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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.
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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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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)!
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.
The bureau is no longer saying when the project, originally scheduled for completion by the end of 2003, might be finished. ...
...
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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."
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.
i think you fail to see how a gov project works.
steps to gov project.
1. create team of 4-5 people to outline requirements
2. get team staff of 2-3 to support them
3. get place for them to work for up to 2-3 years developing requirements
4. subcontract out requirements analysis to someone
5. hire subcontractor to verify requirements analysis by the first.
6. hire gov people to oversee both contractors
7. hire people to support people overseeing subs.
8. release requirements out for public "auction"
9. review company responses to "auction" by s team of 12-20 people
10. hire crew to support 12-20 people on the responses review.
11. except bid.
12 start project.
there you have approximately 100-200 people working on just ensuring the requirements documentation and bid for 3-4 years before a project even starts. that alone could cost 200 mil or more.
they got off cheap.
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.
That's how it works. You can't ask someone to provide a bid for a thing that isn't designed or built yet, then throw them in jail if their bid isn't 100% accurate. Good luck finding bidders! Your analogy to a car is just fucking retarded.