Competitive Intelligence

FBI Virtual Case File = Total Disaster

The 9/11 commission called a modernized FBI information network "critical to domestic security." But according to officials interviewed for the NY Times lead, "The bulk of the internal reports and documents produced at the [FBI] must still be printed, signed and scanned by hand into computer format each day." Members of the 9/11 commission, along with several senators and even Director Robert Mueller himself, expressed dissatisfaction with the mishandling of the system upgrade, which the FBI claimed would be ready by the end of 2004. (Only 10 percent of the system is now deployed.) The LA Times mentioned one fact the NYT didn't: Since the 9/11 attacks, the FBI has spent $581 million on the ill-fated project.

FBI Director Robert Mueller, members of 9/11 commission and other national security experts agree that success of the effort is critical to domestic security; but the bureau has been criticized for years for not developing a modern system like those developed years ago at Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency.

The third installment of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Trilogy technology upgrade program--designed to improve the agency's ability to share information about terrorism and other threats--is looking like anything but a blockbuster. Its Virtual Case File system, the $170 million centerpiece of Trilogy's third phase, lacks the security and overall efficiency required to make it usable, an FBI spokesman says.

"There were inadequacies," an FBI spokesman says. Virtual Case File, originally scheduled for deployment in December 2003, has been plagued by technical problems as the FBI's information sharing needs have evolved over the past few years. In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the ability to share information was highlighted as a weakness in the FBI and other agencies. While there were cultural and legal barriers to information sharing, the outdated nature of the FBI's IT systems was also brought to light and cited among the reasons.

The agency in 2001 commissioned government contractor Science Applications International Corp. to build Virtual Case File. The agency will pay the advisory firm Aerospace Corp. to investigate Virtual Case File's problems and determine whether any part of the project can be salvaged. The New York Times reported Thursday that the contract is worth $2 million.

SAIC doesn't accept all the blame for the problems. "The FBI modernization effort involved a massive technological and cultural change agencywide," Duane Andrews, SAIC's chief operating officer, said in a statement. "All parties involved have made mistakes in the way the Trilogy program was handled in the past."

SAIC said it delivered--and the FBI accepted--the first installment of the Virtual File System in December, in what it calls a change in FBI strategy to do the project in a "less-risky, incremental, phased-in" deployment rather than all at once. The FBI has had four different CIOs during the life of Trilogy, SAIC said, and 14 managers on the project that began in 2001, making it "incredibly challenging" to set system requirements.

Part of the problem appears to be that technology is moving faster than the FBI and its contractors. The FBI acknowledges in a document highlighting recent technology improvements that "the pace of technological innovation has overtaken our original vision for VCF, and there are now existing products to suit our purposes that did not exist when Trilogy began."

The FBI in June determined that Virtual Case File wasn't going to meet the agency's needs. Aerospace's job will be to evaluate the project as well as off-the-shelf software and applications designed by other federal agencies to determine how the FBI can best move forward with plans to give agents the ability to better share case-file information.

It hasn't been cheap and won't be getting cheaper anytime soon - an interesting parallel to a lot of the intelligence software deployments in the private sector that haven't planned for changes in needs and technology standards:

Since the attacks, Congress has given the FBI a blank check, allocating billions of dollars in additional funding. So far the overhaul has cost $581 million, and the software problems are expected to set off a debate over how well the bureau has been spending those dollars.

The bureau recently commissioned a series of independent studies to determine whether any part of the Virtual Case File software could be salvaged. Any decision to proceed with new software would add tens of millions of dollars to the development costs and render worthless much of a current $170-million contract.

Requests for proposals for new software could be sought this spring, the officials said. The bureau is no longer saying when the project, originally scheduled for completion by the end of 2003, might be finished.

FBI officials have scheduled a briefing today to discuss what a spokesman said was the "current status of FBI information technology upgrades."

A prototype of the Virtual Case File was delivered to the FBI last month by Science Applications International Corp. of San Diego. But bureau officials consider it inadequate and already outdated, and are using it mainly on a trial basis to glean information from users that will be incorporated in a new design.

Science Applications has received about $170 million from the FBI for its work on the project. Sources said about $100 million of that would be essentially lost if the FBI were to scrap the software.

"It would be a stunning reversal of progress," Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), the chairman of the Senate appropriations subcommittee that oversees funding for the FBI, said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times this week. "If the software has failed … that sets us back a long way.

"This has been a fits-and-starts exercise, and a very expensive one for a very long time," he added. "There are very serious questions about whether the FBI is able to keep up with the expanding responsibility and the amount of new dollars that are flowing into it. We have fully funded it at its requested levels."

A spokesman for Science Applications, Ron Zollars, said via e-mail that the company had "successfully completed" delivery of the initial version of the Virtual Case File software last month. He declined to comment further.

The stripped-down prototype will be running for three months. The bureau plans to then "shut it down, take all the lessons learned and incorporate them in a future case management system," a person familiar with the bureau's plans said.

Science Applications will apparently be no part of that future: Its contract expires at the end of March, and there were no plans to renew it, sources said.

That the software may have outlived its usefulness even before it has been fully implemented did not surprise some computer experts.

An outside computer analyst who has studied the FBI's technology efforts said the agency's problem is that its officials thought they could get it right the first time. "That never happens with anybody," he said.

Some sources sympathetic to the FBI defended the process, and said that what has been learned in designing the software has given the bureau valuable design and user information.

The replacement software may even be called the Virtual Case File, although it is unlikely to bear much resemblance to the product that is being rolled out to about 300 users testing the prototype in New Orleans and Washington. The prototype's main feature allows users to prepare documents and forward them in a usable form.

Eventually, the FBI expects to have software with added features for managing records, evidence and other documents, along with the ability for users to collaborate on documents and share information online.

The move is being engineered by Zalmai Azmi, who has been the FBI's chief information officer for the last year. People familiar with his work say Azmi recognizes that the change in direction is likely to generate political heat but that it will serve the bureau better in the long run.

The development illustrates the problems in keeping up with rapidly changing technology that confront any business, as well as the changing mission of the FBI since the Sept. 11 attacks, among other issues.

Meanwhile, the software troubles continue for the FBI in the wiretapping arena as well:

The FBI has effectively abandoned its custom-built Internet surveillance technology, once known as Carnivore, designed to read e-mails and other online communications among suspected criminals, terrorists and spies, according to bureau oversight reports submitted to Congress.

Instead, the FBI said it has switched to unspecified commercial software to eavesdrop on computer traffic during such investigations and has increasingly asked Internet providers to conduct wiretaps on targeted customers on the government's behalf, reimbursing companies for their costs.

The FBI performed only eight Internet wiretaps in fiscal 2003 and five in fiscal 2002; none used the software initially called Carnivore and later renamed the DCS-1000, according to FBI documents submitted to Senate and House oversight committees.

The FBI, which once said Carnivore was ``far better'' than commercial products, said previously it had used the technology about 25 times between 1998 and 2000.

The FBI said it could not disclose how much it spent to produce the surveillance software it no longer uses, saying part of its budget was classified. Outside experts said the government probably spent between $6 million and $15 million.

The congressional oversight reports were obtained last week under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act by the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center, a civil liberties group that criticized the surveillance software after it was first disclosed in 2000.

FBI spokesman Paul Bresson said the bureau moved to popular commercial wiretap software because it was less expensive and had improved in its ability to copy e-mails and other communications of a targeted Internet account without affecting other subscribers.

``We see the value in the commercially available software; we're using it more now and we're asking the Internet service providers that have the capabilities to collect data in compliance with court orders,'' Bresson said.

The FBI said last week it was sending back to the drawing board its $170 million computer overhaul, which was intended to give agents and analysts an instantaneous and paperless way to manage criminal and terrorism cases.

Experts said the life span of roughly four years for the bureau's homegrown surveillance technology was similar to the shelf life of cutting-edge products in private industry.``It's hard to criticize the FBI trying to keep pace with technology,'' said James Dempsey of the Washington-based Center for Democracy and Technology. ``There is just a huge amount of innovation and development going on in the private sector.''

Henry H. Perritt Jr., who led an oversight study of Carnivore in 2000 for the Justice Department, said the FBI originally built its own surveillance system because commercial tools were inadequate. Perritt, a professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law, said he was unaware of any commercial wiretap software that includes audit features robust enough to convince a federal judge that e-mails from innocent Internet users weren't captured by mistake.

``You'd like to have a package that supervisors within a field office and in Washington could do an audit and make sure they're using the tools compliant with the court order,'' Perritt said.

The FBI laboratory division, which produced Carnivore, was headed by Donald M. Kerr, who left the FBI in August 2001 to become the CIA's chief gadget-maker as head of its science and technology directorate. Kerr told lawmakers in 2000 that Carnivore was ``far better than any commercially-available sniffer.''

Such are, apparently, the risks of deploying intelligence software in the national intelligence community... let's hope the same isn't mirrored in the private sector.

- Arik