Obama updates presidency: Smartphone to pierce bubble

US President Barack Obama is carrying an ultra-secure smartphone to keep him from "getting stuck in a bubble," his spokesman Robert Gibbs confirmed Thursday.

 Before Obama's inauguration on Tuesday, there were reports of how unhappy he was at the prospect of having strict limits on his communications with family, friends and the outside world for security and legal reasons.

 Photos taken during the presidential election campaign often caught him tapping away on a BlackBerry. But security concerns meant he could not keep a standard smartphone as president for fear that his communications would be hacked or his whereabouts revealed.

 Gibbs said the security on the device had been "enhanced" to allow him to "stay in touch with senior staff and a small group of personal friends ion a way that use will be limited."

   But there was a catch. The e-mails would all be subject to the presidential records law that requires all presidential communications to be documented.

 "There are ... some narrow exemptions," Gibbs said. "But ... the presumption from the counsel's office is that ... they will be subject to the Presidential Records Act."

   Gibbs, who has worked closely with Obama for a number of years, recounted his own emailing relationship with the president.

 "I've gotten e-mails from him - not recently, or not in a few days, I should say - that go from anywhere from something that's very strictly business to, 'Why did my football team perform so miserably on either any given Saturday or any given Sunday?'"

   Gibbs, who called the solution "a compromise," did not specify the technical details of the device.

 A report in The Atlantic Monthly magazine Thursday said the solution had been found in a special BlackBerry look-alike made by General Dynamics and called the Sectera Edge.

 The device was developed for the National Security Agency's "secure mobile environment portable electronic device programme," and is "certified to protect wireless voice communications classified Top Secret and below as well as access email and websites classified Secret and below," according to the company's website.

 The price of such devices normally ranges from 2,650 dollars to 3,350 dollars.

 Obama got a boost in his quest to keep a modern communications device to stay in touch outside the bubble from John D Podesta, the head of Obama's transition team, who wrote last week about the issue in an opinion piece for The Los Angeles Times.

 "I've been working with Barack Obama since before the election, and I know that without his virtual connection to old friends and trusted confidants beyond the bubble that seals off every president from the people who elected him, he'd be like a caged lion padding restlessly around the West Wing, wondering what's happening on the other side of the iron bars that surround the People's House," Podesta wrote.