Why Obama's phone calls will always go through [Telecom]

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What Declan left out was why NCS & FTS were created then. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK could not get a dialtone...

Side note: POTUS gets some things free, and pays for others. White House meals and snacks are charged back to the First Family; phone calls are not. But all USG #'s block 900 service, so Nancy Reagan had to get her own phone line installed to call her astrologer.

Is that supposed to mean that if he for some reason calls me, and the line is busy because I'm cussing out a telephone solicitor, that the call to the telephone solicitor will be dropped? And Obama will get the tail end of my cussing if I'm not paying attention to what's happening?

I ask this question for two situations: (a) at work as a low-level civilian contractor on a military base, using their phone system, and (b) at home where I doubt I get any special treatment.

***** Moderator's Note *****

For situation (a), your call can be interupted by the military's precedence system: if you're on a Routine-precedence call, and someone places an Immediate-precedence call to your phone, you will be cut off from the original call and connected to the higher-priority caller. I assume there is a warning tone or other notice of the transition.

For situation (b), your call can be interrupted only by a manual process: there is no provision in the civilian telephone network for automatic precedence userpation. Although it is possible to force a disconnect on an existing call, the terminating exchange will not be able to connect another call until the line is placed on-hook, and even then the first call that comes in will always win.

My knowledge of this is somewhat dated, however, so I'll ask those more familiar with the current system to chime in (pun intended).

Bill, who still has a four-columns Touch Tone pad from a #5 Crossbar Master Test Frame.

Bill Horne Temporary Moderator

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What it means is that the White House has had, for many years, a team of aggressive telephone operators who will track down someone and get him to the phone when the White House wishes to speak him. If the person's line is busy, they will ask the local operator to interrupt. (A longstanding capability in dial switches, which anyone can request for a fee in an emergency.)

I'm pretty sure high level officials, such as cabinet officers, have dedicated special "hot" lines in their homes.

Somewhere I heard the nature of their work requires them to still use a cord switchboard. Would anyone know accurately if that is true? A cord board does offer the maximum in flexibility.

I don't know about today, but the famous US-Soviet "hot line" installed after the Cuban missile crisis was actually a teleprinter, not a voice connection. It was generally used for social chitchat by the operators at each end since it was extremely rare for it to actually be used in a crisis.

President Lyndon Johnson was kind of a phone freak and had phones installed all over the place.

It is suggested that FDR kept in touch with Churchill by telephone, but given the limited reliability of overseas calls at that time I'm not sure how true that is. Obviously scrambling would be required to maintain confidentiality over radio waves. (The Bell System used a crude scrambler). Until an overseas cable was developed and laid in the 1950s, the radio waves used a combination of short wave and long wave, using whatever worked best at the particular time and season of the call.

***** Moderator's Note *****

I don't know if the operators at the White House still use cord boards, but it's true that _some_ White House communications still connect through them. In the words of a WHCS operator who I asked about this subject: "They never break".

It's possbile that the U.S. Russio "hot line" is still connected via TeleType (Model 15's, IIRC), but I doubt there's much chit-chat: the Russians sent their messages in Russion, and we sent ours in English, so as to assure the minimum possibility of translation error. I suppose there are now "hot lines" of one sort or another in every capitol building of every nuclear power.

Then-Senator Johnson was reported to have received a call on his IMTS car phone from Senator Everett Dirkson, his father-in-law, in which Dirkson bragged about getting a phone for _his_ car after using his influence to get to the top of the priority list (at the time, IMTS was the only system available and in such short supply that the FCC gave government officials priority). Johnson's reply was "Hold on, Ev: my other phone is ringing!".

It's true that Churchill and FDR talked on an international telephone hookup, but also true that the scrambling was primitive by today's standards. They both had, of course, the advantage of having used telegrams and letters all their lives, and so I assume that they were used to phrasing their statements in a way that would be difficult to follow even without a scrambled connection.

Bill Horne Temporary Moderator

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MSNBC had a photo series about White House life. Some of the pictures showed the President's telephones. (Other telephones may be out of view.)

JFK's desk. One colored Call Director, one black no-dial 500 set.

Ford: 6 button Touch Tone keyset with side buzzer buttons. Carter: colored Call Director (smaller than JFK's). Bush Sr bedroom: white rotary six button keyset, red no-dial 500 set. was in decline by 1988).

***** Moderator's Note *****

Shrub's office: a Mickey Mouse phone, with the cord cut.

Bill Horne Temporary Moderator

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They exchange test messages every hour (or maybe half hour). Sometimes it's poetry, sometimes literature....

SigSaly:

It's quite true. A remarkable system built by Bell Labs called SIGSALY provided digital encrypted voice communication. The Germans had broken the older scrambling system early in the war, but they apparently never even realized that the SIGSALY traffic was voice. It was decades ahead of its time, but since it was secret until 1976, its innovations were re-invented in the meantime.

Now that was funny! Thanks for making my day.

***** Moderator's Note *****

Actually, it's inaccurate: nobody ever cut the cord on Shrub.

Bill Horne Temporary Moderator

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Stop it! I'm going to hurt myself if you keep this up.

***** Moderator's Note *****

I wish, to the core of my soul, that it _was_ a laughing matter.

America is still a Puritan country, where voters are unable (or unwilling) to expend the mental energy needed to separate vice from virtue, assuming always that the presence of one indicates the abscence of the other. The more historians tell us that powerful men have always lived by different rules, the more we cling, ever more desperately, to a quant and simple minded notion that our president should be expected to meet the same standard of behavior we expect of a church pastor.

Shrub wasn't elected - he was annointed. Leaving aside how his brother Gerrymandered the Florida ballots and left us with a comical image of a cross-eyed Electoral Judge focusing on the last dangling chad in the world, I'm sure there were other deals made that we'll never hear about. If I live to be one hundred, nobody will ever convince me that Shrub's father didn't make a deal with Diebold to hack the code in the computerized voting machines in Ohio.

The 2000 election was not about issues: it was about presidential infidelity. Even if philandering _were_ a measure of executive competence, it is _not_ an excuse for an entire nation to put on blinders: Americans allowed the Florida courts to coronate a daddy's boy who would be hard-pressed to form a team of sled dogs.

Bill Horne Temporary Moderator

Please put [Telecom] at the end of your subject line, or I may never see your post! Thanks!

We have a new address for email submissions: telecomdigestmoderator atsign telecom-digest.org. This is only for those who submit posts via email: if you use a newsreader or a web interface to contribute to the digest, you don't need to change anything.