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Last Thursday, April 6, the United States conducted airstrikes against Syria and president Trump received a briefing on this attack at his Mar-a-Lago estate in West Palm Beach, Florida. The next day, his press secretary Sean Spicer tweeted a photo of this briefing, which shows some hitherto unseen and futuristic looking devices: Trump and his team of policy makers at Mar-a-Lago. April 6, 2017 (White House photo - click to enlarge) In the photo we see some kind of small guest or spare room with a rather narrow table and cheap chairs of the type that can be rented for events. At the far right side there seem to be dark curtains, indicating there may be windows. As was pointed out by Sean Spicer, the photo was redacted for security reasons: the content of the documents was erased. CNN provided a version of this photo showing who all the persons in the room are: (click to enlarge) Not present in the room were vice president Mike Pence, secretary of defense James Mattis and chairman of...

(Updated: December 25, 2017) On January 20, businessman Donald J. Trump became the 45th president of the United States. In the Oval Office he found telephone sets for both secure and non-secure calls, which were installed under his predecessor Barack Obama. Trump called them "beautiful phones", but nonetheless some small changes were made, apparently to better fit the image that he wants to present of himself. As Trump continued twittering there's speculation whether he still uses his very unsecure old Samsung Galaxy S III or a new phone that has been properly secured. At the moment this isn't clear, also because there are no photos yet showing Trump using a smartphone as president. This issue will be discussed when more information becomes available. President Trump signing an executive order, with the modified Cisco 8841 IP Phone and the older Cisco 7975 IP Phone with expansion module. January 24, 2017. The wooden box with presidential seal is an emergency ca...

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...

(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...