A brief look into presidential telephones
Hat tip to the viral LinkedIn post from Chris Palermo which inspired this piece about telephony systems in the White House.
Since Trump’s inauguration on Monday, there’s been many photographs of him in the Oval Office, sitting behind the desk, with a pile of executive orders laid out. UC geeks undoubtedly noticed the pair of telephones—identified to be high-end Cisco 8851 units—prominently positioned at an angle facing the president.
Understandably, these Cisco VoIP phones aren’t put on the desk just off the shelf. They’ve been hardened by a third party to provide on-hook security to ensure the device remains secure when not in use (i.e. handset is “on-hook”), as evidenced by the protruding box-shaped modules attached to the backs.1
The one with a yellow presidential seal is for secure communications. The other is for regular calls. Yellow is the color code for U.S. “Top Secret/SCI” classification, sometimes referred to as “above top secret.” (SCI stands for “Sensitive Compartmented Information.”)
Also, in 2018 UC sleuths learned of a new secure phone outside of the White House. It was Thanksgiving Day in the second year of Trump’s first term as he spoke to members of the military from his famous Mar-a-Lago resort. Photos of the occasion showed President Trump using a yellow-bezeled Cisco 8841 phone.2
There was even a period of transition when the Oval Office had mixed devices: an Avaya 9608 for non-secure calls and a Cisco 7975 for encrypted secure calls.3
It’s amazing that in the relatively short history of the United States and the invention of the telephone, the POTUS now has state-of-the-art secure audio and video communications at his disposal, anywhere in the world.
Going way back to the year 1879, the White House installed its first telephone with a simple number “1.” It was just a few years after Alexander Graham Bell had patented his famous invention. President Rutherford B. Hayes was the first president to blaze this communications trail even if he rarely used the device.
It wasn’t until 1929 that President Herbert Hoover got to have a telephone in the Oval Office, which is not even a decade ago.
https://www.electrospaces.net/2021/01/the-phones-in-president-bidens-oval.html
https://www.electrospaces.net/2018/11/trump-has-new-secure-phone-outside.html
https://www.electrospaces.net/2015/07/new-ip-phones-in-white-house.html