President-Elect Obama has made little secret of how much he loves his Blackberry. Staffers say that like many owners of the popular email device, Obama makes sure it’s at his side at all times. He receives emails from a large network of friends and supporters. However, due to the Presidential Records Act, which mandates that all presidential correspondence be entered into the official record, and if requested be made available for public review, he may be forced to give it up. In fact presidents are advised not to use email for communicating at all due to the risk of hackers accessing it.

“They could come up with some bulletproof way of protecting his e-mail and digital correspondence, but anything can be hacked,” said Diana Owen, head of the American Studies program at Georgetown University, who has studied how presidents communicate in the Internet era. “The nature of the president’s job is that others can use e-mail for him.”

Shortly before taking office in 2000, George W. Bush sent a farewell message to his email correspondents from the AOL account he had at the time:

“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,” Mr. Bush wrote from his old address, “This saddens me. I have enjoyed conversing with each of you.”

Obama however, plans to have a laptop on his desk in the Oval Office, and if he does, he’ll be the first American president to do so. Whether he will be using it to send emails to advisors, friends and relatives is yet to be seen.