Given the reality that these are small machines that, when lost, can do a lot of potential damage, we recommend a comprehensive contingency procedure be put into place when such a device is lost or misplaced.

Each staffer issued such a device needs to be trained to notify the Electronic Communication Protection Detail immediately when the device is lost. Our recommendations go further though, into the realm of what can be. While every electronic countermeasure can be circumvented given motivation and skill, countermeasures do help.

We recommend that no communication device be issued to White House staffers without two key features: location and destruction.

Companies like TeleNav offer GPS-equipped devices that provide realtime tracking of employees in the field. Devices like the BlackBerry 8800 and BlackBerry 8700 already contain GPS functionality. If a phone were to be lost, the Electronic Communication Protection Detail should be able to query the phone to find out where it is, and then immediately dispatch a recovery team.

One feature not commonly provided on smartphones is a secure erase function. Like the tape that would self-destruct in fifteen seconds in the Mission Impossible TV show, phones and handhelds provided to White House staffers should be equipped with a remotely-triggered self-destruct mechanism.

No, I'm not recommending blue smoke come out of the device. Instead, I'm recommending that devices like this be outfitted with firmware-level DoD data wipe technology. Conditions like the failure to properly type in a password or the receipt of a signal sent to the phone would cause the phone to begin a wiping process on all internal data. Obviously, there's no guarantee that a wipe would complete, but this is an added level of security that should exist on all phones used by White House staffers.

While some custom work would be necessary, this is not a hard technology to implement. All that would be necessary are software changes -- and a mechanism to make sure the phone doesn't exhibit any outward signs that it's wiping itself. In fact, if it appears that the phone's battery is dead, it will probably buy enough time for the wipe to complete.

Recommendation: restore full function of the Presidential Records Act
Our final recommendation is political, rather than technical. Although not directly an email issue, the conflict between the intent of the Presidential Records Act and Executive Order 12,233 needs to be resolved.

As we discussed earlier in this series, Executive Order 12,233 virtually guarantees that presidential records won't be disclosed. Once again, we think it's important to have an informed populace, and we think that by permanently locking presidential records -- even from other branches of the government -- we lose some of the checks and balances that have proven so essential to America over the years.

Final thoughts
This has been quite the journey down the rabbit hole. What we thought was simply a news story about email messages turned out to be an investigation into some potent national security problems. What we thought was a story just about some basic technology turned out to be a wild ride through 25 years of presidential perogative.

If you take anything at all away from this series, please make it be this: email in the White House needs to be fixed. Not because we want to give Congress a bigger stick with which to beat on presidents, but because some really bad things could happen if it's not fixed.

We've included some recommendations in this article, but there are still more questions than answers. We've listed many of them during our investigation. Only once all the questions are answered can a more comprehensive policy be defined that can protect our presidents' ability to conduct business while protecting them from how they conduct business.

In our final installment next week, we'll list the questions that have yet to be answered.