Fergie's Tech Blog

Revolving Door at the U.S. Air Marshal Service

Rhonda Schwartz and Avni Patel report on ABC News' "The Blotter":

Federal air marshals tell ABCNews an expensive hand-held communication system has not lived up to its promise but that their former director has still benefited.

The system, part of a multi-million dollar contract with the Datamaxx company, was pushed for by the former director of the Federal Air Marshal Service, Thomas Quinn. He went to work as a paid consultant for the company weeks after he left the government earlier this year.

Under Quinn, the Federal Air Marshal Service paid Datamaxx more than $22 million for a system of personal digital assistants, or PDAs, that was supposed to allow air marshals to document suspicious behavior and communicate with the ground during emergency situations.

Air marshals say that what they got was little more than a paperweight. "They were represented as something that was going to help us identify terrorists, but there's just no way that it was going to work that way," said Don Strange, a former FAMS Special Agent-in-Charge in Atlanta.

posted by Fergie @ 6/20/2006 11:34:00 AM