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Showing posts from January, 2017

The 5-year anniversary of this weblog

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Today is the 5-year anniversary of this weblog, so this time we will look back at the main developments and the highlights from the 108 articles that have been published here so far. The very first posting was on January 18, 2012, and contained a video about the White House Situation Room , providing a nice look at the telecommunications equipment used at the highest level of the US government. The first header of this weblog from January 2012, showing communications equipment in the watch center of the US National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) Initially, this weblog was called Top Level Telecommunications, as it was the intention to write about the communications equipment used by high-level government and military officials. This fills a gap, because about crypto equipment for secure communications, there were already some very good websites, like those from Jerry Proc and the Dutch Crypto Museum , while for example the White House Museum and Cryptome provided great photos of t

The presidential communications equipment under Barack Obama

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(Updated: January 31, 2017) Over the past five years, a range of articles on this weblog covered the secure and non-secure phones used by president Barack Obama , whether in the White House, at his Summer residence or aboard Air Force One. With Donald Trump taking over the US presidency in a few days, it's a good moment to look back and provide a comprehensive overview of the communications equipment during Obama's time in office. Additional context for this was provided by a background story from the New York Times from April last year, as well as by several other sources, which show an almost complete overhaul of the communication systems of the Obama White House. Preparations under George W. Bush For the communications systems used by the president of the United States it was more important to be reliable, than to be up-to-date, and so the equipment often served decades, almost until the moment that there are few officials left who know how to maintain it. Modernization s