Information Dominance Center

Don’t tell me the NSA doesn’t have a sense of humour. NSA chief General Keith Alexander built his control room inspired by the flight deck on Star Trek’s spaceship Enterprise. And named it the Information Dominance Center. Allegedly, this was a way to convince congress to green-light PRISM. Or maybe it was just one general’s daydream come true. I spent many years in the video games industry and can testify that game developers have similar creativity when it comes to interior design. One especially successful developer turned their office into a British gentleman’s club, complete with Chippendale leather chairs, green glass lamp shades, and oil-painted portraits of employees. We never got around to it, but when I was a game developer our fantasy was to decorate our office as a Hill Street Blues-style police station, with worn wood furniture, loudly ringing analogue phones that nobody ever bothers to pick up, and a chain-smoking sergeant with loads of paperwork on the front desk. The meeting room would be a patrol car sitting outside in the street. So, laugh all you want about the Information Dominance Center. Or call it the ultimate man cave.