If Raoul Duke worked for NIST, he might have written something like this. I’m looking forward to switching to the Mets and ignoring this chaos for a while.
There’s a sick kind of poetry to this country’s perpetual failure to understand technology. You’d think after Snowden, Clinton’s emails, the OPM breach, and the Chinese balloon parade, someone in the grand cathedral of American power would’ve stood up and screamed, “Buy the Secretary of Defense a goddamn government phone!”
Whether he knew it or not (and he should have), the US Secretary of Defense was allegedly carrying water for sensitive, maybe classified, maybe just deeply embarrassing details — through unsecured channels. This kind of tech blunder that would get a mid-level IT guy fired from a regional HVAC distributor in Tulsa.
But the scariest part may be that this isn’t political, it’s institutional. This is what happens when a creaking government, swollen with its own bureaucracy, meets the digital age with the finesse of a drunk bear trying to thread a needle.
Let’s be honest: if you’re the CEO of even a half-respectable company — let’s say, a chain of 14 Arby’s franchises — you get a company phone. You get the corporate account, the mobile device management (MDM) policy, the email with the kill switch, and some poor schmuck in IT watching every time you download an app or forward an attachment. It’s basic. It’s baked in. It’s how modern organizations function in a world full of cyber-hyenas looking to rip your data to shreds.
Now ask yourself: why is the Secretary of Defense not subject to the same treatment? Why isn’t there a mandatory, locked-down, compartmentalized system that forces the separation of personal and official communications? A device that screams Top Secret when you try to Snapchat your lunch?
It’s not money — we spend more on defense than the next ten countries combined. It’s not tech — NSA has enough toys to make Batman jealous. It’s not even politics — both sides of the aisle love a good scapegoat after a breach.
It’s culture. The federal government still treats IT like office furniture. Necessary, vaguely annoying, and fundamentally beneath the dignity of a cabinet-level official. We give 22-year-old interns in Silicon Valley a more secure digital lifestyle than we give people with nuclear codes.
I’m not sure I understand why we don’t treat the Secretary of Defense like a CIO. Lock down their comms. Give them one channel for classified ops, another for business as usual, and a third for personal stuff that won’t get them subpoenaed. Make them sign policies with real teeth. Audit them quarterly. Give them a secure device that’s idiot-proof, not just idiot-resistant.
Note: If you’re a senior official reading this on your personal phone — stop it. Get a secure line. Or better yet, quit and go run those Arby’s franchises. At least there, when you screw up, the worst-case scenario is a bad sandwich, not global war.
Ok, this rant’s over. Time to play ball!
LET’S GO METS!