered electronic communication. The very nature of an electronically transmitted missive is that it can be intercepted en route leading to all manner of horror scenarios worthy of a Tom Clancy novel. Imagine some rogue nation gaining access to highly classified text discussion between the pres and the secretary of state or an email to a friend being inadvertently forwarded and giving the secret service a major headache. The solution was a special phone preapproved by national security officials which meant he had to trade in his old BlackBerry 8830 World Edition for a model that was 3 times heavier but so much cooler.

Both the FBI and Department of Defense use BlackBerries that come with the strongest version of the governments Advanced Encryption Standard AES-256. This 256-bit encryption standard is secure enough to scramble communications classified as "secret" but not good enough for those designated "top-secret". Only two are worthy of transmitting the most sensitive hush-hush information, the Sectéra Edge (a Windows CE based Palm Treo) and L-3's Guardian. Both Edge and Guardian were developed specifically to meet the exacting standards of the NSA. The veteran is the Edge, which has already been used by the Pentagon, and NSA while the Guardian is still undergoing field testing. Edge and Guardian phones are made to work on SIPRnet the government's private version of the Internet that only 300,000 people have access to. At a touch of a button the phone's user can switch from SIPRnet to the less restricted but still secure NIPRnet as well as regular WiFi and any of the commercial wireless networks in use throughout the world. Voice calls are carried over normal cell networks but undergo encryption called "secure communications interoperability protocol" or SCIP that only another SCIP phone can decode. All non-voice transmissions like email use algorithms specifically developed for the NSA one of which is a 384-bit key that is prohibited from pubic use.

All these James Bond features come with a hefty price tag. The Sectéra Edge costs $3350 with a two-year warranty. This puts it beyond the average consumer budget though still much cheaper than the Vertu line of luxury mobiles with their gold screens, ruby bearings and leather trim. But anyone with a generous credit card limit can get a Vertu. SCIP is a security protocol that is not widely used so obtaining an unauthorized copy is next to impossible even for government officials. Also only a select group will have the President’s new address and each person will first have to attend a security briefing. The full list of the chosen is closely guarded and aside from the obvious answers like the VP, White House chief of staff and press secretary no one really knows and if they have Wonker’s golden ticket they are not telling. Forget sleepovers in the Lincoln bedroom or state dinners because this address is now the unmistakable sign of who is really in or out in Washington’s corridors of power. Messages from the President are designed so they are impossible for the receiver to forward and messages sent to him do not allow for attachments thus minimizing the potential of a Trojan or other mal-ware gaining control of the phone and surreptitiously recording and relaying conversations. As an added precaution the address itself is subject to change regularly.

Corporations prefer it and it is still the most widely used smart phone but Research in Motion (RIM) the makers of Blackberry have their hands full trying to keep Apple’s iPhone from encroaching on their territory. The security and productivity features of BlackBerry are attractive to businesses but iPhone has a sexy design and touch screen that RIM tried to emulate with their Storm model. But the trump cards in the iPhone deck are the applications and the App Store. So until RIM can compete with the over 500 million iPhone apps downloaded, having the most popular person in the nation unofficially endorse their product has been a welcome piece of publicity. All the sturm und drang over the presidential cell phone has been free advertising to the tune of $50 million by some marketing experts estimates.

In his bid to remain connected and accessible Obama dragged the office of the President kicking and screaming into the age of personal tech and social networking. Most people in the US check their email, text their spouse, subscribe to RSS feeds and surf the net several times daily so it makes little sense for someone who heads such a hyper connected country to remain so isolated. The argument that it is for his own protection is not a good enough reason to keep the most influential decision maker in a black box where he has to rely on second or third hand information. The country and the world come together in cyberspace and now the White House is finally logging on.