The FBI's $379 million upgrade won't solve the agency's problems.
With the FBI in the midst of a "wartime reorganization," there's one thing the bureau might want to upgrade: its IT arsenal. After all, this is an agency that relies on 5-year-old desktop computers, 56K modems, and, until recently, index cards.
The FBI's information technology troubles are nothing new. On the one hand, the bureau has long used sophisticated eavesdropping and wiretapping technology to build cases against suspected criminals. Recently, its Internet wiretapping system, Carnivore, has gleaned mounds of user data from ISPs. But much of the information goes unanalyzed or doesn't get to the right people in a timely fashion. Not surprisingly, the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center drove the point home: The FBI urgently - and admittedly - needs to develop an information technology policy for the 21st century.
The truth is, the FBI is years behind the rest of the world when it comes to taking advantage of sophisticated networked computing systems - and the agency was well aware of that fact before September 11. In July, FBI assistant director Robert Dies told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the bureau needed to quickly "incorporate a state-of- the-art IT security process and a world-class records management system."
Even though former FBI director Louis Freeh was fond of saying that every agent would be issued a laptop as well as a gun and a badge, the bureau's IT systems failed to keep up with breakthroughs in private business during Freeh's reign. In the 1990s, the FBI spent almost $200 million updating its 33-year-old National Crime Information Center. But this summer, Dies told the Senate Judiciary Committee: "For a variety of reasons, the FBI information technology has had no meaningful improvements in over six years."
The NCIC, the backbone of the bureau's information system, is housed in Clarksburg, West Virginia. It lets agents and police in state and local departments connect to 17 databases containing, among other things, fingerprints and DMV and criminal records. The NCIC 2000 network runs on three IBM mainframes capable of processing 2.5 million transactions a day. The servers in FedEx's data center, by comparison, crunch 150 million transactions per day.
It gets worse. Nearly half of the FBI's 26,000 desktop computers are outdated, and most of its offices share 56K connections to the main FBI network, making the downloading of a digital photograph a nice afternoon's work. These days, data mining at the FBI is the task of about 1,000 of the bureau's 28,000 employees, who sift by hand through information collected by field agents, according to Anthony Bagdonis of Applied Systems Intelligence, a Roswell, Georgia-based government software contractor. And until about five years ago, the FBI's database consisted of 3-by-5 index cards stored in gray metal file cabinets in field offices and at headquarters.
Dies has embarked on a $379 million upgrade program, named Trilogy, to bring the bureau up to speed. Most of the money is earmarked for high-speed network connections and improved hardware and software. But as Dies himself told Congress, Trilogy alone won't solve the FBI's problems. And the agency will need to get past new bureaucratic hitches that are likely to pop up on the post-September 11 landscape. For example, the responsibilities of Tom Ridge's new Office of Homeland Security overlap with those of the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center, possibly making for crossed wires when it comes to sharing data.
It's not too difficult to imagine how a better wired intelligence service might have averted the September attacks. Shared governmental databases could have notified the INS of the CIA warning issued in late August, which said two men with al Qaeda ties had entered the US. The INS could have detained one, while the FBI tracked the other, whose name and San Diego address would have turned up in a search of the California Department of Motor Vehicles database. The address might very well have led agents to the other San Diego-based terrorists who participated in the attacks. FBI analysts or, better yet, analytical software could have been instructed to flag any appearance of the men's names or the names of their known associates in Carnivore intercepts. The automated confirmation email - sent back to the terrorist who, on September 11, bought seven plane tickets online - could have been captured by Carnivore and noted by an analyst or by the software, and the scope of the plot might have begun to emerge.
The technology to fight terrorism exists. Now it's up to the FBI to manage it wisely.
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