FBI Somewhat Useless. Feel Safe?
It’s been nearly two years since the FBI admitted that the new computer system they’d spent hundreds of millions of dollars and three years building wasn’t just late and over-budget, but also useless at fighting terrorism. Of course, like any good bureaucracy, the FBI then sat around for seven months before deciding that maybe it should scrap the system and start again from scratch. Sounds like a plan, right? Well, it’s been well over a year since then, and the FBI has just now gotten around to picking a vendor for the new system, while admitting that this time, it should cost about $500 million and take another four years to fully implement. Given the fact that it’s taken nearly two years to go from recognizing the last system was useless to finally agreeing on plans for this new system (and given the history of the old system), you would have to imagine the odds aren’t that great on this new system showing up on time, within the budget or actually being useful in fighting whatever threat is most important to the FBI by the time it’s completed.
Filed under: Society
Okay, by this point, it should be no surprise at all that the FBI is somewhat incompetent when it comes to technology. Considering their ongoing saga of throwing millions of dollars at computer systems that arrive late, over-budget, and don’t actually do anything useful, is it really any surprise that the FBI is now admitting that many agents don’t actually have email accounts yet? That, of course, is for external email accounts — not their internal system. Of course, this isn’t the first time that the FBI’s email system has been in the news — though, apparently, it’s too much effort for most of the press covering this story to look back into the past. About a year ago, there were news reports that the FBI was shutting down their email system, because they were afraid of hacks — similar to the one that the Secret Service faced. What was interesting there, was that the FBI’s email system was apparently run by an outside party. It’s not clear what’s happened in between now and then — and if the agents lacking email used to have accounts that were ditched last year or if this is an ongoing issue. Either way, is it really that hard to set everyone up with an email account? If the fear is having the system hacked, then set up policies. Since they already have internal email within the FBI, then clearly such a system should only be used for non-confidential information.