How can it be that the U.S. government has produced the most advanced, sweeping technology for spying that the world has ever known, yet it can’t create a website that allows Americans shopping for health insurance to simply log on?
That is the intriguing question posed by Ezra Klein at The Washington Post, who has a little fun comparing and contrasting the two systems on his Wonkbook blog this morning.
Klein notes that the “technical competence and reach” displayed by the NSA – monitoring 60 million phone calls in Spain in one month – is so overwhelming that the French foreign minister conceded that his nation’s leaders are “jealous” of the spy network’s abilities.
At the same time, the debacle resulting from the Obamacare rollout revealed “extraordinary technological incompetence,” Klein noted. In fact, reports on the ACA website project, which was farmed out to 55 contractors, demonstrates that some sectors of the government are far behind in software and technology as a matter of course.
Klein reaches a comical conclusion:
“The joke here is obvious: Can't President Obama just ask the NSA guys to run the Obamacare web site? After all, the ones who are no longer spying on foreign leaders will need something to do.
“But the more serious question is whether both of these visions of the government can be right at the same time. Is it possible that the U.S. government can contain both the terrifying technological competence implied by the NSA stories and the unnerving technological incompetence displayed in the Obamacare stories?
“You could make an argument for it. The NSA has much more in-house technological talent than the Centers of Medicaid and Medicare Services. They've also had a lot longer to get their systems up and working. Perhaps they're just better at what they do.
“But it seems at least as likely that the NSA is a whole lot less omniscient than the Snowden documents suggest. A program that sounds inescapable and infallible on paper might be a mess in reality.”
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