simrob

One of the most fun non-research things I've had the opportunity to do in graduate school is interview people with interesting backgrounds doing extraordinary things with computer science and then write about them for a computer science audience. All these are available from here.

My most recent profile, of the outgoing technical director of the NSA's Information Assurance Directorate, is twice as long as my previous ones, because, damn, it's the outgoing technical director of the NSA's Information Assurance Directorate. This felt a lot like Real Journalism, what with the interviews, synthesis of various first-person and second-person sources, and combing through IBM technical reports and recently declassified (through FOIA) internal histories of the National Security Agency.

There were two great tidbits I couldn't figure out how to include even given twice my normal wordcount, from little lines about life at the NSA like "People come in and they do miraculous things every day" to the line "There are not enough women in this field right now, and we really need to address this problem...We’re certainly not going to out-people them if half the people aren’t getting into the game" which is awesome both because it presents the fact that women are discouraged from involvement in computer science as a medium-term threat to national security - that's a new framing - while simultaneously showing George's cold-war origins by falling into the trope of the enemy-as-unspecified-they.

2017 Update: Wow, a lot of this reads differently in the year of our Luigi twenty seventeen, huh.

In March 2012, George wrote me back to complement the article. I particularly like that he said "I sent the article to NSA's public affairs Office and they thought it was great - fair, well written, even interesting."