http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/24/AR2005112400216.html By Deepa Babington Reuters November 24, 2005 KHAN BANI SAAD, Iraq (Reuters) - Newly fitted with the latest communications equipment, a U.S.-Iraqi coordination office north of Baghdad was ready to connect with similar facilities all over the country at the touch of a button. Instead, the U.S. contractor who installed the network returned a few days later to find that Iraqi officials had covered the brand new equipment in plastic and left it untouched, afraid of mishandling and ruining it. "I kept trying to call them and I was baffled as to why I couldn't get through," said James, a contractor hired by the U.S. military to set up the coordination office, who declined to give his last name. "They were just afraid of breaking it." As the United States tries to bring greater sophistication to Iraqi police and army communications -- an essential tool in battling the insurgency -- it is finding that the latest foreign technology from around the world gets bogged down by quirks in local custom and petty hierarchies in Iraq's bureaucracy. Connecting joint U.S.-Iraqi coordination centers through a secure private network is part of a broader effort by the United States to get officials across Iraq to share intelligence and other essential information quickly and confidentially. Since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, the centers have communicated through patchy radio or Voice over Internet phones and used the Yahoo! email service to exchange reports. The centers needed a more reliable method of sharing information, but as the U.S. contractor found out, there is more to it than simply installing the latest technology and handing out instruction manuals. "I guess for them this is going from barely crawling to running," he said, as a convoy of Humvees trundled through town to escort him to a center that needed help using the Internet. In one instance, the contractor said he gave a list of 200 key contact numbers to an official at one center, expecting it to be posted around the facility so that everyone on the staff could have the numbers at their fingertips. Instead, the official kept the list to himself -- apparently in an effort to hold on to the small amount of power it allowed him to wield over the rest of the staff. HI-TECH HITCHES Training local officials is another challenge. James trained some workers at one center, but they didn't share that knowledge with anyone else on the staff, he said. In a makeshift training session at a barren center in the small town of Khan Bani Saad north of Baghdad on Wednesday, it was clear Iraqi officials there had a steep learning curve ahead of them. Six of them huddled over a new computer with paper clipboards as the U.S. contractor tried to explain through an interpreter how to use a new virtual private network. One Iraqi worker clicked furiously on the icon to launch the application, while others struggled to type out an email. The training began over from scratch. "The subject of an email should give you an idea of the rest of the email," James, the contractor, explained, as the Iraqis nodded. "It should be short and descriptive." Emails that look as if they contain sensitive information should be reported at once to the head of the center, he said. Innocuous looking messages from Najaf or Mosul could be deleted. Despite his staff's limited know-how, the head of the center, Colonel Mohsen Abbas, was happy about the new equipment and the computing wizardry it promised. "Earlier they had old computers and another problem was some of the guys didn't know how to work those computers," said Abbas, who received a private tutorial afterwards. "This new computer is amazing for me." © 2005 Reuters _________________________________________ Earn your Master's degree in Information Security ONLINE www.msia.norwich.edu/csi Study IA management practices and the latest infosec issues. Norwich University is an NSA Center of Excellence.
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