No one objected to Jeb’s frank assessment of the work at hand. American federal agencies had owned and used computers longer than anybody else in the world. That was bad news rather than good, for it meant that the federal government had the world’s oldest, creakiest, cruftiest, most messed-up systems. Everybody who knew anything about the reality behind the scenes knew that it was awful. Computer security was obscure, ultra-technical, underfunded. It was scattered and amateurish. There was nobody in charge. There were no firm policies and no accountability. And the budgets? Laughable!