Through the gates of Fort George Meade pass the most powerful technical minds that the government employs. But Fort Meade’s website contains pixelized, faux-shaded green fonts and a two-column descending-text template not seen since the days of GeoCities.
Yes, Fort Meade, a 5,400-acre complex less than an hour’s drive outside of Washington. Home of the National Security Agency, the U.S. Cyber Command, the Navy’s new cyberfleet. The nerve center of a sprawling surveillance apparatus and the place the military turns for defending its networks against hackers or malicious insider threats. You would know absolutely none of this from the ersatz Fort Meade that exists on the internet, which doesn’t appear to have benefited from the coding expertise of its many, many residents.
At Fort Meade’s website, you’ll get a fade-out events calendar for fun activities on base, an early-2000s-style thermometer that gauges charitable contributions, and a grid-style hyperlink menu of base information, like what’s playing at the movie theater. A video blog (above) about goings-on at Meade has to be hosted at a separate WordPress site. Spend too much time on an individual page, and Firefox will find an unresponsive script.
It’s not even as if other Army websites are this awesomely bad. Check out Fort Hood’s — a clean, functional site with drop-down menus. The Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth even has a community blog two clicks from the homepage. Fort Dix’s site matches Fort Meade’s for ugliness, but Dix also has menu functions pop up when you scroll over the sidebar, and the base’s denizens don’t include thousands of sophisticated cyber professionals.
Want to leave your views about some aspect of the website? A section called “Soundoff!” directs visitors to … the base newspaper — whose website is better designed than the base’s.
You have to hunt around before you see words like “Cyber Command.” The NSA still stands for No Such Agency on the site, and it’s hard not to notice how much more professional NSA.gov looks. Yes, even with the cartoon snow leopards.
We’re not saying that the nation’s top surveillance and cybersecurity experts ought to take days and weeks out of their busy schedules to perfect ftmeade.army.mil. Just maybe, you know, an afternoon. If you can run blanket surveillance, you’ve got to be able to fool around with custom CSS to represent your home or work installation.
Video: MeadeTV video blog on WordPress.
