High profile government contract WTF
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You may or may not be aware of this story, but the FBI spent $170M on a case filing system to bring them out of the dark ages of paper files and into the age of computer networked data, and completely utterly failed. This WP article reads like a slightly longer and more polished version of the stories we read here every day:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/17/AR2006081701485.html
To sum it up, the project could be described as one big clusterfuck of mismanagement. (Can I use that word here?)
Oh yeah... and credit to Slashdot where I got the link. Who reads newspapers anymore?
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Man, that thing is 5 pages, I'm not reading it.
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@cooldudman said:
Man, that thing is 5 pages, I'm not reading it.
That's what I say about documentation!
How about the printer-friendly version? It's only one page.
I was going to comment on this story at Slashdot, but I get discouraged if I don't get to post within about 5 messages from the top.
Anyway, this seems like just a symptom of the disease that infects government today (a really bad symptom, I'll grant). When any bureaucracy gets sufficiently large and complex, it seems to discourage actually getting things done. Getting things done requires leadership, and leadership attracts blame when things go wrong, and nothing when things go right. So you have a huge organization where the members are busy making sure they don't take the blame for anything, or at least have somebody else lined up that they can blame.
This story sounds familiar. The FBI has had problems keeping their technology even somewhat current. By the time they get any significant new systems installed, those systems are already obsolete.
Example from news.com:
Those limitations arose in large part because the FBI's primary
information management system was "designed using 1980s technology
(that was) already obsolete when installed in 1995,"
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@R.Flowers said:
but I get discouraged if I don't get to post within about 5 messages from the top.
Yeah, you've got to get that "Fi[r]st" in early... (groan)
Marc
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@Jojosh_the_Pi said:
R. Flowers, are you ever going to bring back that wrestling guy in the tiny red outfit as your avatar? Everyone loved it!
That little guy sure made an impression! I found him by Googling "WTF" (something that is NOT work-safe 30% of the time, BTW!). As my avatar, however, he is enjoying retirement.
I finally found the original, which I have appropriated and put up at imageshack.us: prepared to be disturbed!
I have linked to it rather than embedded it because it's borderline risque. Not in a good way. As you can see from this picture, I picked the less controversial of the 2 figures.
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@Brendan Kidwell said:
You may or may not be aware of this story, but the FBI spent $170M on a case filing system to bring them out of the dark ages of paper files and into the age of computer networked data, and completely utterly failed.
That's not even the tip of the iceberg.
It was designed to supplant part of another project which was cancelled last year at a final cost of more than $250 BILLION dollars.
Unfortunately, I worked on that project during the early and mid nineties.
WRT to the later poster saying people in the FBI were leaving for better-paying jobs, it was worse on my project. One of our major customers was the CIA, where one by one, the competent technical people assigned to our project were getting laid off and replaced with... well, scary people. People that would have been much more at home, say, torturing kittens.
It's my theory that as Clinton was gutting our intelligence budget, the agencies were dumping people out of anywhere they could to make room for the people who did field work. It's a lot less dangerous to lay off a software project manager than it is to lay off a guy who makes people disappear.
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This sort of thing happens way to often to be fun anymore, though perhaps not at quite the same scale.
In my opinion, the real WTF is that the company is still around to repeat their offence. They swindled the FBI for several hundred million dollars, and they get to walk away. Something is not right here.
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all the sources I've read say that the company warned the FBI repeatedly that the project was headed for disaster and the FBI ignored them.
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@tster said:
all the sources I've read say that the company warned the FBI repeatedly that the project was headed for disaster and the FBI ignored them.
That's a classical boondoggle.
Frankly, I don't think you can have a "high profile government contract WTF", because "high profile government contract" already implies "disaster". The only hope a government contract has for success is to be so obscure that nobody notices and shoves their oar in to screw it up.
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@CDarklock said:
It's my theory that as Clinton was gutting our intelligence budget, the agencies were dumping people out of anywhere they could to make room for the people who did field work. It's a lot less dangerous to lay off a software project manager than it is to lay off a guy who makes people disappear.
Please cite references from reliable and known sources if you are going to make such questionable claims with an obvious personal political bias (or preferably, just keep your conspiracy theories to yourself).
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@CodeRage said:
Please cite references from reliable and known sources
Your inability to use a search engine is not my problem.
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@CDarklock said:
@CodeRage said:
Please cite references from reliable and known sources
Your inability to use a search engine is not my problem.
Ok, google www.google.com/search?q=Clinton+was+gutting+our+intelligence+budget and guess what!? We get YOUR POST, right here, on that well known and reliable source of political truth... www.thedailywtf.com (TA-DA!). The other sites listed are surely a collection of truly unbiased ones, but I will leave that as an exercise for you, and any other interested reader (you will be lucky if you find one link that isn't yet another biased editorial).
Making politically slanted statements without appropriate citations just demonstrates how little intellectual ability you really possess. If *YOU* are making the claim, it is *YOUR JOB* to do the diligent research, not mine. Your lack of doing so, along with your weak insination that I have an "inability to use a search engine", is really pathetic. That is the real WTF.
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Making politically slanted statements without appropriate citations just demonstrates how little intellectual ability you really possess.
Why exactly would I look up a citation for something I personally witnessed? I was THERE. I know what happened. Looking it up would just be stupid.
If *YOU* are making the claim, it is *YOUR JOB* to do the diligent research, not mine.
Excuse me, but no. What you are referring to is the burden of proof, which is part of Robert's Rules of Order in formal debate, but we were not having a formal debate. The burden of proof also has statutory application in a court of law, but this is not a court of law, either. This is the internet, where you must assume that anyone saying anything is a lying sack of crap.
So even if I *do* post links and quotes and everything else, you still have to go to a search engine YOU trust and find sites YOU believe to make sure I'm not posting a load of garbage. And I expect you to do just that, when you care that much about what I'm saying.
Your lack of doing so, along with your weak insination that I have an "inability to use a search engine", is really pathetic.
Well, you claim that when you TRIED to use a search engine, all you could find was my original post. Let's see what MY use of a search engine can turn up, shall we? I have three main points to support: Clinton was gutting our intelligence budget, field operatives were being recalled, and contractors were being laid off. Let's see how well I can do.
9/11 commission report, p. 93:
"Cuts in national security expenditures at the end of the Cold War led to budget cuts in the national foreign intelligence program from fiscal years 1990 to 1996 and essentially flat budgets from fiscal years 1996 to 2000 (except for the so-called Gingrich supplemental to the FY1999 budget and two later,
smaller supplementals)."There's Clinton gutting our intelligence budget.
House committee on intelligence:
"Because of the perceived reduction in the threat environment in the early to mid 1990s, and the concomitant reduction in resources for basic human intelligence collection, there were fewer operations officers, fewer stations, fewer agents, and fewer intelligence reports produced."
There's recall of field operatives.
And Louis Uchitelle's book The Disposable American covers the history of layoffs quite well:
"Surprisingly, layoffs nationwide rose faster in the early 1990s than the early 1980s, as President Bill Clinton aggressively preached that labor had to lower its wage demands in order for American businesses to be competitive in global markets."
So there's contractor layoffs.
And from those three FACTS, I have composed a theory: that the intelligence community was laying off contractors and temporarily replacing them with recalled field operatives. Any solid evidence of that would be classified pretty much by definition, so you'll just have to take my word for it. But I'd really love to hear your alternative explanation. Pretty much every rebuttal I've heard amounts to "the CIA is stupid", which is simply not the case.
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@CDarklock said:
...budget cuts in the national foreign intelligence program from fiscal years 1990 to 1996 and essentially flat budgets from fiscal years 1996 to 2000 (except for the so-called Gingrich supplemental to the FY1999 budget and two later,
smaller supplementals)."There's Clinton gutting our intelligence budget.
Seems to me that Bush I signed the budgets for fiscal years 1990 to 1993. Give credit where credit is due.
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@CDarklock said:
Making politically slanted statements without appropriate citations just demonstrates how little intellectual ability you really possess.
Why exactly would I look up a citation for something I personally witnessed? I was THERE. I know what happened. Looking it up would just be stupid.
If *YOU* are making the claim, it is *YOUR JOB* to do the diligent research, not mine.
Excuse me, but no. What you are referring to is the burden of proof, which is part of Robert's Rules of Order in formal debate, but we were not having a formal debate. The burden of proof also has statutory application in a court of law, but this is not a court of law, either. This is the internet, where you must assume that anyone saying anything is a lying sack of crap.
So even if I *do* post links and quotes and everything else, you still have to go to a search engine YOU trust and find sites YOU believe to make sure I'm not posting a load of garbage. And I expect you to do just that, when you care that much about what I'm saying.
Your lack of doing so, along with your weak insination that I have an "inability to use a search engine", is really pathetic.
Well, you claim that when you TRIED to use a search engine, all you could find was my original post. Let's see what MY use of a search engine can turn up, shall we? I have three main points to support: Clinton was gutting our intelligence budget, field operatives were being recalled, and contractors were being laid off. Let's see how well I can do.
9/11 commission report, p. 93:
"Cuts in national security expenditures at the end of the Cold War led to budget cuts in the national foreign intelligence program from fiscal years 1990 to 1996 and essentially flat budgets from fiscal years 1996 to 2000 (except for the so-called Gingrich supplemental to the FY1999 budget and two later,
smaller supplementals)."There's Clinton gutting our intelligence budget.
House committee on intelligence:
"Because of the perceived reduction in the threat environment in the early to mid 1990s, and the concomitant reduction in resources for basic human intelligence collection, there were fewer operations officers, fewer stations, fewer agents, and fewer intelligence reports produced."
There's recall of field operatives.
And Louis Uchitelle's book The Disposable American covers the history of layoffs quite well:
"Surprisingly, layoffs nationwide rose faster in the early 1990s than the early 1980s, as President Bill Clinton aggressively preached that labor had to lower its wage demands in order for American businesses to be competitive in global markets."
So there's contractor layoffs.
And from those three FACTS, I have composed a theory: that the intelligence community was laying off contractors and temporarily replacing them with recalled field operatives. Any solid evidence of that would be classified pretty much by definition, so you'll just have to take my word for it. But I'd really love to hear your alternative explanation. Pretty much every rebuttal I've heard amounts to "the CIA is stupid", which is simply not the case.
Oh please, cut the "you'll just have to take my word for it". Are you implying you have some top secret knowledge of the allocation of CIA field operatives? Yeesh, and I thought most people here were computer software people.
I have not questioned that budget cuts were made, I was criticizing your politically slanted claim of that it was Clinton that made these cuts. It is Congress who approves budgets, and Clinton hardly started the changes that began at the end of the Cold War. Plenty of Clinton opponents supported for, and voted for, these very budget cuts. Nationwide layoffs rising in the 1990s made by businesses is really silly to attribute to the President, even at his suggestion, and has nothing to do with governmental budget cuts in the intelligence sector. Funny you should quote the 9/11 report, does it mention that Clinton launched a missile at an al qaeda base targetting none but OBL himself, much to the criticism of Clinton's opponents. Supposedly barely missed. Doesn't sound like Clinton was really weak on intelligence given that act, perhaps the fact that the USA no longer had to wage an expensive intelligence operation against another world superpower meant budget cuts and layoffs were appropriate to focus the effort to more current needs.
Anyway, nice work on giving some citations. I still find your blaming Clinton to be politically slanted. I fail to find in your links a smoking gun implicating him alone in any of the discussed budget cuts, especially considering what part of our government votes and approves such budgets, and considering which party controlled the Congress for most of the Clinton presidency.
So, your theory that budget cuts did indeed lead to the "intelligence community ... laying off contractors and temporarily replacing them with recalled field operatives" is not what I am questioning. I just don't understand the Clinton spin you took. Also, never did I state that I considered the "CIA Stupid", perhaps you are defending against someone else's comments.
(sorry I don't have time to proofread this message)
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@Philbert Desanex said:
@CDarklock said:
...budget cuts in the national foreign intelligence program from fiscal years 1990 to 1996 and essentially flat budgets from fiscal years 1996 to 2000 (except for the so-called Gingrich supplemental to the FY1999 budget and two later,
smaller supplementals)."There's Clinton gutting our intelligence budget.
Seems to me that Bush I signed the budgets for fiscal years 1990 to 1993. Give credit where credit is due.
what?
also, people here are arguing about different things. One says that layoffs in the CIA were due to Clinton's budget cuts. The other says that it's not Clinton's fault because congress also wanted to cut the intelligence budget and that you can't blame corprate layoffs on Clinton. Seems to me that none of those statements are actually contradictory.
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@CodeRage said:
Ok, google www.google.com/search?q=Clinton+was+gutting+our+intelligence+budget and guess what!?
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@CodeRage said:
Oh please, cut the "you'll just have to take my word for it". Are you implying you have some top secret knowledge of the allocation of CIA field operatives?No, I'm saying that I can't give you any classified information. That's a subtly different thing.
Yeesh, and I thought most people here were computer software people.
They do use software, you know, and someone does have to write it.
I have not questioned that budget cuts were made, I was criticizing your politically slanted claim of that it was Clinton that made these cuts.
Let's look at what Clinton's Secretary of Defense Les Aspin testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in 1993: "If you look at the bad guys out there, there is no bad guy, with the possible exception of what happens in Russia, but the most extreme case of the bad guys out there is another Desert Storm. And there isn't anybody out there that is the kind of threat that Iraq was before Desert Storm."
That's the core of the argument that won over Congress and led to most of the cuts, especially in the mideast.
Clinton hardly started the changes that began at the end of the Cold War.
No, but he extended them far beyond the bounds of reason. And it's true that Clinton didn't unilaterally decide; he simply appointed the cabinet member who presented to Congress a false sense of security sufficient to cut and reduce most of the funds used for overseas programs. This was done primarily to meet Clinton's campaign promise to cut $60 billion from the defense budget, which you quite rightly observe was largely out of his hands. There are only a few places in the defense budget that we retain a degree of agility and discretion, and one of the most flexible is overseas intelligence.
Nationwide layoffs rising in the 1990s made by businesses is really silly to attribute to the President
Senator John McCain to President Clinton, 15 July 1993: "Mr. President, we have heard a great deal from the new administration about its concern for defense conversion and for the defense industrial base. We have heard that it is seeking to create a new type of defense industrial base that will rely on dual use technology, and help increase America's competitiveness. I am concerned, however, that several aspects of the administration's rhetoric do not match reality. [...] What the administration fails to comprehend, or chooses to ignore, is that the downsizing of defense will result in substantial job losses of both military and civilian personnel."
Funny you should quote the 9/11 report, does it mention that Clinton launched a missile at an al qaeda base targetting none but OBL himself, much to the criticism of Clinton's opponents.
The *sane* criticism leveled at Clinton was not that he was targeting bin Laden, but that he was doing it with cruise missiles fired from ships in the Red Sea and Arabian Sea, which is a fantastically ineffective strategy.
If you don't quite understand why, perhaps I should point out that Afghanistan is a landlocked country. It has no coastline. So we were shooting missiles over one country and into another, ostensibly trying to hit one person. Yeah. Sure. That will work. I don't hold it against Clinton that he avoided military service in Vietnam, but I *do* hold it against him that he later tried to make military decisions. If you didn't serve, and you don't have any training, and you haven't even made any real effort to learn military strategy - just STFU and let the generals handle it, mmkay?
There was certainly a lot of stupid "we should never fight anybody" whining going on, but those people were (and still are) just plain retarded. Correct military response is a non-partisan issue.
I fail to find in your links a smoking gun implicating him alone in any of the discussed budget cuts
Senator John McCain, 24 January 2000: "Since 1992, when President Clinton took office, our armed forces have deployed an average of one deployment every nine weeks, yet defense budgets have declined by nearly 40 percent during that same time, and procurement of modern weapons systems has declined by 70 percent."
I just don't understand the Clinton spin you took.
You could have stopped that sentence after the first four words.
I was there. I watched it happen. There is no documentation on the *planet* that can refute that. If you want to run off and claim "there's no evidence", you go right ahead. It simply cannot change what I know to be true.
Also, never did I state that I considered the "CIA Stupid", perhaps you are defending against someone else's comments.
However, you did challenge the idea that the CIA did pretty much the only intelligent thing it could have done under the circumstances, which implies that you believe the CIA would instead have done something stupid.
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@CDarklock said:
@CodeRage said:
Oh please, cut the "you'll just have to take my word for it". Are you implying you have some top secret knowledge of the allocation of CIA field operatives?No, I'm saying that I can't give you any classified information. That's a subtly different thing.
Yeesh, and I thought most people here were computer software people.
They do use software, you know, and someone does have to write it.
I have not questioned that budget cuts were made, I was criticizing your politically slanted claim of that it was Clinton that made these cuts.
Let's look at what Clinton's Secretary of Defense Les Aspin testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in 1993: "If you look at the bad guys out there, there is no bad guy, with the possible exception of what happens in Russia, but the most extreme case of the bad guys out there is another Desert Storm. And there isn't anybody out there that is the kind of threat that Iraq was before Desert Storm."
That's the core of the argument that won over Congress and led to most of the cuts, especially in the mideast.
Clinton hardly started the changes that began at the end of the Cold War.
No, but he extended them far beyond the bounds of reason. And it's true that Clinton didn't unilaterally decide; he simply appointed the cabinet member who presented to Congress a false sense of security sufficient to cut and reduce most of the funds used for overseas programs. This was done primarily to meet Clinton's campaign promise to cut $60 billion from the defense budget, which you quite rightly observe was largely out of his hands. There are only a few places in the defense budget that we retain a degree of agility and discretion, and one of the most flexible is overseas intelligence.
Nationwide layoffs rising in the 1990s made by businesses is really silly to attribute to the President
Senator John McCain to President Clinton, 15 July 1993: "Mr. President, we have heard a great deal from the new administration about its concern for defense conversion and for the defense industrial base. We have heard that it is seeking to create a new type of defense industrial base that will rely on dual use technology, and help increase America's competitiveness. I am concerned, however, that several aspects of the administration's rhetoric do not match reality. [...] What the administration fails to comprehend, or chooses to ignore, is that the downsizing of defense will result in substantial job losses of both military and civilian personnel."
Funny you should quote the 9/11 report, does it mention that Clinton launched a missile at an al qaeda base targetting none but OBL himself, much to the criticism of Clinton's opponents.
The *sane* criticism leveled at Clinton was not that he was targeting bin Laden, but that he was doing it with cruise missiles fired from ships in the Red Sea and Arabian Sea, which is a fantastically ineffective strategy.
If you don't quite understand why, perhaps I should point out that Afghanistan is a landlocked country. It has no coastline. So we were shooting missiles over one country and into another, ostensibly trying to hit one person. Yeah. Sure. That will work. I don't hold it against Clinton that he avoided military service in Vietnam, but I *do* hold it against him that he later tried to make military decisions. If you didn't serve, and you don't have any training, and you haven't even made any real effort to learn military strategy - just STFU and let the generals handle it, mmkay?
There was certainly a lot of stupid "we should never fight anybody" whining going on, but those people were (and still are) just plain retarded. Correct military response is a non-partisan issue.
I fail to find in your links a smoking gun implicating him alone in any of the discussed budget cuts
Senator John McCain, 24 January 2000: "Since 1992, when President Clinton took office, our armed forces have deployed an average of one deployment every nine weeks, yet defense budgets have declined by nearly 40 percent during that same time, and procurement of modern weapons systems has declined by 70 percent."
I just don't understand the Clinton spin you took.
You could have stopped that sentence after the first four words.
I was there. I watched it happen. There is no documentation on the *planet* that can refute that. If you want to run off and claim "there's no evidence", you go right ahead. It simply cannot change what I know to be true.
Also, never did I state that I considered the "CIA Stupid", perhaps you are defending against someone else's comments.
However, you did challenge the idea that the CIA did pretty much the only intelligent thing it could have done under the circumstances, which implies that you believe the CIA would instead have done something stupid.
You smell like Ann Coulter, are you using her handbook? You win... Clinton was bad, Bush is good. There really is no point arguing with someone who sounds so dedicated to the military industrial complex. Hey, that's fine, everyone has to believe in something. You can see how great a place the world is now that Bush has enacted his will; and anything bad that has taken place since he took office has been Clinton's fault, for sure. I appreciate the discussion, however, but I think it is way beyond the purpose of this forum, and I see no point of going further... But before I go, I will describe to you why I didn't like the "Clinton spin" you made...
The real truth, as I see it, is that nothing that happens in our government is decided by one party alone. To me, it's like Coca-cola and Pepsi marketing against each other (see 'granfalloon'). They want to create a conflict between the consumers of their products, to make each consumer of one product a rival to the other, thus making their customers strongly identify with one product or the other. (i.e. Coca-cola markets to feeling good, Pepsi markets to being young). This, in turn, helps increase consumption of their product, and this powerful technique causes the consumer to ignore the question "Why am I spending so much money on worthless carbonated sugar water in the first place?". You can say the same for other things like "Chevy vs Ford". And most dangerously, you can say the same for "Democrats vs Republicans".
The real problem I see is that we are so focused on identifying with one party or the other, very much like in sports, praising every great play made by "my team", and finding fault in every play made by the "other team" (they cheat, play dirty, have an unfair budget for players), that we fail to truly be the citizens that are supposed to be guiding our government (as in a democracy). But in fact, the whole game is an illusion, and in the end, the country remains an aristocracy with two teams competing for the goals of the corporations, the rich, and the owners, and not the goals of the people as a whole.
So thanks for the quotes and the discussion, I will try to consider such information in the future. Had I the time or patience, I could find some equally good sounding counter quotes. However, this discussion has truly demoralized me, and I find people who buy so strongly into one side or the other scary and dangerous.
Oh, and I can't give you any classified information, either.
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It's not people that believe strongly in their ideas that are scary. it's people who can't decide and always want to try and appease both sides.
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@CodeRage said:
You smell like Ann Coulter, are you using her handbook?
Ann Coulter is an idiot. An entertaining and attractive idiot, to be sure - but still an idiot.
You win... Clinton was bad, Bush is good.
Whoah, hold on. Clinton was not unequivocally and universally bad; he simply made a few bad decisions. Bush isn't exactly immune to stupidity either, e.g. his dumbass ideas about how we have to preserve the sanctity of marriage. Each issue needs to be considered individually.
The real truth, as I see it, is that nothing that happens in our government is decided by one party alone.
In the grand scheme of things, that's correct. The big picture transcends party boundaries. In the case of 9/11, I lay the *original* blame at the feet of Gerald Ford. It was Gerald Ford's bungling of the Vietnam conflict's denouement that led Carter to sign an executive order which drastically altered how U.S. foreign intelligence operations worked, and in turn forced Bush the elder to direct those operations in a direction which ultimately funded and trained the terrorists under Reagan and later his own administration. But the crux of the matter came when Clinton, not understanding the issues involved, made some bad decisions that were... well, just STUNNINGLY bad.
So you can place the blame anywhere along that line you desire. There's certainly a massive amount of blame you can place at the feet of GW's daddy for doing something rather reckless and volatile, and I'd bet some part of that choice was founded on a passive-aggressive expectation that it would backfire and bite us in the ass. But in the end, it's *really* not that simple, and the biggest failure in this chain was two presidents that did not have any military experience or training - who decided nonetheless to make massive sweeping changes in our national defense programs. It is IMO purely coincidental that both were Democrats, and there is of course the simple fact that they were cleaning up a Republican mess in the first place.
They want to create a conflict between the consumers of their products
Anyone who really thinks this way in our modern political system is dangerously out of touch with what politics really is, and should definitely not hold public office.
The real problem I see is that we are so focused on identifying with one party or the other
I completely agree. Lieberman represented the best possible opportunity for Democrats to retake the White House, but they chucked him out over a relatively minor ideological dispute and are now backing some loser. "He didn't toe the party line in every respect, so we're going to flush our best option down the toilet!" The only saving grace of this is that, apparently, the Republican nominee is every bit as retarded. And when you compare the records and platforms, I'd still back Lieberman over just about any likely contender I've seen thus far.
I find people who buy so strongly into one side or the other scary and dangerous.
You should, because they are.
Fundamentally, I'm about the truth. I don't care whether the person I blame is in this party or that party, I care whether he really deserves the blame. You can't give Democrats a free rein to turn America into a vast hippie commune because "war is bad", but you can't give Republicans free rein to stomp all over basic human rights under the banner of "God and country" either. Somewhere between those two approaches, the truth lies.
Oh, and I can't give you any classified information, either.
Yes, but the difference is, I wouldn't ask for it.
