The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [37]
Who were these strangers from distant, scary wings of the U.S. government? Were they rivals? Allies? Neutrals? No one even knew. The new Homeland Security empire was going to eat up any number of proud, independent agencies. Some said six, some said twelve, and some said twenty-two. This meant that no one’s turf was safe anymore.
It also meant something more promising, though. It meant opportunity: the biggest federal re-org in forty years. It meant that the right bunch of computer-security geeks, in the right place with the right tools and attitude, might break out from obscurity. Bold nerds from some mainframe garage in the Commerce Department might end up giving marching orders to the Secret Service.
Jeb was the kind of man that computer people naturally turned to in a crisis. Jeb rather resembled Jabba the Hutt, if Star Wars characters had been cops from Texas. Jeb’s mood, always dark and cynical, had ratcheted up several notches to grimly militant. Jeb had the rigid-eyed stare of a man who was summing up his life’s work and laying it right on the line. Jeb had shaved his cherished beard, revealing a nest of pale double chins. Jeb had even found somebody in Washington willing to cut him an enormous blue serge suit.
Van had never seen Jeb answer to “Dr. Jeremijenko” before. Jeb Jeremijenko didn’t even have a real doctorate. No one ever used his unspellable last name. Jeb had learned his computer security as a street cop who had stumbled over a UNIVAC in Houston in the 1960s.
Banging a mahogany table with the meaty flat of his hand, Jeb hushed the chaos in the room. By getting together in this very, very quiet way, Jeb bellowed, they could get some useful progress made in the stupefying mess that was federal computer-security policy. In other words, they could finally settle down and cut the crap.
No one objected to Jeb’s frank assessment of the work at hand. American federal agencies had owned and used computers longer than anybody else in the world. That was bad news rather than good, for it meant that the federal government had the world’s oldest, creakiest, cruftiest, most messed-up systems. Everybody who knew anything about the reality behind the scenes knew that it was awful. Computer security was obscure, ultra-technical, underfunded. It was scattered and amateurish. There was nobody in charge. There were no firm policies and no accountability. And the budgets? Laughable!
However: after September 11, a day of reckoning had finally arrived. Jeb knew it. The crowd knew it. Congress knew it. Anybody who watched the news or read the papers knew it. The old lazy, scatterbrained ways just weren’t going to cut it anymore.
Every great crisis was also a great opportunity for people with the guts to dare and win. Now, Jeb declared, was the vital moment to level with each other, get a strong sense of the will and abilities of the computer-security community, and to really clear the air for solid, effective action.
Van knew that this sermon of Jeb’s meant big trouble. Jeb was positioning the CCIAB to become a kamikaze high-tech outfit that played fast and loose with the old rules. Van was okay with that risk. Realistically, there wasn’t any other choice. If he, Derek R. Vandeveer, was ever going to become an effective federal security official, then Washington was going to have to ditch old rules by the bucketful.
Some busybody think-tanker from the Competitive Enterprise Institute went trolling for Van: “Does our Stanford professor concur with Dr. Jeremijenko’s unorthodox approach?”
“Be quiet!” Van roared back. “Be quick! And be on time.” Nobody had any idea what Van meant by this, but the startled conference room went silent for twenty-five seconds.
Nobody else asked Van another