The FBI Software Upgrade That Wasn't 381
Davemania writes "Washington Post reports that the FBI's attempt to modernize their department has once again failed. The 170 million dollar Virtual case File system, the agency's second attempt to go paperless is reported to be useless. The finger seems to be pointing at the FBI leadership, greedy contractors and bad software management." From the article: "It appeared to work beautifully. Until Azmi, now the FBI's technology chief, asked about the error rate. Software problem reports, or SPRs, numbered in the hundreds, Azmi recalled in an interview. The problems were multiplying as engineers continued to run tests. Scores of basic functions had yet to be analyzed. 'A month before delivery, you don't have SPRs,' Azmi said. 'You're making things pretty. . . . You're changing colors.'"
I love you (Score:4, Informative)
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I love you-and your money too. (Score:4, Funny)
Can I borrow $50 from you?
Oblig. InfoWorld link to help out, too (Score:3, Informative)
Government Inefficiancy (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Government Inefficiancy (Score:5, Interesting)
As you said, there would be much more motivation if it wasn't just taxpayer money, so why couldn't they use a system whereby they have several firms fund and set up different solutions and then the best solution gets a predetermined amount of money from the government?
Since the firms would be initially shelling out their own money on the projects without a guarantee of reimbursement, you had better believe they would be busting their asses to make sure the products did what they needed to do quickly and efficiently.
I'm living in a magical dream world, aren't I?
Re:Government Inefficiancy (Score:5, Funny)
If this software system runs under Windows, they started with a Problem Report baseline in the thousands. If they got it down into the hundreds, Kudos!
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This is modded funny but I seriously agree. What perfect world is this guy living in? I've seen software that doesn't even GET tested before it starts shipping.
He's got it all backwards!
Re:Government Inefficiancy (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, I've worked both sides of the fence, and quite frankly, the civil service side wasted less, had fewer penpushers, was more rigourous in vetting suppliers, and brought it's project in nearer budget and deadline (that was nearer, not on!)
Re:Government Inefficiancy (Score:5, Insightful)
Outsource, and this is what you get. They must hire MBA's. Really, sensitive government data projects like this one should never be outsourced, if only for national security reasons.
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Really, it goes far beyond this (not that I don't fundamentally agree with your point). SAIC is simply another war profiteer and 9/11/01 "security" profiteer aligned with this administration. Their profits have soared with the attacks of 9/11/01 and the invasion and bloody occupation of Iraq. One need only look at their personnel roster to get a solid impression of what's wrong with the present fascist regime and globalist congress.
The poi
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The software isn't tricky, it's the politics. The FBI is a feifdom of petty departmental tyrants and ancient practices. Several friends of mine have worked on the case file system in various incarnations, the problem is that the COTRs come in and define the requirements to be "exactly the same thing as this 25 year old main frame, but on a web page". One guy was having problems because his COTR was telling him that it had to be green text on a black background. That may have been an exager
They don't know what they want (Score:5, Insightful)
You'd probably think so, but I bet after the first few months of totally contradictory change requests, specification creep, and an utter lack of hard-and-fast acceptance criteria, that you'd throw up your hands, too.
You can blame the contractors all you want, but I've worked on a bunch of projects like this, and they almost always fail not because the developers weren't good or didn't know their stuff, but because there wasn't somebody on the client side who had the political (internal/office-politics, not Democrats/Republicans politics, although within the USG they're often related) capital to get all the little fiefdoms that exist inside a big organization and sit them down and say "Okay, Fuckheads: this is the system we're going to be using, this is how it's going to work, and you will use it."
Projects like this fail when you let every Tom, Dick and Harry start pushing features into it. I've seen situations where software is in the final stages of testing, and somebody decides that it would be fun to bring down the Big Boss to show them where all these millions of dollars have been spent. And the Boss will come down and take one look at the software, and immediately demand that something get changed. Often I don't think that they really care about what they're demanding, they just want to show off that they have the power to change shit, so they do.
It's stuff like that which pushes projects into failure, even if they look dead simple on paper. The problem isn't a software-engineering one, it's a customer-relations one. It's a problem of the people hiring the developers probably not having a good idea of what they wanted in software, and not having a single person in charge of it.
You can tell that happened with this FBI project, because it's obvious just from the summary that the CIO wasn't involved in the project throughout its lifecycle. He just seemingly walked in on it when it was a month away from deployment, at which point I'm sure everything was totally FUBAR. The way to have prevented this would have been to get somebody like that on board from the very beginning, who could have kicked ass and taken names and kept things under control.
Without good leadership on the client side, and a clear set of business processes, requirements, and acceptance criteria, it's not surprising that these large software projects fail as often as they do. However, as long as the failures are equally profitable to the development contracting companies as the successes, they have no problem taking on a contract even though they know the client is going to drive it into the ground and has no idea what they want.
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I have to agree with this. I've worked as a contractor along side civil servants and uniformed military personnel. It's rare for the military folks to stick around more than two years in one place, and one job - in some posts, 9 months was about average. The civil service guys had typically been around for many years, and had a much greater sense of ownership of their systems and processes.
I worked on a system that was developed in-house by civil servants. It was an effective system because it was dev
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Instead, I don't see why companies aren't fined (put it in the contract) or sued for everything the government spent on a system that has to be scrapped. Smaller companies would be run out of bu
Sometimes the problem is the specs. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not going to criticise the folks who were trying to implement the system until I know a lot more about the actual conditions in which they were trying to work...
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A lot of defense contracts are awarded by biddable contract, and I've heard (though not from a reliable source) that new marines are told during boot camp to always remember that their rifles were made by the lowest bidder.
It definitely h
Re:Government Inefficiancy (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, the funds are someone's money. The Contracting Officers are legally "on-the-hook" for the things they sign for. If they authorize payment for something that was not delivered and the government does not get it's money back, then they are supposed to be liable for the money they released.
If they continue working for the government a payment schedule is arranged and they have money deducted from their salary. If they get any other money from the government (ex:retirement) that is used toward the debt.
The rules over here at DoD tend to be much more strict than at other agencies, contrary to what some in the media would lead you to believe.
I hear that one of the problems now, with non DoD activities, is that there are not many prosecutions going on for that sort of thing. Also, the way these stories are written, there may not have been any wrongdoing at all (check my
In my case, since I am just a contractor and not a government officer, in this role, (in another position I am sometimes in uniform for the Reserves) I am never on the hook for the agency funds, but my customer is and if his error is due to my doing bad work then I am at risk of losing my job, which can happen with no notice.
Re:Government Inefficiancy (Score:5, Insightful)
The driving problem is the rigidness and stagnation of the government's bureaucracy. The impulse to build this kind of lumbering bureaucracy was a good one - it's called civil service, and it's basically a way to insulate long-term government functions from short-term politicians, keep government employees from becoming the minions of whichever politician wants to build a personal empire. There's no question that the limitations of that approach are killing government. On the other hand, do you really want a civil service that can be downsized or force to work on producing bogus intelligence so we can invade 17 more countries? Or a government whose job is to buy as many copies of Microsoft Vapor Server as it can possibly cram into an appropriations bill? The idea that the government is fundamentally incapable is a useless one, sorta like existentialism, in that it fails to answer the question of what we DO as a result of that insight. Do you seriously propose that the FBI be run by a private interest? I'd rather not have someone like Verizon or ChoicePoint watching my back, thank you - at least the government has a mandate to protect people and not just make money off of them. And there's a name for the head of an large private armed force: warlord.
The article touches on the fact that government has progressively become a comparatively worse place to work than the private sector, because of the bureaucracy and because the salaries don't keep pace with the private sector. A friend of mine is working on Sentinel, and he's been really surprised to find an FBI-side partner who actually wants to oversee the work. If you do think that police work at the federal level should be the job of government, then how do we go about really fixing the FBI?
Government is what citizens make it. And here's the rub: under the past 25 years of leadership of the small-government zealots, we managed to prevent government from making important investments - e.g.: roads (any idea how many bridges in this country haven't been maintained in decades, and what the long-term maintenance will cost on the vast numbers of roads we've built?), emergency planning, a healthy population, an educated workforce, etc. These investments are the infrastructure on which the economy is built. And this stellar leadership has not only managed to give short shrift to the future, but it's utterly failed to address the real problems they correctly identified with government. Anti-government conservatism is a bankrupt ideology - it's nice to kick the government for it's failures real and perceived, but when push comes to shove, it offers no real alternative for building the public underpinnings of our economy and our lives, just faith that the free market fairy will come fix all our problems. We live in an extraordinarily pragmatic age: one where you can assemble data on a large scale to decide if something works or doesn't. It's time to stop carping and give our government a mandate to do this and find its way out of quandaries like the civil service vs. Tamany Hall problem.
Sorry for the rant. Somebody talk to me about fixing the FBI.
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1) First step, IDENTIFY THE REQUIREMENTS of a new system. Create use cases. Observe what actually is done day to day for at least three to six months (this will need people with security clearance out the wazoo). Be sure to follow some issues beginning to end. Also, identify relevant policy and law that the FBI needs to observe - the syste
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What country are you referring to again, and who are these small government zealots that have been leading it for the past 25 years?
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So you end up with directors forcing managers, PMs and the like to adopt the formalized procedures and their unfamiliarity with the process leads to cost overruns and issues. So you outsource it and inevitably (every case I've personally
Project Managers (Score:5, Informative)
The trouble with project managers (and security people) is that they have a checklist mentality.
PM: Have you done this as yet.
You: No, there is no need for it
PM: But I need to get it checked off on my plan
You: It shouldn't be on the plan in the first place
PM: But it is on the plan, so I need to get it checked off. When are you going to do it.
And so on.
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The bad thing about this girl was that she didn't know shit about fuck. The only good thing was that she did realize how ignorant she was, so she didn't question anything I did - just tried to report it to her bosses. And she was good for fetching coffee and ordering stuff (and nice to look at).
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her: but X is on the schedule to be compete today. Y and Z are not scheduled to be done until next month. now we are behind schedule.
And what you didn't know, and didn't bother to ask about, was that X had to be done this month because, Q, R and S were all depending on X, and they're major subprojects that are pushing the end date. So the fact that X will be delayed for a couple of weeks will push the entire project end date out, even if it gets Y and Z done a little sooner than planned
Or maybe not.
Re:Government Inefficiancy (Score:5, Insightful)
On time
At, under, or near budget
Performed as designed.
Mark it flamebait or troll if you want, or just reply with any example.
The Santa Monica bridge reconstruction (Score:5, Informative)
This is how big government projects *should* be done. Hire a good contractor, set a minimum and then give bonuses for good performance and penalties for bad. Did the final tally cost a lot in bonuses? Yes. Was it worth it? Yes- they fixed a major problem in amazing time and did it correctly, plus they had a bunch of blue-collar folks make serious coin working triple time, all of which got plowed back into the local economy.
You can argue it wasn't on budget due to the bonuses, but it was assumed from the beginning they'd be paying out. Since the daily economic loss to LA was higher than the daily bonus for finishing early, I'd argue it was actually under budget.
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Also, I'm not responding directly to the specific case of the story, just the parent's generalized statement regarding software projects.
When you get to be involved in a large Government project, there's not much you can do, as it
Re:Government Inefficiancy (Score:4, Insightful)
That's true for large corporations as well. I worked as a contractor in the Chicago area (not for Anderson Consulting), and had one customer (pharma) tell me that they brought in Anderson for $3m/month for over 2 years, and got 'nothing' for their expense. I saw the same thing with other companies, including one of the largest building-controls companies in the world. It seems that size is the killer, and the reason that federal govt projects are so expensive and delayed is because of the size (not the nature) of the organization.
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Paranoia! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. I'm slightly paranoid.
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Leave the paper trail, and instead build robots to sort and manage the paper trail!
Re:Paranoia! (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, all the unconstitutional crap is being done by the NSA. The FBI got warrents (over 120) through the FISA courts for every single aspect of the British plane bombers investigation that they participated in.
which goes to prove that the NSA warrentless program is utterly unnecessary to stopping terrorism.
Re:Paranoia! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Paranoia! (Score:4, Funny)
Everybody who has to use the bathroom at FBI headquarters agrees.
Some of the Shortcomings (Score:2)
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,
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Oblig. 'Fight Club' quote: (Score:4, Funny)
Can I get the icon in 'cornflower blue'?
Re:Oblig. 'Fight Club' quote: (Score:5, Insightful)
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Haha, this guy does not have a clue of what Softwar Engineering is about. Making things pretty is what you do for *the first* preview of your product, that is what you will show to your clients, the pretty screens with pretty buttons that will do things, of course neither the buttons nor the screen do anything more than get their attention and showcase void promises that you will try to fu
Re:Oblig. 'Fight Club' quote: (Score:5, Interesting)
To put it bluntly, the guy in charge of the NOC was (is?) an incompetent jackass. He'd used the same trouble ticket system at his last job and hated it - not because it was bad, but because the admins at his old company had no idea how to run the thing. Long story short, he had one absolute demand before he'd let it be used in "his" NOC: the consultant had to change the window background color from green to blue, because green reminded him of the last installation.
He was serious.
And he actually scheduled a formal compliance test where he would run through the system to make sure he didn't see green anywhere, and informed the consultant and me that if he did, he was rejecting it forever. I was amazed to find that he actually had management backing on this; it's apparently difficult to find managers with obsolete product knowledge, or something like that. So, the company spend a fair number of kilodollars to make the software blue (to the endless delight of the consultant, who drove a nice Corvette and took me to good expense account dinners - which are the best kind!).
Government Contract$ (Score:5, Informative)
And that is how you get rich doing work for the government. The government agency comes up with a half-assed plan, you put in a low bid, they accept and start handing you checks, and you make things look pretty, all the while hiding the flaws. In then end, you've become rich, the goverment runs a deficit, and the American taxpayer foots the bill.
Re:Government Contract$ (Score:4, Insightful)
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And this would make it very difficult to get companies to do government contracts in the future.
Perhaps they should have taken in past history as well as cheap price, when deciding on contractors.
Eliminating Software Bloat (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems to me that the idea of doing software as a project is purely fiction. Everybody knows that software has bugs, everybody knows that new features are needed as the landscape changes, and everybody knows that software can be made better. So why do people insist on this flawed idea of a project?
I've come to re
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Time to change jobs (Score:2)
I've spent too many years working my rear off.
It's time to start bidding on government programming contracts.
Imagine, being paid loads of money and not having to produce anything functional, with the worst repercussion being having to change your company name before bidding on a new contract.
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You seem to have left out a step: The government agency changes the requirements after the bid is awarded, usually in the user interface. If you're a smart bidder,
Low bids the root of all government screwups (Score:3, Insightful)
Look at pretty much any government building that was built on the lowest bidder
Maybe it's just me, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds to me like... (Score:2)
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You're thinking like a tech, not a politician (Score:2)
Be it a politician showing off for his constituency, or an employee trying to gain power in an organization, small, incremental steps like the ones you describe are too "subtle."
Hell, in the private sector I've been accused of "lacking vision" for proposing incremental changes similar to the ones you describe.
Pointy Haired Bosses want to show off MASIVE strides that they can claim credit for, not smaller projec
Project management in outer space (Score:5, Insightful)
'A month before delivery,' Professor Knuth said looking up through his spectacles 'you can start implementing it if your correctness proofs are complete.'"
Ha! Welcome to the real world, guys.
Well it's nice to know... (Score:2)
Obligatory Chief Wiggum Quote (Score:3, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
That wouldn't surprise me at all. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sounds like the client was the primar one at fa (Score:2)
Re:Sounds like the client was the primar one at fa (Score:2, Informative)
FBI Too Busy (Score:3, Funny)
Why not just hook it all up to a search engine? (Score:4, Insightful)
Non CS people who commission custom software development often have no clue how expensive their ego driven non-standard features can be.
Re:Why not just hook it all up to a search engine? (Score:4, Informative)
ObSimpsons (Score:5, Funny)
Perfect Solution for the FBI paperless office (Score:4, Funny)
It's called WOM, or Write-Only Memory system. This system has near-infinite storage capacity, and can be implemented across the entire enterprise.
Document retrival in the WOM? Not a problem! Just create imaginary documents! Isin't that the way it's done, anyway?
Oh, and if you need a record expunged, not a problem! In fact, it requires almost no effort at all!
Write-Only Memory Virtual Filing System. It was good enough for Nasa, it ought to be good enough for the FBI.
Safety First (Score:2)
WHERE'S OSAMA?
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The US is no deadbeat - it's doesn't fail to pay its debts. It's among the best investments ever in the world. And its collateral is by far the best to seize.
Besides, China cares nothing for shame. Its mafia government cares only for power. Power that Bus
Security Advisors (Score:4, Funny)
That's the FBI policy: they're part of Homeland Security, so their job is mainly to tells what color today is [dhs.gov]. Otherwise terrorists might have trouble knowing which days we're not checking everyone or paying closest attention.
What world does this guy live in? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow... I have never, ever seen a software product that wasn't working on QA bug reports right up to the minute the gold disc is burned. And afterwards, of course, working on all the pre-release bugs that had been classified as 'known issues'.
Re:What world does this guy live in? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seconded. Clearly this guy either doesn't know what he is talking about or is just playing politics (office and/or party). I've personally encountered bugs or (incomplete features) in past releases of Oracle. I don't recall the specifics of the feature I was trying to use, but it was a documented feature that should have been available and according to Oracle's own knowledge base the function should have worked a certain way, but only to dig a little deeper to find that it was just a stub function that hadn't actually been written yet. This was an enterprise product used by thousands of big businesses and it simply didn't do what they said it did.
To say that you are just changing colors on a software product a month before delivery is a rediculous thing to say, and really this guy shouldn't be in his job if he actually believes what he said, vendors are working on bugs for years after delivery on anything as complex as this would need to be.
Hell, even NASA even built in a way to update the software on the Mars landers, when they were on Mars. That isn't to say that this FBI software project has been well managed, well specified, or even well coded, but a certain amount of imperfection must be understood in any project management and design.
How is this news? (Score:5, Informative)
Rereading the summary, the submitter has it wrong - "FBI's attempt to modernize their department has once again failed" implies that Sentinel has failed - which is definitely not the content of the article. Even the snippet quoted is about VCF having problems, not Sentinel.
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Way to just melt the tinfoil fun right off the story, dude. How can we have a slashdot groupthink paranoiagasm Hate-Teh-Bush-Fest if you go and point out the actual facts? Honestly, you're a total buzz-kill.
Going paperless (Score:4, Insightful)
For example, our housing lottery system was, until this past year, an in-person process where people were assigned times, showed up, claimed rooms, and was a fair system that worked. Then, the university got all fancy pants and replaced that lottery with this unbelievably crappy system called Residential Management System [rms-inc.com]. To use: kill ad blocker, only use it in IE for Windows, ensure javascript settings are correct, and then wait until the clock allows you into the online lottery system. Attempt to use a non-intuitive UI that is completely new because you couldn't look at it before while time ticks away and other people claim the rooms you wanted. Even though I got the room I wanted, the experience was horrifyingly bad.
For these large organizations, I think less can be more. Keep your paper trail, but create a highly efficient system for digitizing documents. That way, you start to have some advantages of computers (search, organization, cross-referencing) without the liability of a completely paperless system. From here, you can slowly make a transition from leaning on paper to leaning on machines. But that would be the sane way of doing things, and we're talking about a governement organization here.
Insanity (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not from a CMMI-Level 5 organization (given all the paperwork, change management, formal testing, etc. that the Government Requires). - worse still - when you're talking about a DoD contract, add DISA STIG, and IA compliance, etc. etc. etc.
And this is different from the norm because? (Score:5, Interesting)
It doesn't matter how well planned the project is, or how well educated the customer is, or the proper allocation of project champions on the client side, we all end up getting hit with b.s. look-and-feel complaints that end up taking higher priority than fixing bugs.
If you give the client the option between tweaking a template to a report, and tweaking the queries that feed the damn report so it runs 10% faster, the client will ask you to first make it pretty, then worry about the queries. If you dare ask them why, they will give you a b.s. explanation that it is all about perception. That the pretty page looks more "professional" and it looks like more work and care was put into it.
A word of warning to those of you that are new to for-profit programming: whenever somebody uses the "it looks more professional" gambit, it usually means he has no excuse and is hoping you will drop it. He asked you to do it simply to please himself. HE wants the damn color of the page changed, or that heading two pixels taller, etc.
Every couple of years we get hit with new programming methodology fads, but those don't help us with dealing with difficult customers. When you are pulling millions every year from the same two or three government contracts, the last thing your project manager wants is to piss off any of the primaries for the contracts. Extreme programming won't suddenly make your client listen to you.
Why the hell do you think that programmers are so rabidly enthusiastic about working for free for a specific open source project? These same programmers will drag their feet and hate life in general when working at their salaried jobs. At the free project a hell of a lot of the people involved in running the project will actually have a clue, while at the projects at the salaried job the norm is a lot of the people in charge won't have a clue.
Re:And this is different from the norm because? (Score:4, Insightful)
Although this is true, it is also true that most programmers deliver crap looking, uncomfortable to use, half-assed interfaces if left to their own devices. I know I do...
The same is true of a lot of Open Source software. Fun to do, very powerful, but much of it does look unprofessional or at least unreasonably hard to use, except for other programmers who share the same mindset as the maker.
The tragedy is on one hand that the people who complain about the interface issues are themselves also totally untrained and unqualified to say what exactly needs to be changed, and on the other hand that of course a solid, great looking interface design should be made up front, in the design phase, by professionals. I don't think that ever happens.
But we programmers can start by looking a bit more critically at our own work. A bit. While bitching about those irritating users who think looking professional matters more than actual function. Right?
Story's not new (Score:5, Interesting)
Dear Ms. Howell,
We were startled to see that the article "The FBI Upgrade that Wasn't" by
Eggen and Witte in today's Washington Post is taken directly from an article
we did in September 2005 called "Who Killed the Virtual Case File," by Harry
Goldstein (http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/sep05/1455). His article has won 5
major magazine awards. Neither Harry or Spectrum gets credit or attribution
in the Washington Post piece.
Your writers reinterviewed all our sources, including Matthew Patton, whose
only press interview until your story today was in the Spectrum article.
They filed the same FOIA, etc.
Is this plagiarism? Not exactly. Is it shoddy, lazy journalism? You bet.
Sincerely yours,
Susan Hassler
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Not New Story sheds no new light (Score:5, Informative)
Here's some more food for thought about the "reporting" behind the FBI story:
What's the news angle that warrants front page attention in the Post? That the Post reporters obtained the "unreleased" Aerospace report? Not news: the report was released to Spectrum at the end of April after nine months of litigating a Freedom of Information Act Request.
All the Post reporters had to do was google "virtual case file" and voila! the story pops up as number 1, right there for them to rewrite!
But say they are too lazy to bother googling. They just want the summary. The Spectrum article is the basis for the Wikipedia Entry on the Virtual Case File and the only external link. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Case_File [wikipedia.org]
The Spectrum article was the first and until the Post article, the only one to mention Matthew Patton, who was unearthed by dint of investigative reporting nowhere acknowledged in the Post article.
The Post article purports to turn a spotlight on SAIC, in part by quoting David Kay, the Iraq weapons inspector, who was a former SAIC VP--but who had absolutely no firsthand knowledge of the VCF project.
The Post article uncritcally takes FBI CIO Azmi's word that the follow up project Sentinel is on-budget and on-time, when other news outlets have recently reported about a growing sense within the FBI that this project is doomed to a fate similar to the VCF's.
Um, yeah, it's called "matching" (Score:3, Interesting)
If someone else does a story, especially a big story like yours, a magazine/newspaper has two options:
1. Reprint your story. Credit you. Pay your organisation money. Look, to their readers, like schmucks because they missed a big story.
Or, and here's what usually happens:
2. Match the story. Re-interview the same sources. Go over the same ground. And then publish a very similar story. This way you not only VERIFY that the original story is true and well reported,
Re:Um, yeah, it's called "matching" (Score:4, Informative)
Attribution of material from other newspapers and other media must be total.
Certainly, for example, digging up Matthew Patton was an element of the VCF story that was exclusive to Spectrum's coverage, as Patton had not appeared in other media outlets before or since Spectrum's coverage until today.
Even when publications are chasing the same story, when one publication gets something unique it is normal to see lines such as "As first reported in the New York Times..." etc in stories in other outlets. A similar attribution in passing in the text was all that would have been required: instead the only attempt at attribution by the Post article is buried in the credits list for the accompanying timeline graphic, where the "Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers" is credited as a source, which is a) insufficient and b) wrong (the source was "IEEE Spectrum Magazine". Crediting the IEEE is like crediting General Electric for information taken from a "Today Show" segment.)
As a concrete example, let's look at the recent Sony-BMG DRM rootkit controversy. I did a story [ieee.org] on that, interviewing many of the people involved, people who got interviewed by a lot of media outlets at the same time, but when I found a nugget that had been exclusivey reported by one other news outlet--a video of a DHS offcial talking to a local buisiness group about the issue--I gave credit where credit where was due. To the Washington Post in fact: "One party that cares is the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which includes cybersecurity as part of its portfolio. On 10 November, as reported by the Washington Post, Stewart Baker, assistant secretary for homeland security, made a pointed reference to the Sony BMG protection system..." [Emphasis added]
Speaking personally as someone who hires freelancers, and who's been a staff journalist and editor for somewhat more than a week myself, if your post is indicative of your grasp of the ethical standards of journalism, you can be sure this is one editor who wouldn't call on your abilities as a stringer, or anything else.
Re:Um, yeah, it's called "matching" (Score:5, Insightful)
They just "matched" it. That's the industry term. As a stringer for many years (a "stringer" is a type of freelance journalist) I was called by editors many, many times to "match" stories.
You've worked in journalism for, what, a week now? Welcome to the industry. You may want to check with some people in your organisation who've been around the block a few times before firing off embarrassing (to you) letters to the Post Ombudsman.
You help me understand why the mainstream press is in such bad shape these days. Shoddy Lazy Journalism is accepted as standard industry practice.
I thought this was really old news... (Score:2)
On another note, does anyone else find it infuriating that SAIC intentionally refused to alert FBI to the project's going awry? I mean, we're not just talking about stealing taxpayer dollars, we're talking about a system that could save lives.
Why don't they use a Wiki? (Score:4, Interesting)
With a lot of data already entered, in no time you'll be typing in a routine report and find out that the name you just typed already has a Wiki page, and lo and behold! some agent in Nebraska is looking for that exact person for a child abduction. Case closed. All praise the Wiki.
Re: (Score:2)
If the rest of the world were as picky about QA... (Score:2)
Old News and No News? (Score:3, Informative)
Failed once again? The article (you have to read the whole thing) says it's on track.
The article is 90% about the Virtual Case File system ("built" by SAIC) and it's eventual demise in early 2005, almost 2 years ago. At the end, they discuss the FBI's replacement for VCF, saying:
"Last year, FBI officials announced a replacement for VCF, named Sentinel, that is projected to cost $425 million and will not be fully operational until 2009. A temporary overlay version of the software, however, is planned for launch next year. The project's main contractor, Lockheed Martin Corp., will be paid $305 million and will be required to meet benchmarks as the project proceeds. FBI officials say Sentinel has survived three review sessions and is on budget and on schedule."
Typical of Large Projects (Score:5, Insightful)
The project has to be bitten in chunks. Lay out the functionality, and then start implementing it one small piece at a time, integrating as you go along. The Big Bang approach is always doomed to failure, or explosive costs, especially when you get to the reality that to deploy you need to shut down the business for two weeks to manage the data conversion. Lot's of small $1 million projects are more likely to succeed and be at budget then one big $20 million project.
This isn't news. It's the whole momentum behind a lot of modern development techniques such as Agile, or architectural such as SOA.
There's also a corrolary that any project involving a big consulting company like EDS, CSC, Anderson(or whatever the hell their name isnow), etc. is more than likely going to cost double what it should.
Re:Typical of Large Projects (Score:5, Interesting)
15. A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works.
16. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.
IMHO, John Gall's observations on political systems are incredibly apropos to technical systems.
Project Management (Score:2)
When we moved our office we planned ad nauseum but because of that planning had contingencies in place so our operations didn't suffer. The move went off without a major hitch. We also have a fairly good I.T. project management system in place that we use.
Because failure to under
This is 2005 news! (Score:3, Funny)
More likely, they are just tools for the FBI's PR branch. As in:
FBI IT boss: "We need a new IT budget for a project that will really work, this time, we swear."
FBI director: "Errr, that's risky. The previous two were embarrasing failures."
PR manager: "Let's revive last year's VCFS story and put a "lesson learned" positive spin on it!"
FBI director: "Positive spin??? On a $170 million piece of crud? Come on! Who would be stupid enough to print it?"
PR manager: "You obviously haven't opened the Washington Post recently..."
complex or simple? (Score:3, Insightful)
But that would be cheap and quick to implement and not much chance of making a vast profit.
Aha! (Score:3, Funny)
So that is what Microsoft are doing with Vista. We should have known!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I would like to discuss this in some detail. Congress Critters are you listening?
The issue here is simple and almost sinfully so. If you are to get a job working for the Government, it doesn't matter which agency, you have to provide your quailification credentials. We see them on looking for a job as a list of qualifications. This applies to contractors who supply the government as wee. This becomes a list that looks like a laundry list of the history of the agency. We programmer types will know thes