3 ms·
Over the course of a few years I spent a lot of time in a secure environment in a DoD facility to which I had to travel multiple times for a project. The enviro
by mcculley 5y ago
Over the course of a few years I spent a lot of time in a secure environment in a DoD facility to which I had to travel multiple times for a project. The environment, a maze of cubicles filled with computers, had been installed inside a historic building. For historic preservation reasons, the exterior windows were kept as built. For security reasons, there was a sheet of plywood painted white inside all of the windows. The building allowed no natural light to enter and emitted only a diffuse glow. It was a miserable place to spend long days, illuminated only by flickering fluorescent light.
We had some serious storms come through while I was there. A lot of the permanent residents went home. As I was a visitor and there just for as long as it took me to fix some problems, I was encouraged to stay and work late. I was assured that we would not lose power because the building had been recently equipped with a generator.
A storm came through and the building lost power. It was almost entirely pitch black in the building full of computers, which all went dark, fans and disks suddenly silent. A small fraction of the emergency lights came on. Most were in disrepair and never lit up. It turns out that in a secure environment, one has to make special arrangements to have someone inspect the emergency lighting. We heard the generator spin up. Still no computers, no lights.
In the darkness, one little nook came to life. This nook contained the coffee pot, microwave, and refrigerator. Apparently this organization considered only one piece of equipment important enough to be connected to the generator. We thereafter referred to it as the mission critical coffee pot.
- Aperocky 5y agoThe whole office would have grounded to an halt as people egress over essential items such as coffee and heated food, mission critical indeed.
- mikepurvis 5y agoYour story reminds me a little of Ed Snowden's description of his experiences working in secure environments in Permanent Record. Each individual measure may make sense in isolation, but just like with any long-lived project, the sum total of all of them can absolutely still add up to absurdity.
- walrus01 5y agoif you spend enough working in, around or near a SCIF it becomes pretty mundane. the windowless rooms and sterile environment are actually not much different from commercial telecom stuff, like if you meet a person who works for an ILEC and has a desk in a CO. stick your cellphone in the little shelf box outside the entrance to the secured area, pick it up when you leave, etc.
- mcculley 5y agoI found telecom environments to be similarly sterile but more competently designed and managed than SCIFs. Maybe this is unfair and what seem to be failures are actually by design. Maybe the soul crushing environment is a necessary condition to be in the right frame of mind to inhibit ethical analysis and implement DoD policy.
- isityouyesitsme 5y agoYeah, because whatever YOU work on has nothing an outsider can throw a stone at, ethically. GTFO.
- mcculley 5y agoI worked on DoD projects that I later realized were unethical, or at least unethically used. Yes, I do think that my current work is less likely to be used for terrible purposes just to get someone promoted.
- geoffeg 5y agoMany years ago I worked as a contractor at a financial institution that was a little full of themselves. I had to be escorted from the entrance, through the main office, to a smaller, "less secure" room inside the main office. The bathrooms were a short walk away from the less secure room through the main office so I had to have an escort to go to the bathroom. The escort would wait outside the bathroom for me and escort me back to my desk. While annoying and inconvenient (and ridiculous) it wasn't really a big deal until I came out of the bathroom one day to find the escort had disappeared. (I later found out he had someone kind of family emergency and had to run home, I guess dire enough that he didn't have time to inform me.) I asked around the office where my escort had gone but no one knew so I walked back to my desk on my own. The next day the CTO called me into his office and said he should have me fired right then and there for violating security protocols. I explained what had happened but he didn't care because it looked bad for him. Apparently I should have had someone call security to escort me back to my desk. Two months later they started construction on the room I was in to provide a path to an exit that didn't go through the main office. To use the bathroom I had to go through that exit and leave the building, walk outside to the main entrance and use the "non-secure" bathroom and then be escorted back to my desk through the office.
- erik_seaberg 5y agoI’m reminded of a Hyderabad office building that had half of the outlets backed by UPS. I thought it was smart, until the day every UPS outlet (and every desktop) went dark simultaneously. The other outlets still worked.