Slashdot Mirror
FBI's New Info-Sharing Software Project Fails
Spy Handler writes "After 4 years and half a billion dollars, FBI's attempt to create new information sharing software - called Virtual Case File - simply didn't work.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
To the Feds -
Come look for me the next time you need something that does not work. I would be happy to deliver it for the bargain basement price of only $100,000,000.
Half a billion dollars for a software project like this? Does this seem unreasonable to anyone else?
Slashdot is slashdotted, and the FBI fail it!
Don't throw stones in glass houses, michael. Your software project is even more shoddy than what the FBI had.
Inconceivable!
Since the attacks, Congress has given the FBI a blank check, allocating billions of dollars in additional funding.
And that blank cheque is the problem. Whatever happened to accountability? It's the tax payers money to begin with.
Free XBox, PS2
Having worked at Andersen Consulting little more than a decade ago and seeing the dismal IT failures of EDS has had in England, when I here of vast amounts of money wasted on failed IT projects these companies immediately come to mind.
Perhaps you should try this?
:)
Hm, more seriously.. They must really have tried to make something special. Otherwise WebDAV+SSL would have proven to be a bit cheaper..
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
Hmm, story about FBI and immediately there's 503: service unavailable. Tinfoil time.
Maybe they should have used DC++ instead ;)
Just
From a position of a tax payer this frustrates me.
However, as a programmer I can understand them wanting to scrap the program. If the design has been shot to hell, if their using technology several years past its prime, it's time to start fresh.
And as a tax payer, I'd prefer the FBI to use a system that works, rather than a system that doesn't.
-Teiresias
Where does 581 Million dollars go, just to be tossed out? That money could have been used elsewhere for some good. -Dennis-
"I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection." -- Sigmund Freud
When the server is running slow as shit, and you see that the last 3 articles you posted don't have more than 30 posts, how about you slow down? You don't have to post some anti-government/anti-bush/global warming article every 30 minutes.
slow it down little boy
... The MPAA and RIAA have filed suit against the FBI, since their software could be used to share copyrighted material.
But God demonstrates his love for us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us - (Romans 5:8)
Even when they spend your money on collecting dirt on you, they STILL can't get it right. Sheesh.
First drafts are rough.
I actually read the FA (Ok, scanned it), and I didn't see anything that the FBI required that isn't commonly available now. Get a robust DB, have information decrypted at the user's computer, do not have any portion of this network on the Internet - instead use VPN/SSH connections physically secure the boxes, etc. Why they went to a third party in SD who blew through 130 MILLION of our tax dollars with nothing to show for it is beyond me.
"As the intrepid kobold companion continues his journey, he begins to wonder... if priests raises dead, why anybody die?
It kind of annoys me to hear this. Now I know where all my tax money has been funneled into. It probably didn't work because it was outsourced.
The prototype's main feature allows users to prepare documents and forward them in a usable form. Eventually, the FBI expects to have software with added features for managing records, evidence and other documents, along with the ability for users to collaborate on documents and share information online.
Only the government could spend half a billion on that, and still not have it work...The article has limited detail about the software, but I can't see how it could possibly warrant such a development cost.
How is the complexity of the software that it would cost a few hundred million? Web applications running on clustered servers shouldn't have that high development cost, unless there are some special requirements?
This sounds like a perfect project for the open source community! We should get Richard Stallman to submit a quote.
Or better yet, Bram Cohen (inventor of BitTorrent) or Jed McCaleb (inventor of eDonkey). Those guys have experience writing file sharing programs after all, and isn't that really what the FBI is asking for?
It's hard to soar like an eagle when you're surrounded by turkeys.
From TFA: So far the overhaul has cost $581 million, and the software problems are expected to set off a debate over how well the bureau has been spending those dollars.
I'm going to go with "not well."
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
I could really cook up vaporware so much better than the security-cleared assclowns they hire for these projects. The government is where you go to work when your skills won't get you a job in the private sector.
Give them a copy of just about any P2P app, sounds like what they are looking for. Legitimate use for P2P? I think so.
If the FBI had released its information encrypted as Metallica MP3 files, it would have been a resounding success.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Maybe I'm just jaded, but when has any government project really been good? Boston's road revamping is a great example (I know it's not federal) of how large government projects just go completely bonkers.
I think the worst part of this is that this will be another no one gets hurt cause it's the government job. If this was a private company they'd have to declare bankruptcy and close down shop. But because it's the gov. all people working on this project will keep their jobs and move on to something else. That's just poor management.
They should look at using BitTorrent technology. Then they'd surely get a product that works.
Then again, they'd also show a legit reason for P2P technology and shut down arguments against legit uses for it.
Wouldn't want to piss off any **AA lobbyists and stop any D.C. palms from getting greased now, would we?
Religion is for people afraid of going to hell.
Did slashdot just get slashdotted?
I'M NOT ANGRY!
I didn't realise the slashdot effect could reach so far.
WASHINGTON -- A new FBI (news - web sites) computer program designed to help agents share information to ward off terrorist attacks may have to be scrapped, the agency has concluded, forcing a further delay in a four-year, half-billion-dollar overhaul of its antiquated computer system.
The half-billion is entire their budget to overhaul computer systems, not how much money they spent on this software.
This is not to say they haven't wasted any money:
Science Applications has received about $170 million from the FBI for its work on the project. Sources said about $100 million of that would be essentially lost if the FBI were to scrap the software.
... if it never sees the light of day?
Seems like that's more along the lines of "planned" or "attempted".
I could go for burning a half billion dollars in 4 years - where do I sngn up for their next try?
cyn, free software and *nix operating systems enthusiast.
Sometimes it best to scrap a software project and take the lessons learned from the failure to a new project. As long as knowledge was gained about why the project failed then not all was lost.
Can I bum you a
The article doesn't really mention why they think it's going to fail. It seems like maybe the FBI didn't really know what it wants, and probably still doesn't know what it wants. Science Application, the company developing the program, has received about $170 million dollars for the project. But the article says the FBI has spent about $500 million on the project. Where did the rest of the money go?
Portland, North Dakota Puppies
someone is just milking this for the cashcow...
"moo" says the taxpayers...
FBI can just post their information to usenet group gov.fbi.bigsecret and then use google to search for needed information!
Now gimmi my half a billion dollars please! (I do accept paypal)!
I don't recall having any involvement with this project.
Someone at the FBI definitely should have read this article.
-Rob
Marriage doesn't have to suck!
When I worked for the Department of Justice, a case might have 5 different case numbers: one case number for the DOJ, one case number for the FBI, one case number for the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, one case number for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, etc. If I only had the DOJ jacket number, it could take me 15 minutes to get the case number for another agency, just so I could talk to one of the investigating agents.
Spend money to fix that larger-scale problem, before flooding the FBI with money to squander on a software application that they will be terminating and starting afresh on.
So nothing new here, folks, keep moving. Just another software development project where the goals weren't written down before the work started.
I'll write them one in PHP and MySQL. Sure it won' t be very secure, but this is a branch of the US Government, so they either won't notice or won't care.
~~Every few years or so I'm accidentally fashionable!
The bureau is no longer saying when the project, originally scheduled for completion by the end of 2003, might be finished. ...
...
...
A prototype of the Virtual Case File was delivered to the FBI last month by Science Applications International Corp. of San Diego. But bureau officials consider it inadequate and already outdated, and are using it mainly on a trial basis to glean information from users that will be incorporated in a new design.
Science Applications has received about $170 million from the FBI for its work on the project.
A spokesman for Science Applications, Ron ollars, said via e-mail that the company had "successfully completed" delivery of the initial version of the Virtual Case File software last month.
The stripped-down prototype will be running for three months. The bureau plans to then "shut it down, take all the lessons learned and incorporate them in a future case management system," a person familiar with the bureau's plans said.
An outside computer analyst who has studied the FBI's technology efforts said the agency's problem is that its officials thought they could get it right the first time. "That never happens with anybody," he said.
Some sources sympathetic to the FBI defended the process, and said that what has been learned in designing the software has given the bureau
valuable design and user information.
The first time they saw the software was a year after the delivery date. So they must have been using waterfall. Then they defend the process by saying the only good thing they got out of it was the information for the next pass of iterative development. So the best thing about waterfall is that when it fails you can turn it into iterative. Pure genius.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
This is a prime example why public funded software ought to be open source, that way the community as a whole can pick bits and pieces out of it for further use.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Perhaps using the Duke Nukem engine as a front end was a bad idea?
Seriously, when you look around it's amazing how many software projects just completely fail with no usable code produced. It's not uncommon for companies to spend several million and just shut the thing down a couple years into it.
I think we're about a century behind our technology. We still try to use industrial age models for 'building' things...and the digital/info/[buzzword] age has major implications that those models just don't take into account.
Why don't they do the same for software?
These are the same feds who treat copyright infringement as "theft"; who tack on all sorts of costs to the cost associated with a breakin (where a kid just pokes around the system); and yet they turn the other cheek when these companies waste billions of dollars on badly-executed projects.
As a taxpayer, I am thoroughly pissed at this waste of my money.
Expect the Prime to pay a token couple of million dollars as a "fine" and walk laughing all the way to the bank...
Sounds just like the TIERS Texas Integrated Eligibility Redesign System software my agency has been trying develop. The Texas Department of Human Services, now the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, has contracted to Deloitte to develop a web based system similar to what is described in the article. $3 million a month (according to some) has been spent on this for a couple of years now and it is a HORRIBLE excuse of a system. I know case workers that are being forced to test the software that say it takes at LEAST twice as long to work a case now than it did with the old system that was developed in the 80's. This has been a boondoggle in the worst sense and any Texas taxpayer should be pissed off about it.
It gets to be depressing working for the government because you see so many contracts like this awarded simply because some higher up gets his palm greased. Another example of this is the fact that I had to pay Banctec (the company that has our hardware support contract) the standard fee of $340 to replace a CPU FAN in an old machine the other day. So sad.
P.S. - I'm having to post this anonymously because anyone that has even begun to criticize the TIERS software, even internally, has been officially reprimanded or worse.
Well, for some value of "this"... this project doesn't work, so of course it's not worth $0.5B. An executive branch that was "run like a business" wouldn't pay for a system that big, that expensive, that important, that didn't work enough to be accepted. But maybe it's all Bill Clinton's fault, from back in the 20th Century before Bush had control of all 3 branches of the government, the biggest budget in history, a compelling mandate to remake the FBI however he saw fit... and a history of running private businesses into the ground, just like this one.
--
make install -not war
Lots of people are saying "How could they spend that much money on software that doesn't work". Clearly you've never worked on a government project. I'm working on one for a federal agency. We are migrating a small piece of a small department of this agency from legacy systems (mix of mainframe, access apps, excel spreadsheets, and 3x5 cards) to a J2EE solution. We are 4 years in with an average of 40 consultants at any given time. That alone is 16 million dollars, roughly, not including hardware and software. And this is for a very small set of features just related to storing client information and tracking the state of financial transactions.
We're less than halfway done. The requirements, when we can get any, are both vague and constantly changing. Direct contradictions are the norm, and anything wildly illogical (e.g. "If a transaction is partially rolled back, we still want the state to show that it was completed, except when we don't, and we can't define when we don't.") is justified with "because I said so". As contractors, we are not allowed to question anything the government people say no matter how clearly wrong it is. Several people have been fired for asking to have requirements clarified.
This is how they spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a system that doesn't work.
Just reading the article makes me think this was more a problem of trying to change the way the FBI works through software instead of making fundamental changes in the way they manage their people.
****
"I'd never want to join a club that would have me as a member" - G. Marx
I'm going to go with "short debate". How about an Iraqi election to distract everyone? Talk about "not well".
--
make install -not war
Good one.
The article says that the contractor who wrote the software got 170 million where did the rest of it go? I guess developing the spec cost 400 million.
My guess is that it is a 'cop' thing. They may have put so many unreasonable requirements into the project that it can't possibly work.
p .h tml
.
We have a similar boondogle in Canada called the 'gun registry'. The idea is that all guns are registered. No problem; after all cars are registered. What could be easier than creating a database? We could all do it in our sleep. Well this puppy is up way over a hundred million. That's about a zillion bucks for every gun in Canada.
cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2004/10/23/682430-c
Look at the anal way cops handle a 'crime scene.' You can't get anywhere near it for months. Somebody jumps in front of a train. Could be a crime. Better stop all the trains so nobody can leave Toronto at rush hour. (I think people actually got home by midnight but I'm not sure.)
The FBI can have a system on budget and on time as long as somebody takes them by the hand and makes sure their requirements are realistic. Elsewise, I don't expect this project to succeed anytime soon on any budget.
It has also hired BAE Systems, a British defense contractor, to identify and evaluate the specific needs and requirements for any permanent system.
I don't know how you guys operate, but I find it useful to generate critical requirements before attempting to develop solutions.
First rule of government spending: Why buy one when you can have two at twice the price?
You think these guys subscribe to the rules? S.R. Hadden would be proud...
Sir,
Your offer has been accepted. You are invited to become part of our Guantanomo Detainee Program (which currently does not produce intel or results).
Please report to your nearest police station for arrest and processing. No personal effects allowed (as your living space is significantly restricted).
Thank You
FBI
There is always a frontier where there is an open and willing mind
Burpie seed put all its eggs into a basket with a new inventory/sales/everything for everybody system. It didn't work. They lost a LOT of money in lost sales, on top if the bales of money that were burned on the project itself.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Back of an envelope time.
You want to connect tens of thousands of people. Let them have free access to sensitive data. A completely centralised system requires good comms links. You want to store unstructured and structured data. You want ordinary people (not SQL-heads) to be able to perform analysis. You need some sorts of audit control. You probably need access control because if you are the Director of the CIA, you don't want too many people looking at your file. You want to encourage data mining. You want to encourage links. You recognise that time is a key factor - a report that is fresh has more weight than one that's not, and the fact that someone was a student member of the Revolution is Ours Death Brigade is not necessarily a huge pointer to their current beliefs. You will need a way of removing data. You might need a way of noting that data has been removed. You want ways to classify data. Formal and ad-hoc ways. You want all this to be easily useable, and not to take unusually difficult admin. Above all this must be useful at stopping outrages, while not impinging on the activities of those who are not in the target group - most notably ordinary people.
How do you design and build this?
And the scariest thing is that they're looking to BAE Systems next. I have (well, had) family there for a while. If their experience is anywhere close to typical, this is not an organisation you want to help you run critical security/intelligence concerns.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I guess a Wiki wouldn't work for them... Blogs wouldn't work either. A copy of the Code that runs SLashdog with heads of major field offices playing the Role of Cowboy Neal wouldn' work either..
Ok, my point is now that they have a secure network there are some many great ways to share data, and even rank and Meta-moderate data...
Sure it's nice to build some amazing wild system that totally solves every problem they ever had and ever will have... BUT there is too much risk.
You see this happening again and again in Government, with FBI, IRS, etc. Big huge systems build from whole cloth rarely ever fit or work or are delivered as promised.
Smaller systems with continual or incremental changes work better.
http://www.hawknest.com/
According to the article, $170 million has been paid for software development. $100 million of that will be lost of the software is scrapped. The rest went to purchase thousands of computers and set up new networks.
So, surprise, the slashdot story title is misleading.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
I have worked with SAIC on different projects.
IMHO SAIC delivered the Feds a package that exceeded the minimum requirement for the prototype. It has to interface with the old, slow existing system.
The only thing new in this world is the history that you don't know.[Harry Truman]
Just store it on their T-Mobile phones like the Secret Service and have it sold on IRC.
that this was the LOW bid!
Nobody seems to get it. You can not develope systems than monitor everthing. The capability is not here anywhere. Amatures think that with computers we can do anything -- wrong. How much information can any of you deal with in gigs? Sure you can store it but to make sense out of it is another matter. This project was doomed to fail.
Writen over 20 years ago by Fred Brooks, still a must-read for all software developers.
One of the hardest things in working for government is that in order to write software properly, you need to get a good look at the data you're working with. You can't see this data; it's heavily, heavily classified.
It's classified two ways: first, a lot of this data is privacy protected (the FBI spies on American citizens and that data is heavily controlled). Second, one of the things it needs to store is sources&methods, which are protected even more closely than the data itself. (The most classified stuff is always about sources&methods, not the data itself.)
The open-source community could write pieces of it, but the hard work on a project like this is adapting it to the particular requirements of the customer.
The problems involved aren't abstract ones that can be solved byu an incredibly clever person like Bram Cohen. They're involved in getting a gazillion people to all buy off on a data format, and convincing them that they really can share information without violating their security requirements (which is really just code-speak for "if I let you have this information I won't be the only one with it, and therefore I become less important.")
The security clearance requirement means that they're working with a drastically reduced pool of programmers. Corners get cut, ideas go unused for lack of implementers, internal oversight is practically nil. (They have code reviews but they're an immense waste of time.)
I'm not sure I've ever worked on a government project of even a tenth this size that I considered to be successful, even if it did get deployed. But throwing it out to the open-source community isn't an option.
1) Pick a package that is supposed to do everything imaginable allow's for unimaginable enhancements, and is totally configurable. It has to be 'off the shelf' to save $. Nevermind you've bought the only one that was ever 'on the shelf'. ... ... ...
2)Hire a primary contractor to oversee 'tailoring' the application to your needs. He subcontracts.
a)ergonomics
b)info flow
c)work flow
d)networking topology
e)interoperability study
i)this is so they can buy the weirdest combination of COTS hardware that mght possibly work
d)and so on, use your imagination
3)Now the minions of suits arrive for meetings. Meetings run som 80 hours per week with overtime chares. All sorts of facilitaiton hardware and personel are hired to facilitate these meetings
4)All the hardware is ordered.
5)The software is installed and doesn't run.
20)Additional hardware is purchased to run custome glue software to make things work.
30)It kind of sort of works but is not configured to do what the latest revision of the contract calls for.
40)Configuration has been going on for months. Stuff that didn't work and stuff that did, doesn't. $500,000,000 spent and the 'client' throws in the towel.
Typical...
The companies that get awarded contracts like this are primarily good at writing proposals, great Power Point presentations, holding long meetings (at remote locations), performing requirements definition, alternatives analysis, white papers, security accreditation, various data gathering, data modeling, blah, blah, etc, etc. But rarely are they also good at the actual matter at hand. But I doubt there is anything a govt agency can do about this, since they require all that luggage to show accountabiity to the taxpayer...
If it seems too impossible to bungle a project like this...it probably is. I'd bet the half a billion has been funnelled to some covert program.
I get the stomach churning feeling that this is par for the course as far as government projects go. You wonder what kind of accountabilty there is in a failure of this size.
That's a law in some states.
I wonder if there is a federal equivalent.
You don't just give someone half a billion and get nothing unless someone missrepresented what they were capable of.
A Wiki setup seems perfect. According to the FA, they need something with "the ability for users to collaborate on documents and share information online."
It seems that if they could expand Wiki to also display fingerprints and arrest warrents, then they're golden. Then just set up a good search engine on top of it, and there you go.
I know, put a Google Desktop search on top of it, and run it off a Beowulf cluster...never mind.
--LWM
bushco have promoted the person responsible for this catastrophic failure in planning to a higher position of authority and responsbility, because, hey, that's the way this administration works... rewarding the failures of this miserable government.
Aha! But we already know who you are...
"So far the overhaul has cost $581 million" "development costs and render worthless much of a current $170-million contract." Why the hell do they need THAT much money to develop an application? Hell, look at Linus Torvalds, or Ben Goodger. Did they need half a billion dollars to do what they did? No. Sad indeed.
From the article: it's SAIC.
Actually, you cannot attribute to incompetence the criminal motivations revealed by Sibel Edmonds and others.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Your tax dollars at work....
Sometimes seventeen/Syllables aren't enough to/Express a complete
Beyond a certain point, it's hard to completely pre-plan large IT projects. The only way to do them is to do large-scale mockups (aka the first attempt).
Advice: on VPS providers
Imagine the learning curve! Here we have this monolythic blob of stuff that can do EVERYTHING. Here are the 12 billion source lines of code and a make file that takes 3 centuries to run. The project is 4 years behind schedule and we fired the 10,000 coders that were working on it before, but we asked them to comment their code with nice flower boxes.
From my experience, the bigger the project the more likely it is to fail. Making lots of little bits out of one big one may result in some integration hiccups, but at least there will be useful pieces and refactoring can be addressed on a priority basis.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
"The prototype's main feature allows users to prepare documents and forward them in a usable form. "
This just in, the FBI invented email!
stuff |
I don't know why it didn't work. After all:
"The SAIC team offers a modular architecture that emphasizes the use of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) products and maximizes the use of existing infrastructure, while supporting the insertion of emerging information technologies," said Dr. Dana Hall, SAIC group senior vice president. "Most importantly, our solution is designed to meet the day-to-day real world requirements of FBI agents."
from: http://www.saic.com/news/jun01/news06-12a-01.html
If she floats, she's a witch.
So, FBI was not pleased with the softare, hummm..
Let me guess some of the expectations:
1. So, I type the name of Osama here in this box named "Most Wanted #1", and he should be caputred, departed and recieved in my office in not more than 1 hour and 25 minutes.
2. As soon as I type Orange here, the alert level should be changed accordingly through out the country - I want all the billboards to display alert message in orange text thoughout the country - including schools, federal and state offices.
Can't the FBI just use the kick-ass CTU-software suite they use on 24? I'm sure Jack Bauer wouldn't mind...
ProjectSize Success Challenged Failed
Standish Group Chaos Project Statistics Copyright 1998, The Standish Group Internation, Inc.-Challenged means that the requirements for the project were not met i.e. over budget, over time estimate and offering fewer features/functions.
-The Virtual Case File software project was impaired i.e. cancelled
p.s. it was a big pain to line up stuff, is there an easier way to do this on slashdot posts? using the allowed html?
I know that many readers don't RTFA, but I'm surprised to know that even the news posters don't RTFA. It didn't cost half a billion dollars to create the software. According to TFA Science Applications has received about $170 million from the FBI for its work on the project. Sources said about $100 million of that would be essentially lost if the FBI were to scrap the software.
I'd like a nice on-line form associated with my tax return, which allows me to pick exactly where my tax dollars are spent.
I'd tick off things like, "Sidewalks and road repair in the region of my choice."
I'd tick off, "Public Transportation."
I'd tick off, "Environmental Conservation" and "Well-funded Free Medical Clinics which employ doctors who really want to heal people and not just get rich." I'd tick off all the other things I want MY money to be spent on. I want to be able to micro-manage where my tax dollars go, what salaries people receive, and who gets to have a job funded with MY money.
Things I'd NOT tick off would include,
"Missile defense systems which A) don't work and B) increase world tensions leading to hugely wasteful expenditures on ever increasingly complex defenses. Which don't work."
"Spineless Yes-Man Politicians More Interested in Keeping Their Jobs than in Serving the People who Bloody Voted for them."
"Free Handouts and Make-Work Contracts for Stupid Corporations Which Don't Deserve Jack Shit, *cough Haliburton* But which Happen to be run by Friends and/or Family Members of Sitting Retard Presidents."
"Education systems which make kids stupid, socially retarded and massively mis-informed."
"Legal and Penal systems which put non-criminals into jails which are designed to shove everybody into beast-mode and encourage them to abuse one another just so that they might survive."
And of course,
"Half-Billion Dollar mis-leadingly named information-consolidation contracts which duplicate other contracts and existing systems which already work a bit too well at putting non-criminals into jail."
If I can't have that tax system, then I'd rather see the whole goddamned thing burn to the ground.
But hey, that's just me.
-FL
I think they should come up with an online form for the principal information and then put the rest in a free form text box based on a few rules. then add notes and opinions. throw all of this in a big database and then sic the google search engine on it. (or perhaps gigablast or A9) Of course this would all be on a private network that could recieve case info from the outside world probably via encoded e-mail or vpn. Each bit of info would be double checked by editors for spelling mistakes and accuracy then approved to go into the database. but the system would not be allowed to divulge info outside a few authorized machines which were located in secure FBI offices. The search engine would return results that could be forwarded to agents in the field if needed by authoized personel.
The Bureau has the same issues proprietary trading firms have (mixed strategy hedge funds). They could have done this for a few million using the same meta-architecture used by these funds.
I have a tiny, tiny bit of experience working with some of these folks and I'm not surprised it got this screwed up.
www.hiredinsight.com
When will people learn: with extremely complicated systems that humans have to interact with you can not specify it 100% correctly the first time?
Experience in building such systems has lead many of us to realize you must use an iterative approach that allows the end users to be part of the feedback loop.
Release early and release often, let your users use and break the application, and come closer to the ideal system with each iteration.
Now, I wouldn't blame the FBI for the problem completely - after all, they are not software developers. A portion of blame should go toward the contractor for failing to realize the issues surrounding development of such a complex system and taking appropriate actions to determine and meet the needs of their clients. Their contract should have been written to a) specify customer satisfaction as the key measurable for success, and payment of the contract b) put in a rider that basically states any functionality needed to bring the application to minimal usability as discovery occurs will be part of the first contract (this is negotiable - some things are really enhancements and new functionality - and some are required, even though not originally discovered in the first iteration - this allows both parties to recognize up front that 100% discovery of requirements does not take place in practice).
This approach has worked extremely well for me as a manager of vendor development (I have been extremely lucky to have vendors who understand what I am talking about), as well as for my own projects that I develop and implement. While there is a bit of risk involved in negotiating key usability issues discovered late in the development cycle - going out of the gate with an iterative approach ameliorates much of that - and is certainly less risky than giving someone $100,000,000 before I see the first line of code...
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
"I'm having to post this anonymously because anyone that has even begun to criticize the TIERS software, even internally, has been officially reprimanded or worse."
You mean the chair?
What's wrong with Napster? ;)
Privacy is terrorism.
It's "they're" you idiot
I always have to laugh when I'm watching 24 and they pull inter-agency databases up in a few seconds and send it to Jack's PDA in the field. To top it off, half the time the chick that is doing it is pretty hot.
In the real world 1/2 the stuff he asked for would probably be on an old Unisys machine (not supported since 1989) that thinks it is dumping records to a printer that is actually an old OS/2 machine connected to the serial port running a Pascal program that was written by a summer intern back in 1992 to parse the printer data and write it to a csv file so that he could pull it into Lotus 123 and do a report with it.
In the real world the terrorist would win because Jack would be waiting in the field waiting for this vital piece of information. The person that he called to get the data would be a civil servant with a bad attitude who wouldn't answer the phone because he was out smoking a cigarette. Even if he did try to help, he would have to hire a contractor to actually do the work. After the civil servant spent 4 months writing a spec and getting everything through purchasing, the contractor would have to sift through an old yellow printout of the Pascal code because nobody would know where the files were anymore. Eventually the hard drive on the OS/2 machine would die and all would be lost. The contractor would still charge $1000/day for being there and stress that next time they should get him involved BEFORE it gets that bad. It would then take 73 days for the contractor to get paid on his net 30 invoice because if you though the intelligence systems were a CF, you should see how they do it in accounts payable.
After 4 years and half a billion dollars, FBI's attempt to create new information sharing software - called Virtual Case File - simply didn't work.
Likely story. It seems like the government has been reading too much Dan Brown.
(read first paragraph)
Having seen a little how the government works, they will need to pay for and scrap yet another system before they get one that even remotely works. The reason: it takes three iterations for them to even figure out what they want.
"...plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow" - Fred Brooks
The government always does.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
During the 15 years I ran my own computer consulting business it was common to be invited to make a bid, do the analysis and present a proposal, only to have the analysis given to a another to impliment. Sometimes the connection was nepotism, sometimes it was a competitor who under bid, so the putative client thought they'd save money by using the low bidder. They "Cherry Picked" me. That happened only a few times before I realized what was happening and begin charging for the analysis. If they wouldn't agree to pay for the anlaysis I wouldn't submit a proposal.
I am wondering if a similar thing isn't happening here. SAIC is, in effect, being paid to the system analysis, but the most lucrative part of the project will be given to an insider, a crony or for a political payoff.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
not surprising, considering that it was probably built by a bunch of horribly-unqualified-but-well-intentioned kids, fresh out of school. I know because I've worked on many gov consulting gigs. but another possiblity is that the fbi is to blame.
We've spent hundreds of millions of dollars in a fruitless search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as a part of a war that cost billions (and thousands of American/"Coalition" and Iraqi lives), and not only was Bush handily reelected, but he had the gall to give Medals of Freedom to George Tenet, Paul Bremer, and Tommy Franks--the three prime architects of this utter disaster. Everyone who's given this administration warnings, cautious advice, or contradictory evidence against patently absurd assertions has been targeted for demolition. This administration doesn't know the meaning of the word accountability. Heck, Bush probably pronounces it "accountamability" anyway.
It just seems that the system is completely rotten. Considering that people are openingly stealing millions and they are stealing it directly from the elite police and no one does a damn thing!
Personally, I find it appalling that the overly affluent are so well rewarded given the cost of their immoral treatment of others.
Britney Spears wants to be a detective like on CSI...why not just hire her?
Four years and half a billion dollars? I thought Andersen was out of the consulting business.
I'm not good in groups. It's difficult to work in a group when you're omnipotent. - Q
Note that the FBI, as with most government agencies, doesn't write software like this, they contract it out.
In this case, the bad product was produced by Science Application International Corp.
Sure, there maybe have been unrealistic requirements and other customer-related problems, but sometimes a bad team/company (or bad management) just produces a bad product.
Jeez, they should have just saved Napster the first time.
This kind of waste is made incredibly easy by a new republican type of government procurement called "performance based contracting". In the good old days, when the US did things like sending rockets to the moon, the government payed competitive salaries, and hired highly competent people. These competent people wrote highly competent specifications, then hired contractors to build things to those specs. The problem was that the contractors ability to rob the government blind was limited by the good judgement of the gov't employees. Now, under the republicans, gov't salaries and staff levels have been slashed. The only people left are old slobs waiting to retire. These people are hopelessly out of touch, and couldn't write a technical spec to save their lives. SO they have redfined procurement. NOW you just write a one-page request that says "Build us a computer system", then you open up your wallet, and let the contractor take whatever they want. In order to keep the cotnractor "honest" you offer them a 10% bonus on top of whatever rapacious profits they have already made if the system they build actually WORKS. And what has this gotten us - mind boggling incompetence and waste on a scale unprecedented in the history of mankind! Of course this is exactly what the republicans want. It gives them an excuse to "punish" government workers with further pay and staff cuts, and this in turn means even less interference in the shovelling of large buckets of tax dollars into the wallets of large corporations. The innocent get blamed and the guilty get rich.
"Sic Semper Path of Least Resistance"
"Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want."(unknown)
Cripes, give me the $100 Million. I'll set you up with a wiki and a google search appliance and I bet it'd work better than whatever shit their contractor came up with. My tax dollars at work. Grr.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
...work for government, and then you'll understand. Anyone beyond the level of 'prole' - that is, anyone with any sort of managerial responsibility - is likely to be a fucking idiot of the first order. The higher you go, the dumber they get, because promotion isn't based on ability but contacts and mutual secret-keeping. Who managed to get his 15-year-old babysitter to whore herself out to his boss? That's the person that's going to get promoted, be sure of it!
I know it's a trite, overused stereotype, but in more cases than you'd think possible it's also a *true* stereotype. Just about the only true stereotype I've run into during my life.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
It is both simultaneously disheartening and reassuring that our only protection from realization of a Big Brother is the mythical man month.
Have you considered running for president?
As always, impressed not so much with your views, but the joie de vivre in which they are expressed.
Salutations.
They would have to then release the code.
That would make the system insecure.
When I spec out software I like to do it modularly. Some would call this object oriented, but I think that object oriented is a specific type of modular programming.
And then for each module you have well defined behavior.
You can contract or shop out the various pieces. And that way you can have parts that will work for what they are supposed to do, and other parts that need one more time through the design spiral.
It would be like if you designed a car, you don't cut the car from a single piece of metal. You have various systems, braking, power train, fuel system, etc. If any one part doesn't fulfill it's requirements, then you can still use the other parts. That is how I also design software.
What they have here seems like people who didn't design the stuff with rigourous requirements documents. There must be some part of this system that they can salvage.
Wow, you got off light. http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/guncontrol/
Oh yeah, this is just to track law abiding citizens. Apparently, its not cost effective to track criminals in Canada.
1) Scratch dirt. 2) ??? 3) Profit!
Well this IS Texas. ;-)
look it up. they are not that innocent
try craigslist for starters
Please note that the article states it was a half billion dollar upgrade to the FBI computer system in general, and that:
Science Applications has received about $170 million from the FBI for its work on the project. Sources said about $100 million of that would be essentially lost if the FBI were to scrap the software.
In other words, the article says that it was $170,000,000 put into the Virtual Case File, not $500,000,000 - not that it's much better, but let's at least be accurate while we laugh at them.
-Jay
"Hold on, isn't Science Applications (also known as SAIC) also that company that was so incompetent in creating Pro-U.S. propaganda in Iraq that their contract was pulled from them?"
and
"Why does the government keep giving them contracts when they suck?"
You want them to be successful?
"It gets to be depressing working for the government because you see so many contracts like this awarded simply because some higher up gets his palm greased."
I'm assuming that you're saying that someone in the chain of command is taking home bigger paychecks? Or do you mean some other kind of "greased"? If so simply look for whom is living beyond their stated paycheck.
If they have live animals in the snack room, then RUN LIKE HELL!
You must think in Russian.
For a minute there I thought you were talking about Sourceforge.
I imagine that would actually work better than whatever mess was delivered to the FBI.
It's nice to know that my safety has been compromised by a bunch of jackasses who can't code their way out of a paper bag. In my business, if you don't deliver, you don't get paid. If you've already been paid, you have to refund the client.
Since the project tanked, I want a refund. The FBI should get their money back from the vendor and have to return it to all of us. Since the last census showed about 240,000,000 tax payers, I'm due a refund of 42 cents. I'd also go so far as to say that every tax payer in the USA is also due a refund of 42 cents.
42 cents,
Queen B
HDGary secures my bank
who are used to the idea that if somebody wants a pop-up that says, "Hello World," it will take at least 250 top-level managers to determine the interface requirements, another 500 to do the preliminary hiring specifications for contractors, and so on.
what, they can't define some database elements and put a dozen folks on a front end in under five years?
they need to get classroom of high-school juniors on this.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
nah, it was SAIC, one of the beltway bandits inside the ring interstates around DC that exist only to liberate funds from the US treasury.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
May I suggest Oracle 10G-Man
And as a tax payer, I'd prefer the FBI to use a system that works, rather than a system that doesn't. But as a criminal, I'd prefer the FBI to use a system that doens't work, rather than a system that does... ohh, I'm soooo conflicted!
"There are just four jobs remaining in the US. They are movies, music, microcode (software) and pizza delivery." Well, so much for the government ability to develop complex software projects. I guess I will need to get a job from uncle Enzo.
Not surprising. There is probable a rule somewhere stating that developing software for a State Department of Human Services will fail miserably and cost a lot of money. Texas is not unique.
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/13/1 455234
Another example of this is the fact that I had to pay Banctec (the company that has our hardware support contract) the standard fee of $340 to replace a CPU FAN in an old machine the other day. So sad. Especially when you consider that for $349, you could have replaced the whole machine with a new machine (sans monitor) from Dell with better performance...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Ahh, yes, wouldn't we all....
:)
:)
"80% of government is fat."
Not really. Of course, if by "fat" you mean not supported by me, well then, fair enough.
Reminds me of the quote, paraphrased, "One persons pork project is another persons vital project".
"Spineless Yes-Man Politicians More Interested in Keeping Their Jobs than in Serving the People who Bloody Voted for them."
But if people keep re-electing them, maybe they are serving their public. Of course the problem is, people get the representation they deserve, and so do we
The ultimate problem with the checklists is how they would be worded. And of course, no costs would be included....
Would you like (yes/no):
"A missile defense system that works and makes the world safe for democracy."
"Vital infrastructure contracts for companies to provide much needed employment."
"Education system that keeps your kids occupied for eight hours a day (and out of your house)."
"Legal system that delivers quick, accurate, and deserved punishment to criminals."
Now if you voted against some of them, people would think you torture animals in your spare time
I see a lot of intelligent and insightful replies on how this problem could have been dealt with instead of the way it actually was. That's because you are free to suggest.
I think the main issue I have with them all is that the implication is that the government actually cares what it does with your money. It doesn't. They have the power, you don't. If you accept that then you'd be surprised how many thousands of problems they created would not exist today.
The problem is that you believe they can solve anything but the most basic things a society needs. Even with that they'll often fail.
You sit back and let them roll over you with huge tax bills, they waste it all over the place, then you bitch at how much they suck. You are like a frog in water that keeps getting hotter and hotter! Stop and freaking look at the big picture. The entire clusterfuck they do is pure insanity! %95 of it is wasteful or counterproductive.
Americans aren't free but they think they are.
Here's an example of a coroporate exploit of externality . The film, The Corporation which is being shown in Aus at the moment details how companies avoid responsibility. The company developing the software has passed the *cost* of defects and inability to operate as required to the the client, the FBI. In turn funded by the US tax payer.
Counter to this it the poor technology management at the FBI. Is there really such a technology and project management and *knowledge gap* ?
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
The big defense contractors screw the taxpayer again and again, and still get rewarded with more contracts? Why? Easy...political contributions and connections. Take a look at any of their boards of directors.
While I have not seen the reqs. for this "Virtual Case File" I betcha it could easily be developed for 5% of what was paid and be close to state-of-the-art from 80-90% COTS( Commercial-Off-The-Shelf) software and Open Source. But then what fun is that when you can rape the taxpayer?
We are only talking about entering data onto secure web forms and retrieving said data for Pete's sake!
The fact of the matter is that even a really broken system of government could probably work wonderfully if all the people involved (both the public and the civil servants) were committed to doing a good job with good intentions and had no greed, anger, fear or general idiocy built into their heads.
Unfortunately, I don't think we're going to see this any time soon. And further, it seems that 'Razed to the Ground' may become more a default position than a bitter day-dream before terribly long.
-FL
I wonder if you could do it a lot cheaper my just indexing the whole mess with a Google search engine. The FBI "system" was dozens of custom databases, many written in COBOL or PL/I decades ago. Google works well with flat files than structured databases.