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.