Updated 9:19 p.m.
A former AOL vice president is poised to become one of the Central Intelligence Agency's top science and technology officers. But before you make those jokes about CD-ROMs and octogenarians on dial-up, keep in mind: she's also been a NASA Jet Propulsion Lab engineer, a top spy, and a champion of open source software, too.
Dawn Meyerriecks was in charge of AOL's product technologies group, where in the mid-2000s she oversaw the relaunching of aol.com and the company's iconic Instant Messenger. That makes her the first Internet executive to become one of the CIA's top techies.
Meyerriecks' move to become Langley's Deputy Director for bet365体育赛事 and Technology isn't entirely unexpected, however. Not only has she spent most of her career in the worlds of national security, intelligence, and aerospace -- first at JPL, and most recently as Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Acquisitions and Technology. (The AOL job came in between.) But the intelligence community has also become increasingly aggressive in reaching out to Silicon Valley and the broader technology community. This appointment might make those ties even tighter -- that is, if beleaguered AOL is still considered a legitimate tech credential.
In a 2011 interview, Meyerriecks claimed that the AOL experience made her a better government tech exec. "One of the lessons I learned from AOL is that you can actually deliver innovation without asking for additional dollars," she told Geospatial Intelligence Forum.
And in her most recent position, Meyerriecks has tried to push the spy community to spend its dollars a little more um, intelligently. She helped established an in-house app market for spies and analysts. And she's publicly championed the use of open source software in the government -- at one point begging open source developers to take on the more established software firms servicing the intelligence community. "I sample lots of collaboration software -- I think it universally sucks," she told a conference last year. "Sorry, 'suck' is a technical term."
"When these big defense contractors talk about how amazing their software is, she's been really good at throwing the bullshit flag, because she's so qualified and competent," says John Scott, a senior systems engineer at the national security consultancy RadiantBlue Technologies and a leading advocate for open source software in the military.
In a statement to Danger Room, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper says that "filling Dawn's shoes will be no easy task. Dawn has done truly incredible work at ODNI [The Office of the Director of National Intelligence] and leaves a legacy of aligning and integrating the acquisition, S&T research and facilities communities across the entire IC [intelligence community]. I know she will be a terrific addition to the CIA Directorate of bet365体育赛事 and Technology team."
Replacing Meyerriecks at ODNI will be Kevin Meiners, who's worked for years for the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence. While he was there, "Kevin set the standard for defense-wide collaboration and defined how an Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance program should be managed 'on-time and on-budget,'" Clapper says.
Meyerriecks isn't the only person to have held jobs in both the tech and national security communities. Darpa director Regina Dugan left last year to become an executive at Google's Motorola division. White House cybersecurity official Sameer Bhalotra left to join a California start-up not long thereafter. And the current Darpa chief, Arati Prabhakar, was until recently a partner at one of Silicon Valley's best-known venture capital firms. But, at the highest levels, such swaps between the Beltway and the Bay Area are relatively rare. More typical are resumes like that of Meyerriecks' boss, CIA science and technology chief Glenn Gaffney, who spent his entire career in the intelligence field, or his predecessor Ruth David, who worked for years at the Energy Department's Sandia National Laboratories.
For a long time, those sorts of resumes made perfect sense. Since the start of the Cold War, the CIA's science and technology shop has worked on hidden sensors, stealthy jets, spy drones, surgically-altered cats, and the occasional acid trip. But in recent years, it and every other research arm of the intelligence community has become increasingly focused on software and cybersecurity. At times, that interest has been kept quite secret; the CIA reportedly helped develop the suite of cyberweapons that targeted Iran's nuclear facilities, for example. At other times, the spooks have been quite out in the open. In 2001, the CIA set up a venture capital arm that now sinks millions into tech start-ups -- and sometimes even co-invests with Google. Intelligence chiefs like National Security Agency director Gen. Keith Alexander are now making public appearances at hacker conferences. One former CIA chief, David Petraeus, mused at a conference about turning the Internet of Things into spy system. Another former CIA director, George Tenet, paid a visit to WIRED's San Francisco offices after he stepped down from his perch at Langley.
Whether Meyerriecks will be able to boost the CIA's standing in Silicon Valley remains to be seen. Yes, she's an award-winning IT chief and a veteran of a venerable dot-com titan. But for many, AOL will always be remembered not for its technology prowess, but for marketing stunts like this.
