(((American spies envy geeks, because geeks have better hardware.)))
By CLIVE THOMPSON
The New York Times
December 3, 2006
When Matthew Burton arrived at the Defense Intelligence Agency in January 2003, he was excited about getting to his computer. Burton, who was then 22, had long been interested in international relations:
he had studied Russian politics and interned at the U.S. consulate in
Ukraine, helping to speed refugee applications of politically persecuted Ukrainians.
But he was also a big high-tech geek fluent in
Web-page engineering, and he spent hours every day chatting online with friends and updating his own blog. When he was hired by the
D.I.A., he told me recently, his mind boggled at the futuristic, secret spy technology he would get to play with: search engines that can read minds, he figured. Desktop video conferencing with colleagues around the world. If the everyday Internet was so awesome, just imagine how much better the spy tools would be.
But when he got to his cubicle, his high-tech dreams collapsed. "The reality," he later wrote ruefully, "was a colossal letdown."
The spy agencies were saddled with technology that might have seemed cutting edge in 1995. When he went onto Intelink - the spy agencies'
secure internal computer network - the search engines were a pale shadow of Google, flooding him with thousands of useless results.
If Burton wanted to find an expert to answer a question, the personnel directories were of no help. Worse, instant messaging with colleagues, his favorite way to hack out a problem, was impossible:
every three-letter agency - from the Central Intelligence Agency to the National Security Agency to army commands - used different discussion groups and chat applications that couldn't connect to one another. In a community of secret agents supposedly devoted to quickly amassing information, nobody had even a simple blog - that ubiquitous tool for broadly distributing your thoughts.
Something had gone horribly awry, Burton realized. ...
(((Yeah, it's called "technological change." A terrible business.
Covert. Sinister. All-encompassing.)))
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/magazine/03intelligence.html?ex=1322802000&en=46027e63d79046ce&ei=5090
