This does not sound nearly as much like a "computer upgrade" as a "security downgrade". When you make top-secret files easier to move around the network, you make them easier to steal. No matter what the precautions are, wider access to people within the organization means more access for people who want to supplement their civil-servant incomes by selling secrets. Even if the technology is perfect, the people are a weak link and the more of them you put on a list the likelier it is that there's a broken link. On the other hand, we could see some interesting things if the technological solutions to this set of secure communications problems is ever made public. It amuses me to think they may wind up using off-the-shelf solutions like kerberos and PGP. Bear On Tue, 13 Mar 2001, Bill Stewart wrote:
NSA COMPUTER UPGRADE - [The Wall Street Journal, B1.] What does it take to send an e-mail to all 38,000 employees at the government's premier computing center, the supersecret National Security Agency? "An act of God," says the agency's director since 1999, Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden. The NSA, he discovered to his chagrin last year, has 68 e-mail systems. He has three computers on his desk - none of which can communicate with the others. To deal with those frustrations, Hayden is now plunging into one of the U.S. government's biggest information-technology outsourcing deals ever.
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