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Post-9/11 DOJ Tech Project Dying After 10 Years?
gManZboy writes "A secure, interoperable radio network that the Department of Justice has been working on for more than a decade and that has cost the agency $356 million may be headed for failure, according to a new report by the agency's inspector general. Called for in the wake of 9/11, the Integrated Wireless Network (IWS) project has already been repeatedly scaled back. Today, the Department of Justice continues to rely on several separate land mobile radio systems, some of which are unreliable, obsolete, and fail to interoperate with one another. Agents often have to swap radios, share channels, or refer to a book of radio frequencies and manually switch between those frequencies to stay online. Radios remain insecure, as much of the current equipment fails to meet encryption requirements. Much of the agency's equipment is more than 15 years old and is no longer even supported by the manufacturer."
The point was NOT to create a secure, interoperable radio network. The purpose of the plan was to create legions of (somehow) "successful" project managers and government hangers-on with quasi-governmental authority, and pump money into those organizations in return for future favors. Whether or not it produced anything was irrelevant. Around 9/11 there's so much fearmongering that nobody will say no.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
that the government spending $356 million on a failed project doesn't sound like that much money anymore?
More goodies for the Swap n' Shop in Dayton!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Well, I'm glad at least a portion of their budget seems to be coming from the MAFIAA.
and nothing to show for it
shocking ... really ... it ... is (yawn)
As we all know, no private business ever wastes money. They have a 100% success rate on all investments.
Carlin - The Real Owners Of America
"The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They've got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They've got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying  lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else."
"But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago.
"You know what they want? Obedient workers  people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they're coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club."
"This country is finished."
suck the SOPA soap but don't drop it!
have you seen the SOPA commercials where they depict an American flag falling apart? Clever brainwashing bitches!
"A secure, interoperable radio network that the Department of Justice has been working on for more than a decade and that has cost the agency $356 million may be headed for failure,"
Don't you mean COST THE TAXPAYERS?
And how is this any different than any of the programs that followed 9/11? TSA is trampling roughshod over travelers' rights, the Department of Homeland Security is a bloated farce, and the individual's basic rights under the Constitution have been eroded. To say nothing of the years of rendition flights, wars, and torture. I'm certainly glad that we're the "good guys." I wonder what the "bad guys" have been up to.
Yeah, like that Solyndra place! They wasted half a billion dollars of investors...shit...
For day to day police operations, the system should be able to handle unencrypted traffic.
Because adding encryption means an additional layer that can go wrong and thus necessitates a 2nd channel for the support people to use to try to fix the primary (encrypted) channel.
And have encryption an option for the times when you REALLY need it. And have frequent tests of it to make sure that everyone knows how to enable it.
But I'm more in agreement with the GP post. This wasn't really about a working radio system. It was about moving public money to private businesses. The WTC attack and the fear were just the excuses used. IF a working product was delivered ... wow! If not, at least your buddies collected their share of the HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS in this project.
There is another interoperable radio network called Project 25 (www.project25.org) which sprung up in the wake of Hurricane Katrina because none of the agencies involved in rescue operations could communicate with each other, mainly because the vendors that sold equipment to the agencies had competing technologies, different frequency bands and encryption algorithms (or lack thereof), etc. AFIK, Project 25 is alive and kicking, all modern two-way radios sold these days that adhere to the standards set forth by Prohect 25 can communicate with each other, share the same bands, use the same encryption, etc.
Europe has a seemingly good standard called TETRA. Finland uses it in it's own VIRVE network. Why are you wasting money to implement a new standard?
The difference being, when a private business does so they go away. When the feds do so they raise your taxes and throw you in jail if you don't comply. I don't see Kodak on the news telling me if I just paid more taxes everything would be great.
Didn't they tell us TV had to go from analog to digital to free up contiguous blocks of spectrum for first responders?
Are they actually getting that spectrum, or is it all going to cell phone companies and such?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I heard last year that first responders are trying to hang onto a chunk of radio spectrum that the telecoms want. I don't think it was really about encryption so much as making sure that it could do trunking correctly - units could bring in radios across the country and have working interoperability. Encryption is its own ball of crazy. I for one would rather have the fire fighters have better radios, the fuzz can generally get good radios if they want them.
This is apparently the "D Block" which is next to existing 700MHz public safety frequencies.
http://gcn.com/articles/2011/03/31/first-responders-public-safety-d-block-spectrum.aspx
later: http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/dc/2011/06/911-first-responder-radio-bill-clears-committee
--hongpong.com
And you think they want to go away? Of course not. They try their best, and still occasionally fail. But when the government does the same, we're supposed to view it as this evil thing that needs to be torn down.
People who want the government to shrivel up and die hold it to an impossibly high standard, all so that they have a pretense to bring it down.
paid government shill
Nobody wants to government to shrivel up and die. Some of us are just tired of seeing 5000% as much time and money spent solving a problem as was needed.
No in any of the metrics you can measure it in, except that it is more secure and uses less bandwidth. other than that it fails miserably where analog would work.
prove it to me otherwise
Imagine if they had just endowed a couple open source/hardware BSD companies to generate competing projects. Two companies could hire a dozen programmers each to work year round for ten years. It would produce something everyone could use, the public, private companies, and the government itself would actually get a working system. And it would have only cost them around 35 million. 24 programmers x 100,000 x 10 years = $24mil. So another 11 million for overhead.
If the companies were designed from the get go to be BSD open sourced then there would be competition to actually be hired into the projects... you would get even more work than what you paid for...
Killing is Good.
Ok this is going to piss a lot of people off and it's barely related to the story but fuck it, I'm just going to say it. The US is a fucking shadow of what it once was and it's now a big corrupt joke. See that story about Asia overtaking the US in innovation? Yeah, it already happened 20 years ago, you're in denial. Your education sucks, you get worse scores on math tests than chirlden from countries where they don't own shirts and do their homework on slates. Your goverment fails at every project they undertake - after it goes overbudget and funds dissapear with no accountability. Your medical system is a fucking joke - you turn down the sick because they don't have the right type of insurance and maulpractice is rampant. Your distrobution of wealth does nothing but show how your system is owned by greed and your politicians don't even bother trying to hide the fact they're sellouts (SOPA/PIPA anyone?). And how about the next election? Here are your choices: a man who covers the fact he's running you poor and selling you out by giving charged speaches about vaguely positive ideas and a greedy idiot who belongs to a religion where you are required to wear "magic underwear".
A Russian friend of mine said this to me: "Russians aren't waiting for the rise of the East, they ware waiting for the decline of the West". It feels like that day has come. Flame me, mod me down, do whatever - I'm not even going to respond. I just wanted to get that out. The dream of America is dead.
... and for just a small fraction of what they paid. Just give me a waiver of all patent and copyright laws.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
They called it a "Ghost Network".
Of course it involved manipulating the biology of the transceivers, but, hey, "eggs...scramble...break...", right?
Seriously though, WTF!? These are the agencies that we "rely" on to protect us and they can't figure out how to fix the blinking 12:00 on the VCR? Yes, I purposely used an antiquated term for technical incompetence, because the tech is 15 years old!!
"15 years ago" perspective:
Just to name a few...
"Helping to keep you two steps ahead of the Thought Police!"
Thank God for Ham Radio - all volunteers, most likely all patriots in time of great need, all providing gear of various levels of sophistication at no cost to the public.
They should get in touch with these guy in Mexico who build communication networks, tunnels and submarines. They would set it all up real quick.
Every dollar that passes through their hands is leverage. At the top of the pyramid, it doesn't matter whether you "succeed" or "fail", or even if you bother to define success and failure. What matters is that the money passes through your hands, giving you a chance to leverage that cash flow for personal gain. The $5 billion target was probably a hail mary, and they were actually hoping for only a fraction of that. Again, these people aren't spending their own money. They could care less about the exact amount; they merely want to rake as much cash as they can through their hands before their time is up. $300 million isn't exactly chump change.
Did I just imply that the people who run the business of government are there purely for personal gain, the exact opposite of the age-old politician's cry? You're god damn right I did.
The people who do not have a scanner do not have "access" to those channels. They could get a scanner, but have no desire to. Mostly because the police log is published in the newspaper, and they take that at face value. And without one, they cannot listen in.
The difference being, when a private business does so they go away.
Not if they're a politically connected Wall Street firm.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
The slashdot groupthink is to not trust the government, so why do you all believe their explanation of events on Sept. 11, 2001 without question?
Because to not believe the official account of an event of such magnitude would shake the very foundations of what they believe to be true. It would raise many, many uncomfortable questions about how we know what we know, and who is actually running the show, and imply that a mass manipulation is going on to sell the world on something that isn't true. Most people are not ready for that.
It has been shown that most people will ignore information that threatens their preconceived notions. This is no different. Most people, including most in the /. community, would rather be comfortable in their own heads than know the hard truth.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
no longer exists in the USA. Relatively simple, practical tasks can no longer get done due to lobbyists and corrupt, inattentive politicians. Nor is this likely to change before the economy and energy shortages force societal simplification, like it or not. Interesting times.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
$356 million over 10 years is nothing, relatively speaking. Why is slashdot so enamored with headlines that sound like a lot of money but really isn't? For example, I was on a training contract for three years. Five people, $8 million. Five. People.
I spent 2 days earlier this week dealing with another DOJ project. Kind of humorous after the fact.
http://blog.onlymyemail.com/us-department-of-justice-fbi-victim-notification-system/