The Foreign Service Journal, May 2015

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MAY 2015 11 the assistant to then-Under Secretary for Management Ronald Spiers from 1987 to 1989. She was everything an FSO should be. I will never forgive Colin Powell for, in my view, not having the guts to fire her personally. Silverman’s word “scapegoat” is exactly what she was. Mary was happy and content in retire- ment. We stayed in touch, and she visited us in Albuquerque. There are times when I see things on the news, and I want to call her up for a discussion. She usually saw things the way we did and had interesting views on what was going on in the world. Thanks for refreshing my fond memo- ries of Mary Ryan. Kathy Allitto FS Secretary, retired Dillon, Colo. The Secretary’s Email and the Diplomatic Telecommunications Service As a Foreign Service employee who served as a communicator, an informa- tion management officer, management counselor and Freedom of Information Act officer during 26 years of service overseas and in Washington, I paid close atention to the news of Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton’s very “personalized” use of email. But the hullabaloo over it misses a larger and more important point about the State Department as an institution. At considerable taxpayer expense, the department has operated and main- tained the Diplomatic Telecommunica- tions Service for many decades. DTS remains in existence today, part of every post’s Information Programs Center, where secure satellite, terrestrial and data links, as well as classified systems like SMART, are installed. Managed by Foreign Service informa- tion resource management specialists knowledgeable in information technol- ogy and records policy, DTS is the only authorized system for classified process- ing by all Foreign Service personnel— including the Secretary. Sec. Clinton has stated that no clas- sified information was processed on her home system, and that she used it as a matter of convenience. Indeed, in a world increasingly dominated by millions of small black screens which accelerate our pace of thought and frame new global perspectives in seconds, DTS is at a real disadvantage. One could argue that it is a relic of diplomacy’s past as the promise of social media and the value of conve- nience dominate societal trends. Still, DTS remains the only option for protecting our nation’s diplomatic secrets (see my Speaking Out column, “Protecting the Realm: The Past Must Be Prologue,” in the January-February 2014 FSJ ). Equally important, it greatly facili- tates records management and archiving obligations via practical application of tags, terms and other “official record” responsibilities stipulated in the Records Management Handbook. As we rush headlong into a new digital world of instant access and global reach, we should not forget that DTS has long played an important foundational role in the department. By its very design, when properly used, DTS protects our national security while also preserving the official narrative of U.S. foreign relations for history. Timothy C. Lawson Senior FSO, retired Hua Hin, Thailand n