The Defense Department seemingly has much to be worried about, with threats of terrorism, North Korean missiles, wayward submarines and the beleaguered Osprey aircraft.
Now it is apparently anxious about the prospect of 3rd graders looking up from their homeroom computer screens and asking, “Mrs. Cheever, what is Wing-Attack Plan R?”
In what appears to be a classic and gross overreaction to bona fide computer security problems, the Defense Department is at least temporarily gutting a program by which many millions of dollars of used computers and related equipment are donated yearly to thousands of schools, charities, historically black universities, native Alaskan educational programs and impoverished Indian reservations, among others.
“I guess the whole thing is on hold,” said a spokesman for sprawling Eglin Air Force Base, which covers 724 miles over three counties in Florida’s Panhandle. The Okaloosa County School Board is a prime beneficiary of Eglin computers.
“We take education in the local community very seriously,” the spokesman said. “The children of many of our people go to the Okaloosa schools, and providing this equipment has been a top priority.”
By the Pentagon’s apparently conservative estimate, about $60 million in such equipment is donated yearly, in part due to executive orders during the Clinton administration encompassing everything from tribal colleges to native Alaskan education efforts.
Several officials involved with the donations and requesting anonymity suggested that the figure is much higher, especially if one used the cost of acquiring roughly comparable equipment.
“It’s really stupid. We’ll have to find another source of free computers,” said Drew Wilson, the principal of 1,400-student Roy High School in Roy, Utah, which has benefited from desperately needed equipment donated by Hill Air Force Base. The base gave out 1,000 monitors alone last year.
“President Bush wants to be known as the `education president,’ and keeping these donations would go a long way to demonstrating that,” said Sherrill Neale, the network resource teacher at Charles Barrett Elementary in Alexandria, Va.
Since 1996, Barrett has received Macintosh computers, laser printers, laptop cases and surge protectors from the Defense Department. Most are outdated for government use. But they have proved perfect for Barrett’s kindergarten literacy program, as well as for Internet and many other forms of instruction for the rest of the school.
The situation has changed as the result of a few incidents of lax security.
The most high-profile example is that of former CIA Director John Deutch, who faced potential criminal charges after keeping classified data on his home computer. He was among those receiving last-day pardons from President Clinton.
In early January, the Pentagon issued a directive placing dramatic new curbs on equipment donated to non-military institutions. The directive was the subject of fleeting attention at a Jan. 23 briefing at which Pentagon spokesman Adm. Craig Quigley indicated that “you can move so much more information from computer to computer via networks that were just unheard of just a few years ago with great speed and great ease. That’s both good news and bad.”
Quigley said: “We have turned over tens of thousands of pieces of computer-related equipment to schools and other institutes of learning and things of that sort across the country. That’s certainly a worthwhile effort that we all should support. But we’ve got to do what we’ve got to do to make sure that those computer hard drives, in this case, contain no classified or business-sensitive information that could inadvertently do harm.”
Typically, there seems to have been no substantive follow-up by reporters. For sure, this is not as sexy as North Korean missiles or civilian-filled killer submarines. But it does affect many lives, including students at 30 schools in and around Belleville, Ill., who use computers from Scott Air Force Base.
The directive indicates that procedures used in dealing with old classified computers will now cover unclassified ones. That means ditching their hard drives and making them of scant use, if any, to needy organizations.
The directive leaves little to the imagination when it comes to dealing with computers that have previously wound up being used by little Juanitas and Brians all over the land. In fact, it seems to have been borrowed from the Tony Soprano Guide for Dealing with Sworn Enemies:
“Remove the hard drive from the chassis or cabinet, remove any steel shielding materials, mounting brackets and cut any electrical connection to the hard drive unit. The hard drive should then be subjected in a suitable facility with individuals wearing appropriate safety equipment to physical force or extreme temperatures (pounding with a sledge hammer; incinerator) that will disfigure, bend, mangle or otherwise mutilate the hard drive so it cannot be reinserted into a functioning computer.”
Please. The vast majority of Defense Department computers have nothing classified on them. According to a technology official at one large Midwest military base with more than 20,000 employees: “We wouldn’t have anything sensitive getting out. We don’t process classified information. I understand the DOD’s concern, and the security problems they’ve had, but the repercussions on our area schools, and on our children and grandchildren, are pretty big.”
The reality is also that the needy groups that have benefited from the Pentagon largess generally don’t have the money or time to get new hard drives and do whatever retrofitting would be necessary. The directive means they’re out of luck.
It’s why a frustrated Neale dispatched a letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, first detailing the immense benefit to her school of the program. “They have made a tremendous difference. These computers are usually better-equipped than what the school system buys for us. They have network cards, tons of RAM, large hard drives and 17-inch monitors. They can go right on the network, and the students can access all the networked student applications and Internet from multiple computer stations in the classrooms.”
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“This has all changed. We have been told there has been a policy change, and we can no longer obtain equipment from government surplus. All of this equipment will now be put in dumpsters.”
Wilson, the Utah principal, was previously the boss at 700-student Roy Junior High School. The computer needs there were just as great, and the school’s funding much less than the local high school.
“I think I had three or four teachers with computers on their desk. Then I got together with Hill [Air Force Base] and, after a year and a half, every teacher had a computer on their desk. We would not have the money to do this ourselves, and this let me stretch my dollars.”
Robin Marble, an official at Hill Field Elementary School in Clearfield, Utah, personally picked up 35 computers with the Windows 95 operating program from Hill Air Force Base last October.
“I put at least one Pentium computer in each teacher’s room,” he said. “Given how our school funding works here, we were looking at the year 2003 before we could afford upgrades without this donation.
His “new” computers enable him “to use a particular reading program that the kids are really into. We couldn’t run that program on our old computers. Now, because of the program, hopefully our test scores will go up. Because of the donation, we really survived.”
The idea of getting computers without hard drives is a non-starter for Marble. “You’d probably be looking at a cost of around $4,000 to get those. That money is not there, especially in Utah.”
Oh, one last matter: If the Pentagon is so nervous, what about those thousands of computers sitting in classrooms as a result of recent donations?
Well, if there’s money left after appropriations for a missile defense shield, perhaps the Navy SEALs should start sneaking into kindergartens at night and rip out those sensitive hard drives.
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Tribune Washington bureau chief James Warren co-hosts “Unconventional Wisdom” with Michael Tackett of U.S. News & World Report at 7:05 p.m. Sundays on WGN-AM 720.