Since email, computer files in the form of attachments, key contact lists, and so much more are accessible from and stored within these tiny potential nightmares, we believe they need the same careful and integrated oversight that White House email should be getting.

Recommendation: manage political email via the Electronic Communication Protection Detail
Once a candidate wins an election and moves into the White House, all electronic communication, political or otherwise, needs to be managed by the proposed Electronic Communication Protection Detail.

We discussed the reasoning for this earlier, in our Hatch Act recommendation, but we feel it's necessary that the Electronic Communication Protection Detail be clearly tasked with the management of all White House email, not just email that's purely government related.

We have absolutely no problem with the Republican National Committee using a firm like SMARTech to manage non-White House email or email for presidential candidates. In fact, our limited research into SMARTech indicated a company that seems to know its stuff.

However, once a candidate becomes president, the game changes. No longer is the candidate transported in his campaign bus, now The President is transported in Marine One and Air Force One.

Likewise, as we've made abundantly clear in our investigation, White House email, political and otherwise, must be managed by a professional, career Electronic Communication Protection Detail.

Recommendation: archiving must be managed professionally
Without a doubt, enterprise-quality archiving servers need to be set up for the management of all White House email. This technology is offered by many companies, it's solid, tested, and used by the very largest of corporations to comply with their own government-mandated record-keeping regulations.

Once again, we recommend the Electronic Communication Protection Detail manage these systems. We also recommend that all email, policy, political, or otherwise, be archived. Remember that archiving doesn't mean disclosing and the practice of archiving is a technical act, while the practice of disclosing is a political or policy act.

It's up to the politicians to determine whether anything from the archives should be disclosed. But it's up to experienced IT professionals to make sure everything's available if disclosure becomes necessary.

Because technology, media, and file formats are changing at breakneck pace, another responsibility of the Electronic Communication Protection Detail with regard to archiving would be the regularly updating of archives to new formats. In fact, we recommend that the entire cumulative library of archives be checked and migrated every four years as technology and file formats change.

Recommendation: handhelds need management, tracking, and self-destruct
Given the rigors of the job, it's not surprising that White House staffers are human. People sometimes lose things. Given the long hours and high stress, we're not surprised that Karl Rove and likely other staffers have lost BlackBerry handhelds. In fact, we'd be surprised if they didn't.