Oh, great

Surely the Government’s relationship with IT can’t actually be quite as bad as we all cynically assume. Right?

[A leaked intelligence document posted on a website] was... revealing. It was a message from the head of counter-terrorism policy at the Foreign Office to the prime minister’s special foreign policy and defence adviser, dated 20 September 2000. The summary was startling: a new computer system, called Fortress, which had been designed to distribute material, had proved to be slower than the old paper-based system. It was a plea for returning to old-fashioned methods, if the system couldn’t be fixed. Fortress had gone live 12 months previously, but substantial problems had arisen and the situation had reached a point where lives were being put in danger.

( ‘The software had in-built printing constraints as a security feature, so it was impossible for a group of people to sit around a meeting table with copies of a report in front of them’ )