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FBI Conducts Feasibility Study on Project Sentinel 132

Posted by timothy from the keeping-man-safe-from-tyranny dept.
leave-no-trace writes "CNN reports that "FBI officials hope to award a contract by the year's end for a complex new software program (dubbed Sentinel) to replace a failed project that was canceled this year at a cost of more than $100 million to taxpayers." The system is supposed to include search capabilities, protocols for processing and handling FBI reports, security issues and a new system for records management. FBI Director Robert Mueller told lawmakers he is unable yet to place a price tag on the Sentinel project."
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FBI Conducts Feasibility Study on Project Sentinel More

FBI Conducts Feasibility Study on Project Sentinel

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  • Not Quite That Shocking (Score:5, Interesting)

    by geomon ( 78680 ) on Tuesday June 07, 2005 @07:31PM (#12753043) Homepage Journal
    I know that many who have not worked either for or around the US government before are shocked at how money is spent (squandered) on projects that never finish or are dead the day they are deployed.

    The US Department of Energy spent approximately $250 million on a project to convert low-level radioactive waste into a concrete slurry that would be poured into a vault for disposal. They began construction on the vaults and had the grout plant ready to begin operation. Unfortunately, they didn't get approval of from the State of Washington before they began construction. At the point where full-scale testing was to begin, the State rejected their application to operate. Seems they were working a dual track: design and construction while simultaneously working on permit approval.

    They gambled and lost. $250M dropped in a hole and it never hit bottom. The money that was spent on the FBIs last system will suffer a similar fate.
    • So that explains why the US has a huge debt!

      But seriously, that is just pathetic. $250 million on a failed project. I know there are TONS and TONS of researchers that would just DIE for $1 million.

      • Re:Not Quite That Shocking (Score:4, Funny)

        by geomon ( 78680 ) on Tuesday June 07, 2005 @07:37PM (#12753087) Homepage Journal
        I know there are TONS and TONS of researchers that would just DIE for $1 million.

        I work with a few who feel the same way.

        I'll take $500k!

        Damn, I'm cheap.
      • So that explains why the US has a huge debt!

        Na, it's because the US government engages in zero balance budgeting. If a department doesn't spend its entire budget each year, its budget gets cut net year. However, if they overspend their budget (which is quite possible) they get a budget increse next year. So, how would you handle your department's budget if you were in charge of it? Most people I know would spend as much as possible.
        The US government really needs to rethink its budgeting practices.
    • They gambled and lost. $250M dropped in a hole and it never hit bottom.

      If that had been in the private sector, somebody would have gotten fired...in this case they probably were promoted.
    • It is economically unsound to invest into a project that does not have a well defined budget, it will end up costing more than it has to, since no one will keep track of how well the money is spent. This is one of the major reasons why the private sector ends up doing things cheaper.
      • It is economically unsound to invest into a project that does not have a well defined budget, it will end up costing more than it has to, since no one will keep track of how well the money is spent.

        Isn't that how everyone else besides government (from individuals to corporations) approaches an expenditure? When I purchase *anything* for my organization, the first thing that we evalaute is how much we're willing to spend for it.

        I guess that's less of a concern when you're on the taxpayers' dime.
      • It is economically unsound to invest into a project that does not have a well defined budget,

        While normally I would agree wholeheartedly, how do you define all of the costs associated with something that has never been done before and has extremely difficult engineering problems that have to be solved at various interim steps in your process. Add to that the lack of basic science supporting your engineering decisions.

        it will end up costing more than it has to,

        See the above statement.

        since no one w

        • Re:Not Quite That Shocking (Score:1, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward

          how do you define all of the costs associated with something that has never been done before and has extremely difficult engineering problems that have to be solved at various interim steps in your process. Add to that the lack of basic science supporting your engineering decisions.

          You don't define those costs. Those costs should already have been accounted for in your R&D budget. The R&D is there to ensure that you do actually know how to do something before you try and do it. If you are mid

          • If you are midway through a project and still doing R&D, then somebody has fucked up somewhere.

            You're preaching to the choir.

            We now have the $7B vitrification on hold until the seismic risk assessment has been performed. They are halfway into the construction of the main treatment facility and then they have to stop to address questions that should have been answered before they broke ground!
        • "how do you define all of the costs associated with something that has never been done before and has extremely difficult engineering problems that have to be solved at various interim steps in your process."

          Shouldn't the unknown issues be addressed as part of an R&D process? If you don't know how long it takes to solve a problem, as well as what resources (hardware, network etc) are needed, how can you possibly budget and estimate? Correct answer is you can't. These unknowns become major risks.

          Par
      • It is economically unsound to invest into a project that does not have a well defined budget,
        Not unsound, but very risky. At this early stage of a project an investor can gain an extremely high ROI, but also has an extremely high risk of the project eating up all finances without any ROI.

        Governments should not run such risks, only venture capitalists willing to take a chance.

    • The Department of Energy is part of the federal government. Why were they asking the State of Washington for a permit? The federal government has no obligation to obey state laws.
    • I work for the local government, and it's interesting you bring this point up. My first day my boss told me that I would find this job a lot less stressful as a programmer than in the private sector because government wasn't in the business of making money but was in the business of spending it. I had to quietly chuckle..
    • It works out at around twenty six thousand dollars for every man woman and child. You're all going to have to pay, one way or another.

    • I know that many who have not worked either for or around the US government before are shocked at how money is spent (squandered) on projects that never finish or are dead the day they are deployed.

      Hey, look what I can do just by changing a couple of words!

      I know that many who have not worked either for or around A LARG CORPORATION before are shocked at how money is spent (squandered) on projects that never finish or are dead the day they are deployed.

      I am working in the private sector for a large com
    • Seems it (considering the purpose described) that they could have just bought a google search appliance.
      But, then there is the govt appropriations technique....

  • Complex new software program (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 07, 2005 @07:36PM (#12753079)
    I hear MS Access is currently the top contender because of its robust security.

  • It seems that large engineering projects, of any kind (not just restricted to IT), are particularly prone to failure when combined with public government money. I can't count the number of times news reports have uncovered vast government sums (at least here in the UK) being poured into ever-delayed and failing projects.

    One of the more recent cases I can recall is the replacement of national air traffic control systems, which was delayed by years, and even after deployment suffered major issues. Public mon

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Government and Large-scale projects bad mix? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Part of the problem has to do with their insane restrictions on how money can be spent. They will pay $X/hr for an engineer and no higher. They will pay 8% administrative overhead and no higher. You can't put brilliant (but expensive) people on the project because the cost structure isn't set up to reward that. Instead, you are almost forced to hire hundreds of warm bodies to bring that 8% up to something reasonable.

    • I get mad as much as the next guy at government wasting my tax money, however, I do not believe that it is a specifically governmental characteristic.

      Most companies, seem to have the same problems (project Monterey anyone?). The main difference, is that we (rightly) feel that government's money is our money, so it affects us more. On top of that, because it's our money media are much more likely to report those failures, particularly since governments are obligated to disclose such information. Secre

  • Hasn't this happened before? Hasn't the FBI tried desperately to digitize all its crap and failed each time? I seem to remember this from a while ago...
    • It sucks that they have to put 3 computers on each desk so they can fill out every form in triplicate.
    • Last time the problem was, IIRC, they didn't get somebody to seriously figure out the software requirements and realized after spending entirely too much money that they would have gotten something obsolete and unsuited to their needs. A feasibility study, if it involves figuring out in advance exactly what the system should do, is what they should have done first last time. I'm betting they'll get it at least almost right this time (to the point that it might not be a good system, but it will be usable and
    • The last time was last year. It was called the "Virtual Case File". It was a complete failure. I think there was an article in the Washington Post last week about it.

  • My Cunning Plan (Score:4, Funny)

    by MooseByte ( 751829 ) on Tuesday June 07, 2005 @07:40PM (#12753111)

    $100 million down the drain eh? Heck, I'll bid this next project at a mere $1 million and flail miserably causing the contract to be scuttled in the end just like this one.

    Success! Because I'll be saving the FBI $99 million! In fact I think I'll qualify for one of those federal gov't "bounty for saving Uncle Sam costs" contractor bonus plans.

    Off to the Dilbert Mission Statement Generator [dilbert.com].

    • Heck, I'll bid this next project at a mere $1 million and flail miserably causing the contract to be scuttled in the end just like this one. Success! Because I'll be saving the FBI $99 million!

      Thats funny. I decided to quote $100 million, instead of 1 billion, thinking same, but, nobody gives me credit for saving FBI $900 million.

    • No! Wait... you can't!

      We have committed to completely revolutionize low-risk high-yield intellectual capital and authoritatively engineer quality materials while maintaining the highest standards!

  • Suggestion: Google It (Score:3, Interesting)

    by RedLeg ( 22564 ) on Tuesday June 07, 2005 @07:40PM (#12753114) Journal
    Seriously:

    No one else has a hope of pulling an information indexing and retrieval project of this scale off, and they excel at exactly this kind of thing.

    Plus, there's that "First, do no evil...." motto.

    --Red
    • Google + The Federal Govt. == do no evil?

      Lets not tempt fate...

      Anyway, if there is one thing that history teaches us it is that if you are cursed to live in "exciting" times profiteering is the way to go. I am down with some of it happening in the IT sector....

    • Re:Suggestion: Google It (Score:5, Informative)

      by globalar ( 669767 ) on Tuesday June 07, 2005 @08:44PM (#12753549) Homepage
      For the hardware setup (scale) and general search solution, Google is very good. However, it is not for every problem.

      Google does not have near the contextual capabilities of some (custom-fitted) search engines. At some point, you need automation and a level of reliability. You can't have a person looking at everything. And repeated searching, which we take for granted, is often necessary on the same dataset to garner sufficient results. Who says when we have found the right information?

      Google does not provide complex taxonomy or a feedback loop mechanism (which can be very complicated - often patented or proprietary).

      In the original PageRank thesis, it was made clear that context was entirely up to the user. When dealing with records (i.e., highly redundant data that must be cross-referenced extensively), Google falls flat.

      Let me greatly over-simplify. Consider, "Joe Smith civilian" and "Joe Smith terrorist". Google will not distinguish the two Smith's. It will only distinguish the phrase in relation to the index. So - even if we have a link between Smith the terrorist and smith the civilian, we can still mix them up (unless we mark everything explicity). We need context (not just words in the same document, sentence, etc.), and as our search pattern hones in on matches (repeated, refined searching), we need better classification or we go in circles.
      • Consider, "Joe Smith civilian" and "Joe Smith terrorist". Google will not distinguish the two Smith's.
        You could just add a checkbox, like the customs one you have to fill out on flights to the U.S.:

        I am a terrorist and/or am planning terrorist activities in the United States: [ ]

        Or maybe add an HTML Tag to the BODY tag, like regime=terror or something like that...

      • You are describing the biggest challenge that corporations face when attempting to bring order to a general index. Products like the Google Appliance and Oracle Enterprise Search do a great job indexing all of your disparate content sources - unfortunately much of the context of the source is lost. What is required, and by far is the hardest part, is getting the corporation/government/whatever to agree on an enterprise taxonomy that is used as a base level of categorization for the data being indexed. If
      • Somewhat offtopic I suppose, but what I've always wanted to see in Google is something where you can search for some word or phrase and another word or phrase within x words of the primary phrase. For example, primary search is Brian Cohen and secondary search is terrorist with an x value of 10 returns only results like "[b]Brian Cohen[/b], a known member of the People's Front of Judea, a [b]terrorist[/b] organization that recently... That would be cool.
    • Plus, there's that "First, do no evil...." motto.

      That motto basically precludes them from doing work for the us federal government.

  • I think whoever the FBI allows to prime on the contract, they damn well better know a thing or two about project management. I think SAIC's failure to execute is in small part due to the underpinning technology, in large part due to an FBI leadership that was not on the same page, but mostly due to the fact that the management of this project was mishandled.
    • ...and...Given that the project works, is accepted and put into place, who checks that contractor years down the road? I can see it now...Mafia, Terror orgs, and Microsoft in a snipe war on Ebay for rights to the back door...

    • I think SAIC's failure to execute is in small part due to the underpinning technology, in large part due to an FBI leadership that was not on the same page, but mostly due to the fact that the management of this project was mishandled.

      SAIC is certainly not blameless, but I think this is a pretty good summary [computerworld.com] of what happened. The biggest problem was the FBI trying to add major new requirements to an existing project as a response to 9/11. Agreed, SAIC should have said no, but what defense contractor do


    • If any government agency is alloted a certain amount of hard-earned taxpayer money, they either have to spend it, or risk losing it the next time the budget is funded. In short, there's a huge advantage to wasting that much money - at minimum, it means they stand a good chance of staying funded at the current level (maybe even more), whether or not they have anything to show for it. The losers, of course, are the taxpayers.

  • I got as far as (Score:5, Funny)

    by lheal ( 86013 ) <lheal1999NO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Tuesday June 07, 2005 @07:43PM (#12753129) Journal
    the first sentence:
    A technical feasibility study is under way on the new information management system

    before I had to ask google for the definition:

    technical feasibility study: n. from Gr. technos, knowledge + OF faux, false; see rubber stamp. See also "pork barrel" and "buzzword".

    • Re:I got as far as (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Look on the bright side...
      Some really rich dude is getter even MORE money!

      Oh wait, shit...
  • Man 'killed' the all knowing all seeing and now 'we' are finding we need a replacement for him so 'we' are empowering our government to be that all seeing all knowing force.

    I personally think the All knowing all Powerful God was a bit more manageable than the All knowing and All Powerful state.

  • Right.. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by t_allardyce ( 48447 ) on Tuesday June 07, 2005 @07:44PM (#12753139) Journal
    a $100 million software project breaks down to:

    ~ 1.6 million well paid programmer hours
    or a roughly 50 strong team of (well paid) programmers and experts working for nearly 15 years without taking holidays or weekends off. If you want you can cut that down to 8 years and you've still got about $50M to play with for your servers and networking.
    • but those programmers need managers. and those managers need managers, and the managers managers need secretaries. and you need legal and financial people to deal with a government contract of that size. and its likely you are going to license some of the final product, and subcontract some other parts, each of which has their own overhead (including margins).

      at least half of those programmers are going to be completely useless. more than 1/4 barely functional.

      and those facilities you are paying for (incl

      • Re:Right.. (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I question how much you really know about this process, seeing as you didn't bother mentioning the prostitutes.
    • You forgot CEO, CFO, CTO and CIO. These folks alone can suck in $100M in a single year (outsourcing the project itself to India).
  • Ready the EMP! (cf The Matrix..)

    I'm so going to be on their blacklist for this comment...

  • Would someone chuck them a CD with a copy of eGroupWare [egroupware.org] on it please..

  • Incredible (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ScrewMaster ( 602015 ) on Tuesday June 07, 2005 @07:59PM (#12753255)
    That one hundred million dollars can be thrown away (well, sure, a lot of people profited by this malfeasance but the taxpayers didn't get what was paid for) and nobody goes to prison for thirty years ... incredible. Nowadays, it just seems like the worse the crime, the less the time. You would just think that the news media would be all over this but Noooooo! it's just glossed over. And, of course, it's the tip of the proverbial iceberg. There'as a reason taxes are so high my friends, and it has less to do with the services with which we are provided than those which we are not (like this project.) And I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that the "new and improved" project will be run by the same people that screwed up the last one.
    • You would just think that the news media would be all over this but Noooooo!

      So true. It's a good thing there are obscure websites like CNN.com to distribute this hidden information.
    • What planet did you just come from? ;) Here on the section of Earth known as the USA it is no longer permitted for one to question anything that relates to increasing the security of the state. That goes double for projects that are also related to anything touching on terrorism. Those who doubt the wisdom of "The Great and Powerful OZ" (pay no attention to the man behind the curtain) will be told that they obviously hate the USA and all it stands for.

      It seems that anything goes when it comes to throwin
    • It's not all that big a deal, actually. It's $100M over about 3 years. The FBI employs "15,904 Professional Support people", who presumably make at least $30K each year, for a low estimate on salary of $477M each year. Salary is generally considered to be a third of an employer's costs in employing someone (the rest being benefits, supporting equipment, office space, etc). So the human support staff cost at least $4.3B over the duration of this project. If the project had a 50-50 chance of success, and succ

  • zerg (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Lord Omlette ( 124579 ) on Tuesday June 07, 2005 @08:00PM (#12753262) Homepage

    FBI Director Robert Mueller told lawmakers he is unable yet to place a price tag on the Sentinel project.

    If Mr. Mueller wasn't a doofus, he'd call up Google and ask them for a quote. The system would wind up deployed before the year was over.

    Maybe they should make me Director of the FBI.

  • i can do it... (Score:5, Funny)

    by skydude_20 ( 307538 ) on Tuesday June 07, 2005 @08:01PM (#12753269) Journal
    Dear FBI:
    Get yourself a rack of these: http://www.google.com/enterprise/gsa/index.html/ [google.com]
    I'll be expecting a check in the mail for $99million. You know where to find me.

    Sincerly,
    me
    • Dear FBI: Get yourself a rack of these: http://www.google.com/enterprise/gsa/index.html/ I'll be expecting a check in the mail for $99million. You know where to find me.

      Wow, the mods are awake today! This 404 link gets +5 Informative!

  • This will bring them one step closer to their goal of eradicating the world of mutants.
  • Most taxpayers I know look at price tags. If there's no price tag, this SHOULD be a tough sale. Too bad politicians aren't concerned with "costs" or "money" or "individual rights".
    • Too bad politicians aren't concerned with "costs" or "money" or "individual rights".
      Which is ironic, because these things keep "costing" us our "money" and "individual rights".

  • the reason it is failing is (Score:4, Insightful)

    by hsmith ( 818216 ) on Tuesday June 07, 2005 @08:11PM (#12753323)
    they really can't decide on what they want.

    which is understandable, it is a massive project. the constantly evolving requirements don't help to nail down a prototype to get to teh final project.
    • "they really can't decide on what they want." This is, I think, a pretty common problem in government projects. I'm working for a minor defense contractor right now on this cluster-fuck of a project that some DoD jokers dreamed up. My co-workers and I agree that it has little chance of actually seeing the light of day, because the requirements are constantly changing and have been since I got assigned to the project 6 mos. ago. We spend all our time re-doing stuff that we've already done to meet the eve
  • I think successful projects get done in spite of the government, and they are usually done by one person or a small team of people. I know. I single-handedly developed a database integration projection for a government agency back in the mid 1980's that is still in use today. I doubt if a team could have done it. It was me working 18 hour days and weekends that did it. And I did it in spite of some lazy bastard government types who stood in my way.
  • 100 million bucks?

    It's called a Google search appliance.

    Or maybe they should just switch to Mac's running Tiger and use Spotlight.

  • Civic Procurement (Score:1, Troll)

    by omb ( 759389 )
    Compare and contrast DARPA, which founded the
    research to build the internet,

    and what is happening in the post 9/11 chaos,

    one was engineer led, the other opressive and
    much more importantly, completely inefective.

    Someone, in the US space, needs to start asking
    serious questions, so security policy is made by
    scientists and engineers, not politicians, whether
    elected or not. If US military-industrial waste is
    allowed to continue, in this failure mode,

    Usama bin-Laden will get another chance, and will
    do _more_ d

  • Let me guess - the same pointy haired bosses are running this project too.

  • Why do they need a new system?

    Can't Jack Bauer just ask Chloe to, "Open a socket to the main server and retrieve the identity profiles," whenever he needs to?
    • Well, we could allow Jack to do that but whatever information that procedure finds might be outside of the "protocol" that they are running. This would drive Jack to resign from CTU and the resulting body count would be a media field day.

      What we should really do is send Jack to the middle east to find some of the bad guys. Sure, he'd kill half of the population with a pistol and a knife but, in the end, he'd get his man.
  • It is called Spotlight [apple.com].

    Please pay my consulting fee with a check to cash. Thank you.

  • It was about time the government worked on the problems of those pesky mutants!

  • Sentinel (Score:2, Insightful)

    by E-Rock-23 ( 470500 )
    It's got a nice Orwellian ring to it, doesn't it...

    "We are... Watching you..." -- Tim Curry, Congo

    • What happened to politicos? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by typical ( 886006 ) on Tuesday June 07, 2005 @11:29PM (#12754603) Journal
      Did every law enforcement guy and spook get *stupid* WRT PR?

      Let's take a look at the list of bright ideas for names:
      • Total Information Awareness. (Federal tie-databases-together project, never needed a public face in the first place.) Project has spooky logo containing giant floating eyeball in pyramid looking at the world. This is a good example of what we call a very bad idea from a political standpoint
      • Carnivore. (FBI email monitoring program.) Project has unspecified capabilities to monitor email, lots of techies saying scary things about it already. Bad image.
      • Sentinel. (FBI database system.) Current bad idea.

      Now, let's take a look at what the people doing this could learn from:

      • Magic Lantern. (FBI keylogger) Good name. Whimsical. Nonthreatening. You can get a picture of a sort-of-elflike FBI guy skipping merrily through the trees. Congress is not going to get complaints from scared citizens demanding that they cut funding on something called Magic Lantern.
      • Operation Enduring Freedom. (name for the US invasion of Iraq, part two) See, no matter how much you don't like Bush, he managed to hold back on names like Operation Oilgrab, Operation Polishing Daddy's Legacy, and even the (increasingly obviously inaccurate due to news reports) intended name of Operation Infinite Justice. It's not bloodthirsty. It's happy and upbeat.
      • Department of Defense. In the United States, we don't *have* a Department of War, and haven't for many years, ever since someone figured out that it's harder to get funding for war than for defense. Nor do we have a Department of Offense. The Department of Defense is a friendly shield covering kitties and sleeping babies. This is a good name.
      • Social Security. Okay "social" might have been a bad idea, as it smacked a bit too much of socialism, but "security" is always safe. Calling this Handout From Our Kids or Federal Pyramid Scheme was avoided. Good choice.
      • Pro-life/pro-choice. Nobody's negative, everybody's positive.
      • Freedom fighter. The United States does not back terrorists. We have terrorists for *enemies*. We assist freedom fighters in overcoming their cruel oppressors.

      There are things that it's okay to attach scary appellations to. Fighter jets -- Fighting Falcon, Tigershark, Hornet, Cobra, Phantom, Demon, Banshee, Fury. Those are supposed to be scary, because it gives people a sense of vicarious power and excitement. Naming domestic monitoring and law enforcement systems (and that is, with the addition of counterintelligence, the job of the FBI) anything scary-sounding is a very bad idea.

      While the United States doesn't usually do this, here are some other points:

      • Do not name a product after living people. With dead people, there's a only a slight chance that some scandal will be discovered later. With live people, you may have your newly-minted Mike Tyson's Punch-Out! be represented by an individual that abuses women, bites ears off of people, and rapes people.
      • Do not name anything after an ethnic group. Ethnic groups change their names constantly to avoid political friction, and old acceptable terms rapidly become unacceptable. Even the Bureau of Indian Affairs sounds a bit creaky next to Bureau of Native American Affairs, and National Association For the Advancement of Colored People is just plain out-of-date.
      • Codenames sometimes become product names, as Motorola found out with the PowerPC G3, G4, and G5. People can be sued for codenames, as Apple found out with Sagan. If you're going to have marketing people handing out internal codenames, think first. Or have a separate, external codename to use on products.
      • Do not make your name a funny joke, especially an in-joke. It's definitely uproariously funny at the time, and then it just creates misery for every person down the road who has to explain it to ev
  • Hmm Project Sentinel... By chance the failed project wasn't named Wideawake was it. Geez pretty soon we will be reading about giant robots hunting down the mutants!

  • Sentinel too shall fail (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Allnighterking ( 74212 ) on Tuesday June 07, 2005 @10:22PM (#12754123) Homepage
    Why? Simply put. In the government it is impossible to get a spec. You spend months in negotiation trying to nail down something. Once you do and you write up the spec. There is always that funky little clause which allows for "changes unforseen do to the needs of the governement." It's worse than having heart lung machines designed by marketing.

    At the end of stage one a contract is signed. Ok folks time to start.... nope.... not yet. Depending on how the money was allocated they may or may not have to get outside approval. This could be the dept's accounting section, the GAO, or Congress. God in heaven help you if congress gets wind of it. Every Senator and Congressman along with 50K pedantic purveyors of polluted pullet piss (aka lobyists) will be on it like white on rice instantly. Each determined to get a piece of the pie for their district. (We don't need air horns for errors a simple PC speaker and beep will do just fine.... Oh I see Congressman Pantywhistle's district makes air horns, and he's head of the appropriations commitee.) Now the problem is that all of this doesn't get done until 1 week before budgetting tightens up tighter than a bullfrogs butt. You as the contractor have to finish out the new specs and get them to the proper authorities. (What do you mean Mr Toefinger is on vacation! He has to sign the paper work.... Fine can we fedHex it to him in Aruba?) He in turn will get the address wrong on the pre-addressed return envelope and in the end you will wind up getting your paperwork in to budgetting at 3:59 on the last day (one hour before closing)

    Will Sentinel fail, yes but it will faill less than it's predicessor, leaving someone to say.....

    It would have worked if we'd only had a couple of hundred million more.

    (and over in the corner will be a lone secretary, notebook and PDA in hand, who will have created with a spreadsheet and and addressbook a better replacement for sentinal than sentinal itself.)

  • They need this. (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Really, the cost for this isn't as much as you might think it is for the work involved (or compared to other government projects).

    I work for a police station and run people through FBI checks periodically. Don't get out your tin-foil hats though, most FBI checks are for employee background checks, criminal records needing to be checked directly through the FBI don't occur very frequently. But for you people out there who think what they have now is sufficient, you're wrong.

    Currently the only system in p
  • Maby we chose a bad name, but as security robots go it was wicked! :) The sentinel page was http://andre.bonin.ca/projects.html [bonin.ca] If anyone likes it, all members are looking for work in security right now :)
  • "FBI Director Robert Mueller told lawmakers he is unable yet to place a price tag on the Sentinel project."

    Well... the research allready cost more than a 100 million :-)

  • Granting that the federal government is good at screwing up large projects, the same is true of business, yet it seems to me that lots of businesses have set up comparable information systems. This is not an area in which I have any expertise, but to my perhaps naive eye, it seems like it ought to be possible to do it almost off-the-shelf. That is, the networking shouldn't be a big problem, and large database systems are of course widely deployed, so shouldn't setting up a system for the FBI be a matter of

  • $100 million... geez.

    Must be nice to work for an organization where your revenue is guaranteed by law.
  • For a moment, I thought they were talking about this kind of Sentinel... [marveldirectory.com]
  • First off, this was supposed to be a PILOT project. It was designed as such because there was a myriad of problems to be overcome. The largest one was undoubtedly document/case info handling. I could just imagine the nightmares of the folks that were trying to design this one. Some folks here thought this was a free for all and that google search would do the job, not so. There are two concepts at work here- clearance level and need to know. Both work quite well at a human level. But at a computer level, a

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