Fergie's Tech Blog

Newsweek: How the FBI’s Technological Incompetence is Putting America at Risk

Jonathan Alter writes on Newsweek:

Everyone’s got an Exhibit A of the mind-bending, staggering and almost incomprehensible incompetence of the Bush Era. Iraq. Katrina. Medicare. But let’s add one more. Should, God forbid, we be hit again by terrorists, historians will point an unforgiving finger at the computers of the FBI.

As The Washington Post reported on August 18, five years after 9/11 the FBI’s computer system is still not fixed. How can this be? It’s an ugly story of poor management, contractor abuse and an agency that cannot electronically connect the dots—even though nearly everyone agreed in 2001 that developing that ability should be among the top priorities for the United States. It’s as if after Pearl Harbor President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered that ships and aircraft be built to fight the Japanese, only to discover that five years later the government had built none.

posted by Fergie @ 8/22/2006 11:18:00 AM