Shades of Maxwell Smart

[Guest guest]

News With Nuts

by

Raconteur at Large

Stephen P. Pizzo

 

May 17, 2006

 

 

Shades of Maxwell Smart

 

 

I've never doubted for a second that the government would spy on its own

citizens – any government - not just ours. Information is, as the saying

goes, power – always has been, always will be. So, as much as my civil

libertarian side hates it, the realist in me shrugs each time a new

piece of evidence surfaces that they are up to doing just that.

 

Or more precisely trying to do just that.

 

 

As I downed the final dregs of a cold Corona the other day I recalled

all the stories I had written over the years about monumentally

expensive failed government computer system upgrades. In fact, hard as I

thought, I couldn't recall a single story lauding a government agency

for a successful computer project. Not one. Ever.

 

Just last year we learned that the FBI had wasted $700 million trying to

develop a modern networked computer system able to track criminals and

terrorists and allow its offices around the nation to talk to one

another – for the first time.

 

That one didn't work either. Still doesn't. In fact the FBI is now busy

chucking that system and starting over.

 

That story produced a shrug from me too. I recalled a 1994 meeting I had

with an FBI agent just appointed to head the FBI's San Francisco

office's new computer crimes division. I was working for a nascent

Internet company at the time and he asked if he could drop by and check

out this new thing called the Internet. He explained that, thought the

FBI did have a computer crimes division, none of the FBI's computers

were online. “Yeah,” he said. “They don't allow it. It's a security issue.”

 

Remember... this was in San Francisco... the hottest hot bed of Internet

R & D at the time.

 

Last week everyone was atwitter over news that the NSA has been scooping

up all our phone records. Some say that since 9/11 they have squirreled

away as many as one trillion phone transactions. Again, I shrugged.

 

Which brings me to the theme of this rant;

 

 

Will the real US Government please stand up.

 

Are you the black-helicopter flying, eyes in the sky, ears to the

ground, all-knowing Big Brother government?

Or are you really the Maxwell Smart, bumbling, money-wasting, last to

know anything, government?

 

Help me out here.

 

For starters I find it difficult to imagine that it can be both at once.

Are we to believe that within the same government whose top national

police agency, the FBI, can't install a computer system that works,

another agency, the NSA, can? It's possible, but nothing in my direct

experience with government agencies would cause me to believe it.

 

And sure enough, it's not so. There is plenty of evidence that the NSA's

computer systems are just as big a mess as the FBI's – certainly a more

expensive mess, and likely an even bigger one.

 

Last week reporters for the Baltimore Sun got a peek under the NSA's

Cone of Silence. They reported that the man now up for the top CIA post,

former NSA head, General Stephen Hadley, managed to blow $2 billion

during his tenure at the NSA on a failed agency-wide computer upgrade. .

 

 

WASHINGTON: May 9, 2006 -- Two technology programs at the heart of the

National Security Agency's drive to combat 21st-century threats are

stumbling badly, hampering the agency's ability to fight terrorism and

other emerging threats, current and former government officials

say....One is Cryptologic Mission Management, a computer software

program with an estimated cost of $300 million that was designed to help

the NSA track the implementation of new projects but is so flawed that

the agency is trying to pull the plug. The other, code-named

Groundbreaker, is a multibillion-dollar computer systems upgrade that

frequently gets its wires crossed. (Full Story)

 

 

Is it just me, or doesn't the NSA phone spying story collide a wall of

contradictions? I mean collecting a trillion pieces of data is the easy

part. (Because the NSA didn't collect them in the first place. The phone

companies did. The could because, unlike the NSA and FBI, have computer

systems that work.) But once in possession of such a huge and ever

growing mountain of data, then what? You need to slice it, dice it, find

matches, produce tracking reports, integrate data into spreadsheets...

and so on. And you need computers and software that work for any and all

that.

 

So, what happens when NSA analysts feed data into Gen. Hadley's $2

billion cuisinart – which includes the NSA's $1.2 billion

threat-sniffing initiative called “Trailblazer? "

 

Well, for starters, it might be the last time any sees that data. Here's

what 10 analysts who recently left the NSA told the Sun about the NSA's

expensive failure:

 

 

When the agency's communications lines become overloaded, the system

often delivers garbled intelligence reports,

NSA analysts and managers say the new cumbersome and unreliable system

has cut their productivity in half since it was installed,

The new system requires analysts to perform many more steps to

accomplish what the old system used to get done with a keystroke or two.

They report getting locked out of their computers without warning,

Agency linguists say the number of conversations they can translate in a

day has dropped significantly with the new system.

NSA employees get new computers every three years on a rotating

schedule, so some analysts always have computers as much as three years

older than their colleagues', often with incompatible software.

E-mail attachments get lost in the system... simply disappear. Where do

they go? The contractor's explanation: “The just drop out.”

 

General Hadley has now been tapped by President Bush to fix the CIA. It

looks to me that he is getting away from the NSA in the nick of time

since his $2 billion computer system has left the NSA stuffed like a

Jonestown goose with data it can't digest. (Heck of job, Stevie!)

 

By now you must be wondering who got paid $2 billion for failing? One of

the usual suspects, of course. No not Halliburton, but close. Going

under the name, “The Eagle Alliance,” the contract was managed by

Computer Sciences Corp. and San Diego-based Science Applications

International (SAIC.)

 

 

“CSC spent $520,000 in 2001 to lobby Congress and various government

agencies on its own behalf. That same year, the company also paid lobby

firms a total of $580,000. In total, Computer Sciences Corp spent

$1,100,000 in 2001 on lobbying fees associated with a variety of issues,

including appropriation and procurement bills related to the Defense

Department, Treasury Department, the Executive Office of the President

and other federal agencies.

The company also lobbied on " legislative proposals for privatization and

commercialization of Federal services, " according to lobby documents

filed with Congress. In 2002, Computer Sciences Corp spent a total of

$1,110,000 to lobby on similar issues....On April 18, 2003, Computer

Sciences Corporation's DynCorp International won a contract from the

U.S. Department of State to provide up to 1,000 civilian advisers to

help organize civilian law enforcement, judicial and correctional

agencies. The estimated value could be as high as $50 million for the

first year, depending on assessments of Iraqi capabilities and needs. "

(More)

 

 

And the other familiar face:

 

 

(MCLEAN, VA) – Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC)

today announced a contract award from the National Security Agency (NSA)

to be the provider of the technology demonstration platform (TDP) phase

of the TRAILBLAZER program. The NSA selected the SAIC-led Digital

Network Intelligence (DNI) Enterprise team that includes Northrop

Grumman Corporation, Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., The Boeing Company

[NYSE:BA], Computer Sciences Corporation (NYSE:CSC) and SAIC

wholly-owned subsidiary Telcordia Technologies to contribute to the

modernization of the NSA's signals intelligence capabilities. (More)

The Bush administrator's short list of favored defense contractors can

be written down on a fortune cookie slip: Halliburton, Science

Applications International Corp. Fluor, Computer Sciences.

 

 

" It's more of the same people, " a former NSA official told the Sun. " The

contracting system makes it very hard to engage industry, and it's very

hard for people to break into government contracting. This is one of the

areas I think needs tremendous review. "

 

 

For an administration that talks about “accountability” they sure don't

walk that talk. Instead they reward failure, at lease when it's among

friends. Medals are handed out to those forced to get out of Dodge

before their misdeeds catch up with them. And favored companies, that

waste billions of taxpayer dollars on failed technology projects, are

rehired to fix the mess they so profitably created in the first place.

 

 

(Oh, by the way, the FBI and NSA are not the only departments spending

billions trying to reinvent the software/hardware wheel. Homeland

Security is working on a little known computer systems they call ADVISE

( Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic

Enhancement.) So far little is known about this project, except that

nearly $50 million has been spent just testing it. But with such a name

only a bureacrat could love, how can fail -- right?

 

 

All of which explains why I shrugged when I read the NSA phone spying

story last week. Don't get me wrong. I hate it when government kicks me

in the privates. I hate it when Nanny-government Democrats try to

protect me from everything, including myself. And I hate it when

paternalistic Republicans want to protect me from _______ ____________

(fill in the boogeyman dejur.) by keeping an eye on us. I just doubt

they can do it. Oh yeah... also I am sure they'd like those they see as

our enemies to believe they can do it. But, personally, I doubt it. And

I doubt that our enemies are losing much sleep over of it either.

 

Not that we should stop demanding that our elected officials follow the

law. Or that we shouldn't impeach and/or indict those found to have

broken the law. We should – even if, as I suspect, they are failing at

their illegal task. After all, you don't have to be a competent crook to

be convicted. If you try to rob a bank, but fail to get a dime, you

still get to go to jail for bank robbery.

 

Oh, one more thing. If you want to report a suspected terrorist to the

FBI or NSA, include your tip in the body of your email.

Because if you send it as an attachment, it's likely to vanish in transit.

Where do the attachments go? They don't know that – either.

 

http://www.stephen.pizzo.com