I work at the State Dept. Let's talk email.

[SheilaT]

113. Thank you for this.

What little I know about the federal government and technology is that they are often years behind the times.

The Air Traffic Control System is a case in point. Back in about 1968 when they needed to install computers, some genius in the FAA said, "Lease computers? Are you nuts? We'll BUY the computers and then we'll own them!" Forty years later they were still working with those same computers, which desperately needed upgrading. Not sure how the problem was resolved, but it must have been. I do recall sitting on an airplane some time in the late '90s alongside a man who told me he was in IT and was working on those FAA computers.

In 1980 I had a student intern job with the Department of the Army, and one of the things I worked on was called The Machine Readable Project. Since Army installations around the world were in the process of being computerized, they were needed to draw up regulations about how to maintain or archive records, how long they should be kept, and so on. It started with sending out a survey to all of the installations everywhere asking them what was their current state of computerization, just to get a handle on things. I suspect it was a good ten years before the regulations got written and sent out. Which is one problem with any organization as huge as the federal government, just the sheer number of people doing vastly different things from one another, and the perceived need to have uniform standards everywhere.

I've also read over and over that technology has not penetrated most of the federal government, most notably the Supreme Court. I'm sure all the younger lawyers who clerk for them are quite tech savvy, but the Justices themselves not so much.