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Will the US State Dept please use Firefox?

By Sean Michael Kerner on July 14, 2009 3:36 PM

From the "Mrs. Clinton" files:

In a really interesting town hall exchange (for which a full transcript is now available) a US State Department official asked Mrs. Clinton if he could please get the Mozilla Firefox browser for his PC.

"I just moved to the State Department from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and was surprised that State doesn't use this browser," Jim Finkle asked. "It was approved for the entire intelligence community, so I don't understand why State can't use it. It's a much safer program."

That admission, from a former member of the US intelligence establishment is interesting itself. I personally did not know that Firefox was approved in that way by the US intelligence community -- though I'm not surprised. It also speaks to a lack of a cohesive IT policy across all US government assets.

Clinton didn't know the answer to Finkle's question so she referred it to her under secretary. Under Secretary of State Kennedy told Finkle that it is an expense question, to which Finkle replied that Firefox is free.

Kennedy responded with a very interesting retort, that 'nothing is free.'

"Yes, you're correct, it's free, but it has to be administered, the patches have to be loaded," Kennedy said. "It may seem small, but when you're running a worldwide operation and trying to push, as the Secretary rightly said, out FOBs and other devices, you're caught in the terrible bind of triage of trying to get the most out that you can, but knowing you can't do everything at once."

So..it's a question of priorities then? I personally think the Under Secretary was just trying to come up with a good answer. Clinton did have one final thought on Firefox (and free software) that was interesting.

"If we're spending money on things that are not productive and useful, let us know, because there are tens of thousands of people who are using systems and office supplies and all the rest of it," Clinton said. "The more money we can save on stuff that is not cutting edge, the more resources we'll have to shift to do things that will give us more tools....help us save money on stuff that we shouldn't be wasting money on, and give us the chance to manage our resources to do more things like Firefox, okay?"

Sounds okay to me Hillary.

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