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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.

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.

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.

"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.