Until very recently, people entering most intelligence community facilities — top leadership included — couldn’t even get in the building wearing a FitBit or other Bluetooth-enabled fitness tracker. The idea of setting up building-wide wireless access borders on blasphemy for the old guard, the nation’s intelligence chief acknowledges, but times are changing.
“We’re attempting to establish an [intelligence community]-wide policy for wireless, which is somewhat controversial,” Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said May 17 at the GEOINT Symposium in Orlando, Florida. “But you have to allow for technology to change, because inevitably, it will.”
But unlike most major changes, the move to implement Wi-Fi isn’t a matter of creating efficiency or saving money — it’s an appeal to the millennial generation of talent that is driving this change of policy. So far, pilot programs are testing out Wi-Fi in pockets across the intelligence community, but so far a uniform guideline remains elusive as leadership tries to establish standards.
“There isn’t really an incremental change or improvement in efficiency by virtue of wireless,” Clapper said. “So right now everybody’s off doing pilots, if you will, across the IC — and the governing stipulations for managing these pilots is inconsistent. A couple months ago [IC leadership met] to go through this issue, and everybody acknowledged that we need a policy, but what it’s actually going to say — that’s going to be hard to work out. But I’m committed to getting some kind of governance, something published, before I leave.”
Clapper also said he’s dedicated to overhauling or at least improving the security clearance process before he leaves, which is likely by the end of the Obama administration. While the general consensus has been that fewer security clearances should be issued, Clapper said more actually are needed to bolster first responders and law enforcement.
“What we try to do is reduce requirements for clearance when it turns out access wasn’t required. We cut back 600,000 or so clearances, mostly at the Defense Department…that removes a huge burden on the currently very stressed investigatory apparatus,” Clapper said, acknowledging the enormous existing backlog in security clearance processing. “The point isn’t reducing clearances, but reducing clearances where access isn’t required and focusing on where it is, [including] at state and local levels. [Law enforcement and first responders] have every much of need for understanding as we do…the system we have today just isn’t very flexible.”
