Regards, Ivan
Posted on 09/29/2004 12:22:02 AM PDT by MadIvan
More than 120,000 hours of intercepted conversations amassed by the FBI during America's war against terrorism have yet to be translated and in some cases have been destroyed, a government investigation has found.
Although more linguists have been recruited since the September 11 attacks, the FBI's counter-terrorism operation is so short of Arabic and Farsi speakers that the agency is drowning in untranslated recordings and documents.
The backlog is so large that the FBI's digital audio archives have been automatically deleting older recordings, including al-Qa'eda-related material, before they have been reviewed by translators, to make room for new material.
Only two thirds of the highest priority material is translated within the FBI's own 12-hour deadline, according to a newly declassified summary of an internal investigation by Glenn Fine, the justice department's inspector-general. This failure, he concluded, could be partly blamed on FBI managers who had not made urgent analysis of al-Qa'eda-related material a priority.
In 50 of the 900 al-Qa'eda-related cases his team examined, material took at least a month to translate. "The FBI cannot translate all the foreign language counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence material it collects," Mr Fine concluded.
The report acknowledged that the FBI had increased the number of translators from 883 in 2001 to more than 1,200, with sharp increases in Arabic and Farsi speakers.
In one of the most notorious lapses, the National Security Agency, the top-secret surveillance body, intercepted two al-Qa'eda messages on Sept 10, 2001, saying "Tomorrow is zero hour", and "The match is about to begin". But the NSA did not translate them until days later.
Mr Fine made clear that ingrained inefficiencies, computer problems and management failures continued to bedevil the FBI's language programmes. In particular, the FBI had failed to make al-Qa'eda cases a high enough priority.
Mr Fine's report found that it was the luck of the draw whether officers realised that potentially vital al-Qa'eda recordings had been automatically deleted from the translation queue as computer systems tried to create new space.
The backlog of 123,000 hours represents 20 per cent of all counter-terrorist related material recorded since the September 11 attacks.
The situation is still worse in languages associated with FBI efforts to counter foreign espionage in America, such as Chinese. Some 370,000 hours of recordings have never been reviewed.
The highly critical report is a public version of a more detailed audit sent in July to the FBI leadership, Congress and the federal commission investigating the September 11 attacks.
A second report is awaited, examining a whistleblower's claims that, in its haste to recruit new translators, the FBI dropped normal technical and security standards.
Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI linguist, says she was fired in 2002 after complaining of shoddy work in the translations unit and possible espionage involving a linguist. Mr Fine has completed an internal review of her case.
Regards, Ivan
Ping!
I had heard nice things about Rhodes' skills as a talk-show hostess as opposed to anybody-can-do-this morons like Franken and Garofalo. But if she's the best they got, they've got big problems.
Air America simply isn't entertaining. It's shrill, hostile and nasty. Randi Rhodes is among the worst. How it survives at all is beyond me.
Regards, Ivan
Some potential translators are, to put it politely, conflicted in their loyalties.
Oh - oh ... nothing like announcing the problem!
This had better be fixed soon otherwise another 911 WILL occur right under our noses.
This reveals a long-standing weakness of the U.S. intelligence community: an embarrassment of riches on the collection side, and far too little ability to analyze and process the "take" from collection systems into usable intelligence. Collection systems are nice, shiny toys; the analytical capacity is resident in dull, nerdy types who speak funny-sounding languages and work in windowless offices.
Dude, that is so far out...!! What did TONY IOMMI have to say?
" The backlog of 123,000 hours represents 20 per cent of all counter-terrorist related material recorded since the September 11 attacks.
The situation is still worse in languages associated with FBI efforts to counter foreign espionage in America, such as Chinese. Some 370,000 hours of recordings have never been reviewed. "
That's about 500,000 hours. A 650 mb audio CD can hold an hour of music so a half a million times 650 is 325,000,000 mb of storage needed for all of those lost conversations which is 325,000 gigabytes. Hard drives cost about a dollar a gigabyte so the space they were saving by deleting all of the untranslated intercepts would have cost less than half a million dollars?
" This reveals a long-standing weakness of the U.S. intelligence community: an embarrassment of riches on the collection side, and far too little ability to analyze and process the "take" from collection systems into usable intelligence. "
Look at my #9 post, even without enough analysts they just needed more storage and its cheap.
Yes, as one whistler-blower tried to convy to Congress, her fellow translators at the agency were deliberately implementing a "go slow" work action to create more translating slots for their relatives.
When they were not literally cheering inside the FBI when the planes were hitting the buildings on 9-11.
This is why the current civil service system is broken. In a time of national emergency, translation operations should be going 24/7 until the backlog is eliminated.
Union meetings, vacations and weekends should be terminated until the situation is fixed. Pay the top performers a nice bonus when the job is done.
Reminds me of our back home periods in the Navy. If we had a maintenace backlog, 12 hour days and working weekends became the norm. If a Sailor bitched, our Master Chief would just smile and say "Overtime is Authorized".
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