by CKR
A little over a week ago, a nuclear submarine, the San Francisco, drove into an undersea mountain, killing one crew member and injuring sixty others. The mountain wasn’t on the navigation maps. Then last week, the FBI announced that after spending $170 million, they are giving up on developing a database that would provide agents with access to case files.
The world has changed, and its only superpower is showing signs of not changing along with it.
Let me speculate on the FBI’s problem, on the basis of projects I’ve seen.
The FBI decided that it needed a database different from any on the market. This database needed to be particularly secure, to have several levels of access, and to be searchable in special ways, like using graphics for photos or fingerprints. A committee was convened to develop a set of requirements, but the committee didn’t include people who would use or manage the database. After several months of meetings that strained everyone’s patience, the committee came up with a requirements document.
The contractors who bid were those who were accustomed to dealing with the contracting officers and vice versa, probably not Microsoft or Oracle or Google. SAIC won the contract. The database requirements then changed as the people who would be using and managing the database got wind of them and hollered that they wouldn’t work. Frequently they were right. Everybody’s frustration rose as SAIC was unable to deliver a product. Shouting broke out and contracting officers changed, sometimes because of organizational changes and sometimes because they were removed.
Meanwhile, under the sea, the San Francisco smashed into that mountain because the maps said there was no mountain. The ocean is a big place—twice the area of the land on Earth—and the sub was in a place that not too many people go. The navy, ours or the Soviets’, is the only organization likely to have mapped that area. There may have been some satellite photos that looked like there was something there, but mapping is done with sonar, and tracking down every smudge on a satellite photo would be an enormous task. We don’t know how much of the ocean the navy has mapped, because that’s justifiably classified. We can hope that charts of this area will be adjusted.
Both of these fiascoes grow out of a mindset that worked well in the 1950s and 1960s, as the world was reconstructing itself from World War II. The government was the driver for R&D because nobody else could afford to be. The first “supercomputers” were developed by IBM for nuclear weapons programs. These computers were as big as an entire room. Then the oil companies started to buy supercomputers to model their exploration and well development. Private companies launched satellites and sell and interpret the photographs.
The activities that were once the exclusive role of governments escaped first to a select group of contractors (commonly known as defense contractors) and then to the world at large. Technology ran wild, and now you can buy a GPS almost as good as the ones used to target shock and awe to help you find your way when you’re hiking, or a hand-held device that has far more moxie than those room-size supercomputers. Wild-eyed nerds in Silicon Valley decided to database the world and to find unbreakable ciphers. Google has just acquired Keyhole, or you can buy all sorts of pictures from GlobeXplorer. (Some good photos of the tsunami and the 9/11 attacks at the latter.)
This has caused some problems. When the government alone was doing these things, they could be kept secret, so that the Mafia and al-Qaeda wouldn’t have unbuggable conversations and so that only the military could look down and see their targets. So the Navy continues to do its mapping in-house, and the FBI doesn’t bother to call Google or Symantec.
The FBI has called in The Aerospace Corporation, a defense dinosaur like SAIC, to evaluate what went wrong with that $170 million expenditure. Aerospace’s report will probably list some technical problems along with poorly defined and changing requirements and will suggest that The Aerospace Corporation could have done it better. On a cost-plus contract, of course. Have you used an Aerospace or SAIC search engine recently? Neither have I, at least not knowingly.
Ah, but would Google bid?
I once asked an executive of a firm that I thought could do a particularly good job on my project why his firm didn’t bid on government contracts. Too much paperwork, he said, and too much auditing and demand for records. The extra effort they would have to put into a government contract would eat up any profit that might be there. I wish you would when my RFP comes out, I said, but they didn’t.
If Google had bid, someone in procurement would have noticed that Google works with Ireland, Iceland, and India. Surely export licenses would be required. No, not export licenses for future activity, but export licenses in the here and now. And, btw, India is a sensitive country, you know, and so is Russia, so we’ll have to consider whether this would be a breach…and we’ll need to see the connectivity of your computers…
The government has been moving toward privatization of all sorts of things. It’s too bad that it hasn’t developed a way to work with the best of what’s been privatized.