More on FBI Computers

George Buddy of Buddy's Bemusings alerts me to this article by Jonathan Alter in Newsweek critical of the FBI's computer efforts, which raises some additional thoughts:

• No good liberal is surprised that a government contractor is in it for the money. When I was a government bureaucrat I always thought I could do a better job than the contractors, but then I always was a know-it-all. One of the problems with contractors is that they are basically used-car salesmen, by which I mean that they're con-men and women. More seriously, there's the same imbalance of information as the economist Akerlof famously identified with used cars and won the Nobel Prize for. The seller (the contractor) knows more about its capabilities and software than does the buyer (the government).
  
• Having said all that, I don't buy the Alter's idea that the FBI's system is so simple that 12 contractors could have done it. It may look simple to us outsiders, but not to insiders.
  
• But given the environment, Freeh should have hired a contractor to devote 12 man-years to the job of building a kernel system, that could have expanded and evolved as the FBI started to learn the capabilities of PC's and the Internet and the process of developing software and as software has changed over the last 15 years. Trying to do a big system all at once was asking for trouble. (NASA got us to the moon, but on an evolutionary path of development.)

I give Alter credit for citing Harshaw's rule one (without the credit): "If you’ve read even one of the 500,000 articles in the popular press about software development, it’s obvious that the first try never works."

Most Ridiculous Bureaucrat Award

Cold War Missiles Target of Blackout: "The Bush administration has begun designating as secret some information that the government long provided even to its enemy the former Soviet Union: the numbers of strategic weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal during the Cold War.

The Pentagon and the Department of Energy are treating as national security secrets the historical totals of Minuteman, Titan II and other missiles, blacking out the information on previously public documents, according to a new report by the National Security Archive."

Perverts, Liars, Christians and Bush

An interesting collection of articles in the Times and Post today:

• The Times' Eichenwald explores the online world of pedophilia here--From Their Own Online World, Pedophiles Extend Their Reach. He documents the extent to which pedophiles construct their own world, in which children come on to them and pedophilia is a civil rights cause.
  
• The Times also carries this story about a painting of Jesus in a West Virginia school, raising church-state issues. (The painting is the version I remember from the 40's, a very handsome man with long hair with eyes uplifted. At that time, Jesus was the only long-haired person. I'm certainly no expert, but he doesn't look Jewish at all to me.) It includes a quote that the U.S. was a Christian country, founded on Christian principles.
• Turning to the Post, Shankar Vedantam in his science column reports on research showing how much people cheat, and the excuses they give themselves as justification.
• And finally, in the funniest article, the Bush administration has decided that the number of U.S. missiles in 1969 is classified.
  

Why link them together, other than to create a striking header? Because they all show instances of what I might call "housekeeping"--the very human and birdlike quality of straightening out one's environment to make it more to your liking. The pedophiles aren't any less human than the rest of us; they're just more obvious about it.

Discussion of FBI and Computers

Here's a link to the Post on-line discussion of today's article on FBI and computers. My comment is "Reston, VA", but all the comments were on target. Unfortunately it's not a sexy subject, bureaucratic systems seldom are.

FBI and Computers

I blogged on this back when the FBI project was scrapped. (See here , here, and here--matter of fact, it may be my favorite subject.) Today the Post reviews the fiasco here--The FBI's Upgrade That Wasn't placing some of the blame on the contractor who failed to hold the FBI's feet to the fire. But I liked this quote:

"The setup was so cumbersome that many agents stopped using it, preferring to rely on paper and secretaries. Technologically, the FBI was trapped in the 1980s, if not earlier.

'Getting information into or out of the system is a challenge,' said Greg Gandolfo, who spent most of his 18-year FBI career investigating financial crimes and public corruption cases in Chicago, Little Rock and Los Angeles. 'It's not like 'Here it is, click' and it's in there. It takes a whole series of steps and screens to go through.'

Gandolfo, who now heads a unit at FBI headquarters that fields computer complaints, said the biggest drawback is the amount of time it takes to handle paperwork and input data. 'From the case agent's point of view, you want to be freed up to do the casework, to do the investigations, to do the intelligence,' he said."

It's the old problem. People will bypass your system unless it accomplishes something useful for them. That means you either have to design it well, or have a system that has the users by the short and curlies (i.e., if you don't use the system, you can't get paid).

Governmental Inefficiency at the FBI

The Post starts a series on the FBI in today's world with a look at the training program for new agents at Quantico here--Old-School Academy in Post-9/11 World:

"An obsolete computer system is also a problem for new-agents-in-training, or 'NATS,' as they are called at Quantico.

'That is one of the big frustrations here,' said Supervisory Special Agent Karen E. Gardner, chief of investigative training at Quantico. 'If the American people expect us to connect the dots, we've got to train to do it. We don't have the computer networks here to do that.'

FBI officials said the bureau plans to build a multimillion-dollar state-of-the-art intelligence center at Quantico equipped with secure classrooms and classified computers. But it won't be ready for eight years."

FDR's War Department built the entire Pentagon in a shorter time, 16 months to be exact. I guess that's the difference between the "greatest generation" and the Bush(-league) generation.

Maids for Frosh? THIAH (To Hell in a Handbasket)

From a Post story today on new dorms for college students, being built privately:

Way-Out-of-the-Norm Dorm: "GWU's new freshman dorm has a maid service to clean the bathrooms and vacuum the rooms -- no more sticky beer patches on the floor."

I knew the world was going to hell in a handbasket when the Army contracted out KP duty (everyone under 50 will have no idea what it is). But this is the icing on the cake.

Native Americans, Immigrants, and the Religious Right

The Times had a piece today, How to Make Sure Children Are Scientifically Illiterate,
with links to the recent international survey of how many people believed in evolution (US just above Turkey at the bottom of the scale) and taking off from the recent Kansas school board voting:

"A key concern should not be whether Dr. Abrams’s religious views have a place in the classroom, but rather how someone whose religious views require a denial of essentially all modern scientific knowledge can be chairman of a state school board."

While my knee jerk reaction is to agree, sometimes old age causes my knee not to jerk. Today I'm wondering: liberals usually favor Native Americans and immigration (also a big story today) and oppose the religious right, as in this piece today. But when you think about it, I suspect many immigrants (particularly the non-college educated) and many Native Americans share with the religious right a disbelief in evolution. But we forget that.

Afghan Road Rage

The Post yesterday had another interesting memo from the front. This time it was from the command sergeant major in Afghanistan, counselling his troops on the best approach to the Afghan populace. Unfortunately, they haven't yet put the image of the memo on their web site, just an
introduction to it: "Indeed, U.S. troops have earned a reputation as 'negligent, offensive, rude, callous, occupiers, hostile, disrespectful . . . you get the point.' That description is found in the memo below by a senior sergeant in Afghanistan, signaling that the Army is thinking seriously about how to operate differently -- and more effectively -- in its counterinsurgency efforts."

It struck my eye for two reasons. It reaffirms what I knew from Nam--you put guns in the hands of big young males and they will try to prove Lord Acton's maxim: "power corrupts...." But it also proves the hold of the past--it's typed in monospaced type (i.e. pica or elite). The bureaucracy has problems believing that proportional spacing upper and lower case is the most readable font.

Staging Photography

Dr. Bernstein at The Volokh Conspiracy has commented extensively on evidence of staging and faking photographs from Lebanon. I commented, and will expand here. (I should look up Susan Sontag's book on the subject, but I'm too lazy.) There's are multiple continuums of photography, with many distinctions, some of which get overlooked in the current discussion:

• at one extreme is the "snapshot", interpreted literally. The photographer is an observer with a fast trigger finger (like Col. Van Loan(?sp) shooting the Vietcong prisoner in Vietnam during Tet 68). Security camera footage and "candid camera" shots also qualify.
  
• the planned "snapshot", where the subject matter is predictable but the photographer is still an observer. Think of the famous photo of Clinton and Lewinsky in the receiving line or JFKjr under JFK's desk--the photographers knew they might get a picture from the situation and did.
• this grades over into "photo-ops" and ceremonies, where the subject plans an event to provide the predictable pictures.
  
• there's also the photographer-posed events, like wedding ceremonies, handshakes, etc. The NYTimes had a photo in connection with the completion of digging a section of tunnel for the water system. A worker had one foot on the rail. While it seemed real, I suspect it was posed, because it was too good a picture to be caught naturally.
  
• a new variation is the "realness" of the event. A wedding or a bill signing is a real event, usually but not necessarily. Realness also ties to "uniqueness"--presumably you can only get a picture once.
  
• finally there's the photographer created events, like much art.

For Lebanon, perhaps there's less toleration of "posing", if any occured, because of the importance of the subject (as compared to the tunnel digging). There's an implicit contract between photographer/media and reader/viewer--what you provide is warranted to be a true reflection of reality in all important aspects. But there's also a contract between photographer and subject--you can take the picture if it's in my best interests. Sometimes the contracts are irreconcilable.