Obama adjusts his personal Internet policy for life in the White House

After leveraging Twitter, Facebook, and e-mail to help get elected, Barack Obama will face new challenges around Internet communications as US president -- most notably, a law dubbed the Presidential Records Act.

The transition team for President-Elect Barack Obama has now set up its own video channel on YouTube. But Mr. Obama's Twitter and Facebook pages have fallen silent since the election. Whether he'll give up e-mail and his BlackBerry as president is turning into a topic of much debate.

Audio of President George W. Bush's weekly radio addresses to the nation are already being archived on the White House Web site. However, after Mr. Obama takes the oath of office in January, he plans to continue a tradition he is already establishing: becoming the first US president to regularly address the nation through video over the Internet.

Created by the ChangeDotGov transition team, the new channel on YouTube currently offers six video clips, including "Your Weekly Address from the President-Elect," uploaded over the weekend; and "A New Chapter on Climate Change," uploaded just yesterday.

But will Mr. Obama, like Mr. Bush, feel compelled to abandon his e-mail account once he steps into the top office in the land? The answer isn't known yet. Certainly, though, the man who harnessed the Internet so well in getting elected will need to exercise more caution than he did during his more casual campaign days.

Outside of extra security concerns, Mr. Obama will soon face compliance with the Presidential Records Act, according to newspaper and wire reports.

Passed in 1978 and in effect since 1981, the Act opens up all "correspondence" of both the President and Vice President, to archiving, public review, and the prospect of subpoenas. In response to that law, after being elected in 2000, Bush decided to give up e-mailing, though he first transmitted a group message to 42 friends and relatives before retiring his old AOL address.

"Since I do not want my private conversations looked at by those out to embarrass, the only course of action is not to correspond in cyberspace," the then-President-Elect wrote.

Mr. Obama has already shown that he isn't exactly immune to concerns, either, about information that might crop up in e-mails and social networking sites. Applicants for cabinet and other high-level positions in the Obama administration are now receiving seven-page forms containing 63 questions.

Among other things, applicants are asked to list their accounts on social networks such as Facebook, as well as to describe any e-mails or blog posts that could potentially cause embarrassment to the President in the future.

Ironically, however, Mr. Obama's own outreach to young people via Facebook, the Twitter micro-blog site, and other electronic means surely seem to have helped him nail down election to the job of President.

On November 4, Mr. Obama received 66% of the vote among 18-to-29-year-old voters in the US, the highest percentage of the youth vote in a presidential contest since those demographics were first tallied about 30 years ago.

The states of Indiana and North Carolina have been credited with going Democratic on the presidential ticket solely because of the 18-to-29-year-old group, sometimes referred to as "millennials." Every other age bracket in each of those two states voted for Republican Sen. John McCain.

Young Obama supporters also became activists, canvassing across age groups to help get out the vote. In some parts of the country, at least, they appear to have succeeded.

In New York City, for example, about 15% of those who voted for Mr. Obama said they were contacted at some point by his campaign. Conversely, only about 2% of McCain voters said they'd been contacted by his campaign, according to exit polls taken by a consortium of TV networks.

Eric Greenberg, author of a book about the millennials called Generation We, recently estimated that the Obama presidential campaign used 5,000 paid field organizers, with a median age of 22.

Meanwhile, throughout the campaign, Mr. Obama relied heavily on a BlackBerry -- often strapped to his belt -- for on-the-road communications. "How about that?" he reportedly replied to a friend's e-mail after his victory on election night.

The Presidential Records Act might seem unfair, because it applies a different level of scrutiny to correspondence by the President and Vice President than to anyone else in the US. A president might even be tempted to send that law into limbo somehow. But Mr. Obama is probably unlikely to try to do that, even if he's so inclined, because an effort by Mr. Bush to do just that failed in the end.

In November 2001, Pres. Bush issued Executive Order 13233, which overturned an earlier executive order signed by President Ronald Reagan and gave broad authority to former presidents and vice presidents to withhold presidential records or delay their release indefinitely.

But six years later, US Congress voted in turn to nullify Mr. Bush's executive order, passing the Presidential Records Act Amendments of 2007.

There is some precedent in the White House for e-mailing by top brass from the executive branch. Former Vice President Al Gore used a government e-mail address along with a campaign address in running for President against Mr. Bush. That was in 2000, before after the Presidential Records Act had taken effect.

Even if Mr. Obama doesn't become the first e-mailing US president, he'll undoubtedly want to keep taking advantage of the Internet in ways that make sense given his position. His new channel on YouTube is a move in that direction, because it consists of pre-scripted content. But there should be other workable opportunities out there for the new President, too.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt innovated the radio medium with his "Fireside Chats." Pres. John F. Kennedy exploited TV with his frequent press conferences. What's next for Mr. Obama on the Internet still remains to be seen. Could he become the first US President to write a weekly blog, for example, or to send out text messages to the cell phones of citizens opting in to that process?