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The FBI's Upgrade That Wasn't
While accepting some blame for the system's failure, FBI Director Robert Mueller said the software "was not what it should be."
(By Melina Mara -- The Washington Post)
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The problems continued to hamper the bureau after the attacks as well: To transmit photographs of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers and other suspects to field offices, headquarters had to fax copies or send compact discs by mail, because the system would not allow them to e-mail a photo securely.
In the months after the terrorist attacks, overhauling the case-management system became one of the bureau's top priorities. Deadlines were moved up, requirements grew, and costs ballooned.
Along the way, the FBI made a fateful choice: It wanted SAIC to build the new software system from scratch rather than modifying commercially available, off-the-shelf software. Later, the company would say the FBI made that decision independently; FBI officials countered that SAIC pushed them into it.
More than two years after Sept. 11, when a team of researchers from the National Research Council showed up to review the status of Trilogy, FBI officials assured them that the bureau had made great strides. That was true in part: By early 2004, two of the three main pillars of the program -- thousands of new PCs and an integrated hardware network -- were well on the way to being delivered and installed.
But, as the researchers soon learned, the heart of the makeover, VCF, remained badly off track. In its final report, in May 2004, the NRC team warned that the program was "currently not on a path to success."
The review team from the NRC, which is affiliated with the National Academy of Sciences, was made up of more than a dozen scientists and engineers from top universities and leading technology companies, all of them independent of the FBI and its contractors.
The report observed that the rollout of the new case-management software had been poorly planned nearly from the beginning. Months after the program was supposed to be complete, it remained riddled with shortcomings:
· Agents would not be able to take copies of their cases into the field for reference.
· The program lacked common features, such as bookmarking or histories, that would help agents navigate through millions of files.
· The system could not properly sort data.
· Most important, the FBI planned to launch the new software all at once, with minimal testing beforehand. Doing so, the NRC team concluded, could cause "mission-disruptive failures" if the software did not work, because the FBI had no backup plan.
"That was a little bit horrifying," said Matt Blaze, a professor of computer science at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the review team. "A bunch of us were planning on committing a crime spree the day they switched over. If the new system didn't work, it would have just put the FBI out of business."
