The Coming BlackBerry Crack Down

Technology that slips right into your pocket makes it trivial for legislators and lobbyists to be in constant, instantaneous contact. But when it comes to the practice of politics, can ubiquitous connectivity be too much of a good thing?

The latest worry for open government advocates: so-called PIN messaging. It's something you do with a BlackBerry. Each and every one of those devices has a unique eight-digit identification number, known only to the BlackBerry's owner. But share that PIN number with a contact, and it's a direct and immediate Blackberry-to-Blackberry connection. Think of it as mainlining personal communications. Unlike text messaging, PINing is free. And users say that communicating via PIN is often quicker than traditional email, more akin to instant messaging on the computer. All of which makes PIN messaging a quick, fluid, inexpensive way for lobbyists, legislators, staffers, allies, and advocates to ping notes back and forth as the day goes on -- including during official legislative business in hearing rooms and assembly floors.

(If all this is sounding remarkably appealing to you, you can try PINing on your own device. Visit Options then Status to find your unique ID. Send it to your preferred contacts, or broadcast it on Facebook with this application created by Crackberry.com.)

Part of what has transparency advocates feeling shaky is that Blackberry-to-Blackberry PIN messaging leaves less of a traceable electronic trail than email messages, while at the same time being so low-profile as to travel unnoticed with the legislator wherever he or she goes. That can get people into trouble. In Florida, three staffers from the state's Public Service Commission were recently removed from their jobs or otherwise penalized for sharing their personal PINs to lobbyists from the Florida Power & Light utility company. PINing, reports the Miami Herald, has a reputation in Tallahassee of being a more private, protected way than email or text messaging of doing the business of politics.

Among U.S. states, Florida has some of the strongest open government laws, in part due to the leadership of Governor Charlie Crist (whose own staff reportedly has its own share of frequent PINers). But open government laws were were written when some of the technology in common use today, from Blackberry-to-Blackberry PINing to Twitter tweets to Facebook wall post and more, didn't even exist. In this age of constant communications, users are often platform agnostic. The Herald quotes one legislator as saying "It's all coming in so fast, I don't pay attention which message is which type."

But archivists and law enforcement can't afford to be quite so loosey-goosey. Each technology has its own nuances when it comes to record keeping and the leaving of a trail. If open government advocates fail to update transparency and accountability regulations to grapple with the newest and coolest tech, those measures run the risk of becoming as obsolete as the dedicated car phone.

More than that, what has good government advocates worried is that the intimacy of Blackberrys is simply too invasive when it comes to legislators and those who hunger to connect with them in real time. On the local level, there's a growing movement by officials to take that concern seriously. Colorado, West Virginia, Vermont, and New Hampshire limit the use of BlackBerrys and other mobile devices during legislative sessions. The Maine House of Representatives has considered a black out on text messages and emails lobbyists and legislators during official assembly business. Saratoga, Florida bans texting and emailing during public meetings, and San Jose is toying with the idea of cutting off communications between lobbyists and legislators while the city conducts official business. For its part, when the Obama White House asked congressional leaders to come in for a briefing on Afghanistan and Pakistan in March, they confiscated the Hill leaders' Blackberrys and other cell phones at the door.

And in one Pennsylvania case, a lobbyist, later sentenced to three years in prison for improper dealings with former Representative Curt Weldon, admitted to investigators that she deposited her BlackBerry into an Arby's garbage can in the hopes of hiding incriminating messages between her and the congressman. (Prosecutors, though, were able to retrieve most of her messages off of a server. Emails leave a record.)

There's still an entirely valid question, though, about whether, concerns about a paper trail aside, cracking down on Crackberrys is a step down the right path. For one thing, BlackBerrys grant onto us the ability to mulitask. Congressional hearings on Capitol Hill are notoriously sparsely attended (unless, of course, professional baseball players are in the house). That's in part because attending a two or three or four-hour session pulls the legislator away from the rest of their busy day. Being able to get a little work done up on the dais while some other guy or gal is bloviating might just be enough to put more congressional behinds in more Capitol Hill hearing room chairs.

But even beyond the time-management advantages of mobile communications, is there really much of a substantive difference between a legislator and lobbyist texting one another during a committee hearing and the two meeting up immediately before and/or after the session to pre-game or post-game? What's more, connecting a legislator to the outside world via the always-on Internet does for them something critical that it does for the rest of us: it makes us measurably smarter, as we Google up facts and pester friends and sources with questions all day long. Is it such a bad thing for our elected officials to have that sort of technology-enabled instant recall -- even if that means pinging a lobbyist for an assist -- as they go about writing laws, and debating the future of our city, state, republic?

To come back to the concern of the moment, PINing, as far as transparency is concerned, that might be a settled question -- though not in a way either legislators or open government advocates much like. Blackberry-to-Blackberry messages aren't encrypted, meaning that once intercepted they can be easily read. That's the kind of openness nobody is looking for.

(CNN screenshot of Representative Eric Cantor [R-VA], who swears he was just taking notes.)

(With Micah Sifry)