Obama may have to give up his beloved BlackBerry.

The president-elect continues to holster one on his belt, as he has for years, but national security concerns may force him to shelve it soon.

"I'm still clinging to my BlackBerry," Obama said Wednesday. "They're going to have to pry it out of my hands," echoing Charlton Heston's famous quote about his handgun.

The Secret Service and his advisers are worried about hackers, worried about court subpoenas that could make public his e-mails, text messages, phone records - even what Web sites he's surfed. All that concern has prompted debate about the pros and cons of being president without privacy.

"I think it's important not to live in a bubble" Obama told CNBC's Jim Harwood on Wednesday. "I'm still in a scuffle around that, but look, it's the hardest thing about being president."

Attorney Ray Gifford heads the communications practice at the law firm Kamlet Shepherd Reichert in Denver. He also ran the Progress & Freedom Foundation, which focuses on the digital revolution.

"It's a travesty," Gifford said Friday. "He's a victim of transparency laws and the Freedom of Information Act. In general these are great laws in the name of open government, but specific applications create less open government. It's a perverse outcome. The person we want best informed will be less informed."

Gifford joked that while he was chairman of Colorado's Public Utilities Commission, he would especially worry "about the jokes my idiot friends would send me. What if they ended up being made public?" But those are the little inanities of life that help get you through the day. As Gifford said, people behave quite differently when they know all their communications are out in the open, and I don't think that's a healthy thing.

Obama is worried about being able to jump in and out of the flow of information. He doesn't want to be at the mercy of reading only the press clippings he'll be given. He doesn't want a carefully scripted life "where, you know, people aren't just complimenting you or standing up when you enter a room."

"What I'm hoping to do is see if there's some way we can arrange for me to continue to have access to a BlackBerry," Obama said. "This is a concern, I should add, not just of the Secret Service, but also lawyers . . . And so I'm still in a scuffle around that."

I've had a company-issued BlackBerry for about three months and, like most other users, I'm hooked. CrackBerry, they say. It increases my productivity and efficiency. It keeps me in constant contact with work and with friends. I had it with me on the beach in Mexico last month, and was able to provide valuable input into decisions and still enjoy a great vacation. True, it often irritates the heck out of those around me. I don't care enough to do much about it. Every time it buzzes, I can't help but find out why. It helps me do my job better and keeps me in constant touch with everyone and everything. I'm on the Internet whenever and wherever. I was in the waiting room of the doctor's office a few weeks ago, reading The New York Times - on my BlackBerry.

Obama asked Harwood, "How do you stay in touch with the flow of everyday life? It's not just the flow of information. I mean, I can get somebody to print out clips for me, and I can read newspapers. What it has to do with is having mechanisms where you are interacting with people who are outside the White House in a meaningful way. I've got to look for every opportunity to do that - ways that aren't scripted, ways that aren't controlled . . . If I can manage that over the next four years, I think it will help me serve the American people better because I'm going to be hearing their voices . . . ."

Bothered by BlackBerries? I'm told iPhones are worse - I mean better. I was interviewing Rich Barton, founder of zillow.com and a bit of an E-commerce guru. He switched from BlackBerry to iPhone about six months ago and he's amazed at the difference: "I walk around with an open computer on all the time. It's amazing."

Its use has led Barton to predict a future in which "everyone will be connected to each other all the time, and everything will be videoed all the time."

Won't that be swell?

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