FBI IT = FUBAR

The FBI’s “Trilogy” computer-​​upgrade project has come to be known as one of the great infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy dis­as­ters of all time — the “Gigli” of com­put­ing. Now, the New York Times reports, a key part of Trilogy — the Virtual Case File — won’t be able to deploy by the end of the year, as promised. And FBI offi­cials “could not pre­dict when the entire sys­tem would be in place. As a result, an impor­tant tech­no­log­i­cal com­po­nent of the administration’s domes­tic secu­rity effort remains in limbo.”

The Virtual Case File sys­tem, which would allow agents to share infor­ma­tion eas­ily a crit­i­cal short­com­ing of the present sys­tem is already two years behind sched­ule and one bureau offi­cial who spoke on con­di­tion of anonymity went so far as to sug­gest that the pro­gram might ulti­mately have to be aban­doned…
In the after­math of the hijack­ings, Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. direc­tor, told a Senate panel that the bureau’s com­puter sys­tem was so lim­ited that it could not search its files for com­bi­na­tions of terms like “flight” and “schools,” pre­cisely the kind of com­bi­na­tion that might have helped to dis­cern the pat­terns of activ­ity lead­ing up to the attacks. Instead, Mr. Mueller said, the sys­tem could search for words like “flight” and “school” only one at a time…
According to a staff report from the bipar­ti­san com­mis­sion inves­ti­gat­ing the Sept. 11 attacks, the F.B.I.‘s pri­mary infor­ma­tion sys­tem, which was designed using 1980’s tech­nol­ogy, was “already obso­lete when installed in 1995.” The com­mis­sion report said that “field agents usu­ally did not know what inves­ti­ga­tions agents in their own office, let alone in other field offices, were work­ing on.” 

For now — and for the forsee­able future — that’s how things will stay.

June 26th, 2004 | Data Diving | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.