Posted on 09/11/2005 5:08:27 PM PDT by Dat Mon
In a devastating 81-page audit, released in 2005, Glenn A. Fine, the U.S. Department of Justice's inspector general, described eight factors that contributed to the VCF's failure. Among them: poorly defined and slowly evolving design requirements; overly ambitious schedules; and the lack of a plan to guide hardware purchases, network deployments, and software development for the bureau.
Fine concluded that four years after terrorists crashed jetliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the FBI, which had been criticized for not "connecting the dots" in time to prevent the attacks, still did not have the software necessary to connect any new dots that might come along. And won't for years to come.
"The archaic Automated Case Support system—which some agents have avoided using—is cumbersome, inefficient, and limited in its capabilities, and does not manage, link, research, analyze, and share information as effectively or timely as needed," Fine wrote. "[T]he continued delays in developing the VCF affect the FBI's ability to carry out its critical missions."
This past May, a month after it officially ended the VCF project, the FBI announced that it would buy off-the-shelf software at an undisclosed cost to be deployed in phases over the next four years. Until those systems are up and running, however, the FBI will rely on essentially the same combination of paper records and antiquated software that the failed VCF project was supposed to replace. The only recent addition has been a new "investigative data warehouse" that combines several of the FBI's crime and evidence databases into one. It was completed as the VCF started its final slide into oblivion. In addition, the FBI recently digitized millions of its paper documents and made them available to agents.
(Excerpt) Read more at spectrum.ieee.org ...
If you have read and followed the numerous threads on AD, you will note that I keep getting back to an important point...this computer program worked, and worked exteremely well...and yet... somebody apparently decided to not only erase all the data generated by the program, but also to erase the programs SOURCE CODE, and DOCUMENTATION as well. We will find out who, when, and why when the hearings get under way.
As I have maintained, IMHO, this is non-routine destruction of government property, and a loss of a valuable technology resource, which was paid for by the American taxpayer.
If you read this article, you will see that many software development programs run by the government (its all governments...not just the Feds) do not produce software that works nearly as well as AD apparently did. This is why..aside from what AD may have produced in the way of incriminating associations...the destruction of the program technology, technology that according to this article... the FBI DOES NOT YET HAVE AT THE PRESENT TIME , is in my mind a scandel, and needs to be answered for.
An excellent post and I'm quite certain you are correct...that the destruction of this government property is most certainly not routine.
Maybe the data they collected pointed to high elected officials getting illegal payoffs from foreign governments. And that's the real reason why the program was scrubbed and data destroyed. And it left us vulnerable.
There are several scandals here. One is why the FBI still does not have (apparently) the capability that Able Danger had way back in 2000. The related scandal is why AD source code was (apparently) destroyed when it would have been invaluable to a wide variety of counter-terrorism agencies. Another scandal is why the FBI persists to believe it has any competence at all to oversee software development and project management for IT. Sounds like it has burned through a lot of tax dollars with nothing to show for it.... and we are still years away from having adequate database software for the FBI and our national security. What a mess!
Thank you.
Able Danger and this FBI turkey were completely different projects.
From the scanty reports, it sounds like Able Danger was put together as a data mining application by people who were also expert in its use.
In the FBI project, agents who were IT neophytes dictated requirements to the application developers who more or less took them at face value, even as they continued to change far into the project. This is always the kiss of death. Never give the users what they say they want. Understand the users well enough to give the users what they need and more than they expect within the constraints of time and budget.
What this basically says is that all the code was crap, and they learned some lessons about software engineering and project management methodology. Not much of a salvage job.
As far as I can tell, Able Danger was never used by a large community, while VCF was intended to be used by a large number of field agents, maintain a case data base, and implement a complex workflow with secure communications, approvals, routing, etc.
It's not clear what technology was in Able Danger. Possibly it didn't actually belong to the government.
Bump
SAIC still has the source code, the program was a piece of meat, and the Government could never agree on what the software was suppose to do. From an IT perspective it was doomed to fail because of the Feds constantly changing the requirements.
"Lost amid the recriminations was an early warning from one member of the development team that questioned the FBI's technical expertise, SAIC's management practices, and the competence of both organizations. Matthew Patton, a security expert working for SAIC, aired his objections to his supervisor in the fall of 2002. He then posted his concerns to a Web discussion board just before SAIC and the FBI agreed on a deeply flawed 800-page set of system requirements that doomed the project before a line of code was written. His reward: a visit from two FBI agents concerned that he had disclosed national security secrets on the Internet."
Source: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/sep05/0905fbi.html
"If you read this article,"
Page is no longer available.
"It seems reasonable to suppose that the FBI could have taken the guts of the Able Danger data mining and analysis modules, built a different front end and back end per FBI requirements, and used that as a basis for the VCF program."
I agree. I have felt for years that a data warehouse was the cost effective way to solve the FBI problem, which hinges on incompatible data. And I am not even an IT person, just a person interested in reading IT ideas!
Personally, I think the FBIs incompetence has been on the level of criminal for a long time in national security-related issues. They completely blew their counterintelligence function in the Cold War. They actually treated valuable Soviet defectors from the KGB, GRU, etc. as "bad people" and gave them the "cold shoulder"!
The bottom line is, we need an MI5 (independent counterintelligence agency) like Britain. Bush blew it after 9-11 in that regard. What we needed was splitting---not consolidation. FBI is a domestic law enforcement agency---period.
Now, the CIA is getting into domestic stuff to cover the FBI weakness. The British system is much better.
Send the entire FBI out to the parking lot. Call in the Agents you need each day by name. After 30 days of doing this, send home those remaining in the parking lot who have not been called.
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