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FBI Conducts Feasibility Study on Project Sentinel
leave-no-trace writes "CNN reports that "FBI officials hope to award a contract by the year's end for a complex new software program (dubbed Sentinel) to replace a failed project that was canceled this year at a cost of more than $100 million to taxpayers." The system is supposed to include search capabilities, protocols for processing and handling FBI reports, security issues and a new system for records management. FBI Director Robert Mueller told lawmakers he is unable yet to place a price tag on the Sentinel project."
I know that many who have not worked either for or around the US government before are shocked at how money is spent (squandered) on projects that never finish or are dead the day they are deployed.
The US Department of Energy spent approximately $250 million on a project to convert low-level radioactive waste into a concrete slurry that would be poured into a vault for disposal. They began construction on the vaults and had the grout plant ready to begin operation. Unfortunately, they didn't get approval of from the State of Washington before they began construction. At the point where full-scale testing was to begin, the State rejected their application to operate. Seems they were working a dual track: design and construction while simultaneously working on permit approval.
They gambled and lost. $250M dropped in a hole and it never hit bottom. The money that was spent on the FBIs last system will suffer a similar fate.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Or skynet?
save the (poor) tax payers some money
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
I hear MS Access is currently the top contender because of its robust security.
if you where on the executive board, they got new houses and million dollar paychecks for their involvement so in reality, mission accomplished
no need to enter the lottery, just get an executive goverment position, then you can win the lottery every paycheck !
It seems that large engineering projects, of any kind (not just restricted to IT), are particularly prone to failure when combined with public government money. I can't count the number of times news reports have uncovered vast government sums (at least here in the UK) being poured into ever-delayed and failing projects.
One of the more recent cases I can recall is the replacement of national air traffic control systems, which was delayed by years, and even after deployment suffered major issues. Public money just seems to be wasted away on these things, and its accepted as a fact of life.
Business Voyeur
Hasn't this happened before? Hasn't the FBI tried desperately to digitize all its crap and failed each time? I seem to remember this from a while ago...
$100 million down the drain eh? Heck, I'll bid this next project at a mere $1 million and flail miserably causing the contract to be scuttled in the end just like this one.
Success! Because I'll be saving the FBI $99 million! In fact I think I'll qualify for one of those federal gov't "bounty for saving Uncle Sam costs" contractor bonus plans.
Off to the Dilbert Mission Statement Generator.
Seriously:
No one else has a hope of pulling an information indexing and retrieval project of this scale off, and they excel at exactly this kind of thing.
Plus, there's that "First, do no evil...." motto.
--Red
I think whoever the FBI allows to prime on the contract, they damn well better know a thing or two about project management. I think SAIC's failure to execute is in small part due to the underpinning technology, in large part due to an FBI leadership that was not on the same page, but mostly due to the fact that the management of this project was mishandled.
before I had to ask google for the definition:
technical feasibility study: n. from Gr. technos, knowledge + OF faux, false; see rubber stamp. See also "pork barrel" and "buzzword".
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Man 'killed' the all knowing all seeing and now 'we' are finding we need a replacement for him so 'we' are empowering our government to be that all seeing all knowing force.
I personally think the All knowing all Powerful God was a bit more manageable than the All knowing and All Powerful state.
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
a $100 million software project breaks down to:
~ 1.6 million well paid programmer hours
or a roughly 50 strong team of (well paid) programmers and experts working for nearly 15 years without taking holidays or weekends off. If you want you can cut that down to 8 years and you've still got about $50M to play with for your servers and networking.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm so going to be on their blacklist for this comment...
Physicist, consultant, science communicator
Would someone chuck them a CD with a copy of eGroupWare on it please..
AT&ROFLMAO
The X-Men are doomed for sure!
That one hundred million dollars can be thrown away (well, sure, a lot of people profited by this malfeasance but the taxpayers didn't get what was paid for) and nobody goes to prison for thirty years ... incredible. Nowadays, it just seems like the worse the crime, the less the time. You would just think that the news media would be all over this but Noooooo! it's just glossed over. And, of course, it's the tip of the proverbial iceberg. There'as a reason taxes are so high my friends, and it has less to do with the services with which we are provided than those which we are not (like this project.) And I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that the "new and improved" project will be run by the same people that screwed up the last one.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Maybe they should make me Director of the FBI.
[o]_O
Dear FBI:
Get yourself a rack of these: http://www.google.com/enterprise/gsa/index.html/
I'll be expecting a check in the mail for $99million. You know where to find me.
Sincerly,
me
Jesus saves souls and redeems them for valuable cash prizes
This will bring them one step closer to their goal of eradicating the world of mutants.
Most taxpayers I know look at price tags. If there's no price tag, this SHOULD be a tough sale. Too bad politicians aren't concerned with "costs" or "money" or "individual rights".
they really can't decide on what they want.
which is understandable, it is a massive project. the constantly evolving requirements don't help to nail down a prototype to get to teh final project.
I think successful projects get done in spite of the government, and they are usually done by one person or a small team of people. I know. I single-handedly developed a database integration projection for a government agency back in the mid 1980's that is still in use today. I doubt if a team could have done it. It was me working 18 hour days and weekends that did it. And I did it in spite of some lazy bastard government types who stood in my way.
-- SKYKING, SKYKING, DO NOT ANSWER.
Google + The Federal Govt. == do no evil?
Lets not tempt fate...
Anyway, if there is one thing that history teaches us it is that if you are cursed to live in "exciting" times profiteering is the way to go. I am down with some of it happening in the IT sector....
100 million bucks?
It's called a Google search appliance.
Or maybe they should just switch to Mac's running Tiger and use Spotlight.
Compare and contrast DARPA, which founded the
research to build the internet,
and what is happening in the post 9/11 chaos,
one was engineer led, the other opressive and
much more importantly, completely inefective.
Someone, in the US space, needs to start asking
serious questions, so security policy is made by
scientists and engineers, not politicians, whether
elected or not. If US military-industrial waste is
allowed to continue, in this failure mode,
Usama bin-Laden will get another chance, and will
do _more_ damage the next time.
For the hardware setup (scale) and general search solution, Google is very good. However, it is not for every problem.
Google does not have near the contextual capabilities of some (custom-fitted) search engines. At some point, you need automation and a level of reliability. You can't have a person looking at everything. And repeated searching, which we take for granted, is often necessary on the same dataset to garner sufficient results. Who says when we have found the right information?
Google does not provide complex taxonomy or a feedback loop mechanism (which can be very complicated - often patented or proprietary).
In the original PageRank thesis, it was made clear that context was entirely up to the user. When dealing with records (i.e., highly redundant data that must be cross-referenced extensively), Google falls flat.
Let me greatly over-simplify. Consider, "Joe Smith civilian" and "Joe Smith terrorist". Google will not distinguish the two Smith's. It will only distinguish the phrase in relation to the index. So - even if we have a link between Smith the terrorist and smith the civilian, we can still mix them up (unless we mark everything explicity). We need context (not just words in the same document, sentence, etc.), and as our search pattern hones in on matches (repeated, refined searching), we need better classification or we go in circles.
Let me guess - the same pointy haired bosses are running this project too.
I could whip up a Perl script to do all that for only $50 million.
Why do they need a new system?
Can't Jack Bauer just ask Chloe to, "Open a socket to the main server and retrieve the identity profiles," whenever he needs to?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I bet they already have the job half done, or at least are on the same wavelength. Bet they could do it in a quarter of the amount too.
How about the open source community propose some solutions. Being on the inside might help. Do you think it would cost less than 100M if done with Linux? How secure would it be? As if they actually would consider open source.
Please pay my consulting fee with a check to cash. Thank you.
You forgot CEO, CFO, CTO and CIO. These folks alone can suck in $100M in a single year (outsourcing the project itself to India).
Hey, they couldn't put a price on a war in Iraq, but we bought one of those! And it's just getting more warry, unlike most government purchases which evaporate right after their warranty runs out.
--
make install -not war
It was about time the government worked on the problems of those pesky mutants!
It's got a nice Orwellian ring to it, doesn't it...
"We are... Watching you..." -- Tim Curry, Congo
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
Hmm Project Sentinel... By chance the failed project wasn't named Wideawake was it. Geez pretty soon we will be reading about giant robots hunting down the mutants!
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
Why? Simply put. In the government it is impossible to get a spec. You spend months in negotiation trying to nail down something. Once you do and you write up the spec. There is always that funky little clause which allows for "changes unforseen do to the needs of the governement." It's worse than having heart lung machines designed by marketing.
At the end of stage one a contract is signed. Ok folks time to start.... nope.... not yet. Depending on how the money was allocated they may or may not have to get outside approval. This could be the dept's accounting section, the GAO, or Congress. God in heaven help you if congress gets wind of it. Every Senator and Congressman along with 50K pedantic purveyors of polluted pullet piss (aka lobyists) will be on it like white on rice instantly. Each determined to get a piece of the pie for their district. (We don't need air horns for errors a simple PC speaker and beep will do just fine.... Oh I see Congressman Pantywhistle's district makes air horns, and he's head of the appropriations commitee.) Now the problem is that all of this doesn't get done until 1 week before budgetting tightens up tighter than a bullfrogs butt. You as the contractor have to finish out the new specs and get them to the proper authorities. (What do you mean Mr Toefinger is on vacation! He has to sign the paper work.... Fine can we fedHex it to him in Aruba?) He in turn will get the address wrong on the pre-addressed return envelope and in the end you will wind up getting your paperwork in to budgetting at 3:59 on the last day (one hour before closing)
Will Sentinel fail, yes but it will faill less than it's predicessor, leaving someone to say.....
It would have worked if we'd only had a couple of hundred million more.
(and over in the corner will be a lone secretary, notebook and PDA in hand, who will have created with a spreadsheet and and addressbook a better replacement for sentinal than sentinal itself.)
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
Do you KNOW how expensive it is to make huge mutant-killing Sentinels?
... But for every Sentinel we send after him, he manages to get rid of it somehow. And don't even get me started on that guy with the metal claws, can he even *be* killed?
Damn, $250M is quite cheap given the advanced robotics involved in their construction. I mean, it's a *HUGE* PITA to go after that one annoying guy who seems to be able to bend even the non-ferromagnetic metals with his mutant power of "magnetism"
$100M on a 'failed' project, eh? I'm sure that money conveniently went to other parts of the FBI, no wonder the project failed.. ie., 'black funding'.
Let's take a look at the list of bright ideas for names:
Now, let's take a look at what the people doing this could learn from:
There are things that it's okay to attach scary appellations to. Fighter jets -- Fighting Falcon, Tigershark, Hornet, Cobra, Phantom, Demon, Banshee, Fury. Those are supposed to be scary, because it gives people a sense of vicarious power and excitement. Naming domestic monitoring and law enforcement systems (and that is, with the addition of counterintelligence, the job of the FBI) anything scary-sounding is a very bad idea.
While the United States doesn't usually do this, here are some other points:
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Yeah! Why do they use names from sci-fi flicks for government funded research? Someone up high just thinks it's fun to mess with the [delicate] minds of conspiracy nuts?
Zoeith
Heck, just type in "DMV software debacle" in google, that comes up with an Amazon.com book on the subject as the numeber one hit. Try just "software debacle" for even more instances.
The choice between Conspiracy or Incompetence comes up all too often. While Conspiracy is more interesting, the sad truth is that something much less is usually involved.
In any event, the money doesn't dissappear. It ends up in the economy somewhere, and was probably better spent on a failed high-tech program than it would have been in an outright give-away (like unemployment benefits for those same programmers).
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
That motto basically precludes them from doing work for the us federal government.
Really, the cost for this isn't as much as you might think it is for the work involved (or compared to other government projects).
I work for a police station and run people through FBI checks periodically. Don't get out your tin-foil hats though, most FBI checks are for employee background checks, criminal records needing to be checked directly through the FBI don't occur very frequently. But for you people out there who think what they have now is sufficient, you're wrong.
Currently the only system in place is a terminal where you have to know the cryptic commands to make it work (think unix CLI x10). Many law enforcement agencies are in the process of making the switch the "new" ncurses-like interface where knowing the cryptic commands isn't as necessary. In fact, I believe their funding would be well spent on a new system because it would probably save the goverment in general that much each -year- in training costs savings.
I know it's not a popular belief, but not everything the government does is bad.
Maby we chose a bad name, but as security robots go it was wicked! :)
The sentinel page was http://andre.bonin.ca/projects.html
If anyone likes it, all members are looking for work in security right now :)
If any government agency is alloted a certain amount of hard-earned taxpayer money, they either have to spend it, or risk losing it the next time the budget is funded. In short, there's a huge advantage to wasting that much money - at minimum, it means they stand a good chance of staying funded at the current level (maybe even more), whether or not they have anything to show for it. The losers, of course, are the taxpayers.
"FBI Director Robert Mueller told lawmakers he is unable yet to place a price tag on the Sentinel project."
:-)
Well... the research allready cost more than a 100 million
Why doesn't google compete for this contract. I don't know a lot about what the FBI is looking for but it would seem like google would be good at this sort of thing
Parent was definetly funny, not trolly, mod him up.
Be better in bed. Wikiafterdark!
Granting that the federal government is good at screwing up large projects, the same is true of business, yet it seems to me that lots of businesses have set up comparable information systems. This is not an area in which I have any expertise, but to my perhaps naive eye, it seems like it ought to be possible to do it almost off-the-shelf. That is, the networking shouldn't be a big problem, and large database systems are of course widely deployed, so shouldn't setting up a system for the FBI be a matter of integrating a few familiar pieces of technology, with the programming mostly at the level of creating the appropriate fields, queries, forms, and so forth for FBI business? In short, is this actually a hard project, or is it a matter of adapting the same sort of technology used by companies like Ford and Walmart and so forth?
I am a terrorist and/or am planning terrorist activities in the United States: [ ]
Or maybe add an HTML Tag to the BODY tag, like regime=terror or something like that...
It works out at around twenty six thousand dollars for every man woman and child. You're all going to have to pay, one way or another.
Deleted
$100 million... geez.
Must be nice to work for an organization where your revenue is guaranteed by law.
For a moment, I thought they were talking about this kind of Sentinel...
You are describing the biggest challenge that corporations face when attempting to bring order to a general index. Products like the Google Appliance and Oracle Enterprise Search do a great job indexing all of your disparate content sources - unfortunately much of the context of the source is lost. What is required, and by far is the hardest part, is getting the corporation/government/whatever to agree on an enterprise taxonomy that is used as a base level of categorization for the data being indexed. If you can achieve agreement on a taxonomy, combining the information's metadata with its general index information provides a system that supports both targeted searches as well as general queries. Once again the issue is not technology. It is the ability of the organization to adopt new processes and accept change.
Seems it (considering the purpose described) that they could have just bought a google search appliance.
But, then there is the govt appropriations technique....
----- If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern
First off, this was supposed to be a PILOT project. It was designed as such because there was a myriad of problems to be overcome. The largest one was undoubtedly document/case info handling. I could just imagine the nightmares of the folks that were trying to design this one. Some folks here thought this was a free for all and that google search would do the job, not so. There are two concepts at work here- clearance level and need to know. Both work quite well at a human level. But at a computer level, automating these concepts are anything but easy to define, create, route, track, and enforce. Big deal. They scrapped the project. But at least they learned a lot for the next project and are incorporating what they can. Hopefully, the next one will come close to what they were hoping for.
You can get up to 80% of your pay in retirement benefits. Sittin' on that ass, watchin' the big screen while $100,000 worth of paychecks roll in for the rest of your life. Not too shabby.
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
Somewhat offtopic I suppose, but what I've always wanted to see in Google is something where you can search for some word or phrase and another word or phrase within x words of the primary phrase. For example, primary search is Brian Cohen and secondary search is terrorist with an x value of 10 returns only results like "[b]Brian Cohen[/b], a known member of the People's Front of Judea, a [b]terrorist[/b] organization that recently... That would be cool.
Nice Marmot