[Lessismore]

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.

[Dat Mon]

Everyone understands that Able Danger and the VCF were completely different programs.

Thats exactly my point!

From the article....

"So what did the FBI get out of the VCF's last gasp? "We harvested some of the good work from the past," the FBI project manager told me. "We focused that into a pilot. We tested that life-cycle development model of Zal's, and that is a valid, repeatable process. And now we're in a good position to move on."

Thats what they should have done with the guts of AD...but somebody apparently decided to destroy government property and make it unavailable to ANYONE in the counter-terrorism business.

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 think they probably could have had a working system up and running by now. Much of the money spent so far on VCF could have been spent getting all of the voluminous paper data they have accumulated into the system, and establishing their own open source data entry points. This would allow them to create their own terabytes of background data as AD did to process.

JMHO of course.