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."

Comments

Not Quite That Shocking

[geomon]

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.

Complex new software program

[Anonymous Coward]

I hear MS Access is currently the top contender because of its robust security.

I got as far as

[lheal]

the first sentence:

A technical feasibility study is under way on the new information management system

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".

Right..

[t_allardyce]

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.

i can do it...

[skydude_20]

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

Re:Suggestion: Google It

[globalar]

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.

What happened to politicos?

[typical]

Did every law enforcement guy and spook get *stupid* WRT PR?

Let's take a look at the list of bright ideas for names:

• Total Information Awareness. (Federal tie-databases-together project, never needed a public face in the first place.) Project has spooky logo containing giant floating eyeball in pyramid looking at the world. This is a good example of what we call a very bad idea from a political standpoint
• Carnivore. (FBI email monitoring program.) Project has unspecified capabilities to monitor email, lots of techies saying scary things about it already. Bad image.
• Sentinel. (FBI database system.) Current bad idea.

Now, let's take a look at what the people doing this could learn from:

• Magic Lantern. (FBI keylogger) Good name. Whimsical. Nonthreatening. You can get a picture of a sort-of-elflike FBI guy skipping merrily through the trees. Congress is not going to get complaints from scared citizens demanding that they cut funding on something called Magic Lantern.
• Operation Enduring Freedom. (name for the US invasion of Iraq, part two) See, no matter how much you don't like Bush, he managed to hold back on names like Operation Oilgrab, Operation Polishing Daddy's Legacy, and even the (increasingly obviously inaccurate due to news reports) intended name of Operation Infinite Justice. It's not bloodthirsty. It's happy and upbeat.
• Department of Defense. In the United States, we don't *have* a Department of War, and haven't for many years, ever since someone figured out that it's harder to get funding for war than for defense. Nor do we have a Department of Offense. The Department of Defense is a friendly shield covering kitties and sleeping babies. This is a good name.
• Social Security. Okay "social" might have been a bad idea, as it smacked a bit too much of socialism, but "security" is always safe. Calling this Handout From Our Kids or Federal Pyramid Scheme was avoided. Good choice.
• Pro-life/pro-choice. Nobody's negative, everybody's positive.
• Freedom fighter. The United States does not back terrorists. We have terrorists for *enemies*. We assist freedom fighters in overcoming their cruel oppressors.

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:

• Do not name a product after living people. With dead people, there's a only a slight chance that some scandal will be discovered later. With live people, you may have your newly-minted Mike Tyson's Punch-Out! be represented by an individual that abuses women, bites ears off of people, and rapes people.
• Do not name anything after an ethnic group. Ethnic groups change their names constantly to avoid political friction, and old acceptable terms rapidly become unacceptable. Even the Bureau of Indian Affairs sounds a bit creaky next to Bureau of Native American Affairs, and National Association For the Advancement of Colored People is just plain out-of-date.
• Codenames sometimes become product names, as Motorola found out with the PowerPC G3, G4, and G5. People can be sued for codenames, as Apple found out with Sagan. If you're going to have marketing people handing out internal codenames, think first. Or have a separate, external codename to use on products.
• Do not make your name a funny joke, especially an in-joke. It's definitely uproariously funny at the time, and then it just creates misery for every person down the road who has to explain it to ev