Overhaul Moves White House Data Center Into Modern Era - New York Times.
In reality, it was something of a low-tech dungeon.
Until it closed for its biggest overhaul since John F. Kennedy settled into its wood-paneled conference room, most of the room’s monitors used — get this — picture tubes. Communications were often by fax. The computers and telephones looked like the best technology available, in 1985. There was a small kitchen, but it had no sink.
On Dec. 27 the new Situation Room is to open formally, the result of planning that reaches back to before the Sept. 11 attacks but took on added urgency afterward. The White House offered a preview to two reporters on Monday, days before its new data center is pumped full of classified information and its doors are sealed to outsiders.
Even in its new incarnation, it is not quite up to the standards of “24.” But it is getting closer. For starters, Mr. Bush’s new main conference room, just underneath the main floor of the West Wing, has six flat-screen televisions for secure video conferences, and the technology linking them to generals and prime ministers around the globe makes it less likely that the encrypted voices and images will go black. (That happened regularly in connections to Baghdad, an event one former administration official said had been known to “prompt a presidential outburst.”)
The screens also have what Joe Hagin, the deputy White House chief of staff, described in a tour as “John Madden telestrators,” the ability to perform on-screen drawings.
(White House technologists settled on NEC plasma flat-screens for the president’s main conference room and LCD screens, made by LG, in the remainder of the chamber.)
The watch officers, who were previously seated so they stared at walls rather than each other, are now arrayed on two tiers of curved computer terminals that can be fed both classified and unclassified data from around the country and the world. That ends a problem that most multi-national companies solved years ago, an inability to merge different kinds of data without effectively having to cut and paste. “We were all underwhelmed the first time we walked into the Situation Room,” he said in an interview at the White House on Monday, an
assessment shared by others.
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