Posted on 06/04/2002 3:52:53 AM PDT by Cacique
FBI most wanted: new IT priorities
By Dan Fraber
The controversy over who knew what when about the 9/11 terrorist attacks has the country buzzing. It's likely to make for an entertaining summer as the committees and subcommittees play the Beltway parlor whodunit game, partly for the political gain and partly to find remedies for systemic problems plaguing various government agencies tasked with protecting national interests.
One point is clear. The FBI failed to execute on the most fundamental information technology principle--aligning its technology with business goals. In fact, it appears that until recently FBI executive management did not even view technology as a key driver of the agency's success. According to Gartner analyst John Pescatore, the FBI is five years behind private industry in leveraging technology.
How does a major corporation or government agency like the FBI, with 27,000 employees and more than 100 offices worldwide, get to a place where the head of the company (FBI Director Robert Mueller) tells the board of directors (the Senate Judiciary Committee) that "our information infrastructure is far behind current technology. It cannot support the robust analytical capacity we need. . .but having to so dramatically replace the entire infrastructure rather than make incremental improvements, as is common in the private sector, makes the replacement process more difficult."
That May 8, 2002 characterization of the FBI's technology infrastructure by Director Mueller before the Senate Judiciary Committee should not have been news to the committee members.
No improvements in six years
On July 18, 2001--54 days before 9/11--Bob Dies, then Assistant Director Information Resources Division at the FBI, testified before that same committee: "For a variety of reasons, the FBI information technology has had no meaningful improvements in over six years." Either former FBI Director Louis Freeh and his management team did not see the value of IT during the 1990s or were unable to convince Congress that IT is a good investment to help catch the bad guys.
Dies said that 13,000 desktop systems in use at the FBI were four to eight years old. "This means that many agents accessing basic FBI data cannot use basic 'ease of use' features that your teenagers have enjoyed for years, such as using a mouse to move around the screen," Dies said. "The productivity loss and frustration that result are enormous."
During his testimony, Dies, who spent 20 years at IBM before joining the FBI in 2000, also said that a majority of branch offices connect to the FBI's internal network at 56KB modem speed, and that most graphical data such as photos could not be stored electronically. Any company with a seriously lagging technology strategy like the FBI's would be out of business in today's marketplace.
Dies went on to give a progress report to the Committee on project Trilogy, a three-year, $379 million FBI infrastructure upgrade program started in 2000. After 9/11, the deadline to complete the Trilogy project was moved up to the end of this year. While Trilogy begins to address the deficiencies, such as implementing a high-speed interconnection among the FBI offices and applications for managing criminal investigations, it is just a first step. Rolling a new, pervasive computing platform to nearly 30,000 people and working out the kinks will take the next few years to complete.
More technology could be shared
It's not just the FBI's IT infrastructure that needs to modernize. Information sharing within and across the agencies dealing with terrorism needs to be vastly improved. The silos of intelligence data are sometimes necessary due to legislative regulations and security requirements. For example, the FBI only deals with domestic investigations while the National Security Agency (NSA) focuses on foreign intelligence. Perhaps some of those restrictions will change, as with the multi-agency collaboration in the Homeland Security Office, but at least more technology could be shared and modern database architectures applied to information retrieval problems.
The NSA bills itself as a "high technology organization…on the frontiers of communication and data processing." It has an army of math and computer whizzes, and more computing power than the entire world outside the United States. Even the CIA has its share of computing resources and talent.
This is mind-boggling. The private sector figured out a long time ago that technology leveraged smartly provides a competitive edge. And the government, with its various, sometimes competing domestic and international agencies, has not been able to leverage the massive technology investment funded by tax dollars.
On NBC's "Meet the Press" a few days ago, FBI Director Robert Mueller said that "it would be nice if we had the computers in the FBI that were tied into the CIA that you could go in and [search on] flight schools, and any report relating to flight schools that had been generated anyplace in the FBI field offices would spit out." He went on to proclaim the need for artificial intelligence that could offer more predictive technology. Perhaps he could give the NSA or CIA a call.
Clearly, FBI management needs to make IT a priority within the agency and with the Congressional committees that approve funding. The events of 9/11 have put that process into high gear. Additionally, the FBI would benefit greatly by getting more advice from the private sector. The FBI's technology-related problems are common to any industry. The agency could avoid many pitfalls by taking a few lessons from those who have successfully transformed their enterprises. The FBI needs to be a poster child for technology--not for the super secret spyware, but for creating a nimble, communicating organization that takes advantage of technology as well as any industry-leading Fortune 500 company.
I would think that if Microsoft wanted to get on the good side of the gov. they would "volunteer" to set up an IT system for the Feds.
It's called Investigative Journalism, and the Lamestream blew it.
This is ridiculous for a law enforcement agency to have this attitude but the events proved this to be true. The FBI was hamstrung in the 9/11 attacks, they had a perfect case against the plotters but they were all dead because of their suicide mission.
But, it is disengenuous to claim everything would've worked better if we had just had better, more modern IT infrastructures.
The probelm is simple, individauls have failed to do their jobs.
There are lot's of reasons, but the three main categories are: people who don't know and don't care about their jobs; people who care but don't know what to do; and, people who know and do care but are extraordinarily frustrated with the bureauracy.
And, no one is EVER held accountable for their failures: the list of high profile misconduct, gross negligence and incompetence is longer than my arm, I won't enumerate them all here. A recent example is the INS agent who allowed four Pakistani seamen shore leave in Norfolk, VA (who have since vanished) contrary to every instruction affecting that agency. His punishment, "assigned to other duties." Nothing happened to his supervisor. Nothing. Why ??
Ralph Peters, retired intel type who writes extensively on this subject has hit the nail on the head repeatedly. Intelligence analysts don't know how to think !!
Apparently, many (but not all) bureaucrats in other federal agencies are afflicted with the same syndrome.
People who blow the whistle are fired.
Until we start holding accountable individuals for their personal failures, nothing will change, nothing will improve.
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