Bush White House in tech Stone Age
Stories like this, about primitive communication gear in the White House, make me crazy. Here we thought the incompetence of the last eight years was due to idiotic Bush appointees...but maybe it was also because they were running the most powerful nation on Earth with obsolete versions of computer software, etc.
From the Washington Post: "If the Obama campaign represented a sleek, new iPhone kind of future, the first day of the Obama administration looked more like the rotary-dial past.
Two years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, Obama officials ran smack into the constraints of the federal bureaucracy yesterday, encountering a jumble of disconnected phone lines, old computer software, and security regulations forbidding outside e-mail accounts.
......One member of the White House new-media team came to work on Tuesday, right after the swearing-in ceremony, only to discover that it was impossible to know which programs could be updated, or even which computers could be used for which purposes. The team members, accustomed to working on Macintoshes, found computers outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft software....
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/21/AR2009012104249.html
Yes, it seems the PCs in the White House have 6 year-old software on them...and laptops were generally not allowed. Now I know why the Bushies were always "accidentally" leaking documents to reporters...just look at the crappy tools they had to work with.
Inertia was probably part of the problem, but there's also the little matter of compliance with the Presidential Records Act. Congress needs to get involved to make sure our government has the best state-of-the-art equipment to do their job.
After all, the experts are warning that the next major terrorist attack will be computer-based and delivered via cyberspace...turning the Internet into a digital battleground.
Potential attackers, even those with modest skills, can launch devastating attacks...they have increasingly sophisticated hacking tools and a never-ending supply of vulnerabilities. Scary stuff.
Thank goodness that the Obama Administration will be the best in history to push the executive office into the 21st century.
