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Terror watchlist “upgrade” is “imploding,” legislator says
In a letter to the inspector general at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence last week, Rep. Brad Miller (D-NC) complained that the National Counterterrorism Center‘s “Railhead” initiative, designed to upgrade the government’s master database of suspected terrorists, “if actually deployed will leave our country more vulnerable than the existing yet flawed system in operation today.”
Miller, who chairs the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee, cited “severe technical troubles, poor contractor management, and weak government oversight,” which he said had brought the Railhead program to the “verge of collapse.”
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The current TIDE system has its own set of “serious, long-standing technical problems.” It requires users to perform “cumbersome and complex” SQL searches rather than delivering straightforward text matches. And its data is scattered across 463 different, poorly-indexed tables.But the Railhead “upgrade,” Miller’s letter charges, only compounds the problems. According to his subcommittee’s analysis, the new-and-improved system boasts fewer features, hobbles information sharing between agencies, fails to match slight variations in aliases contained on the watchlist, and is stymied by basic Boolean search operators. Miller also alleged that some of the $500 million spent on Railhead already had been improperly used to renovate a facility owned by contractor Boeing.
WTF? 463 tables? Was this written by Microsoft? Why doesn’t the government just hire a Google reject? He could probably kludge up something better over a weekend with a Friday night drinking binge hangover than this.
[Duplicate comment deleted. – ed.]
It’s when you find out about the ineptitude of government it makes ‘We Have Met The Enemy and He Is Us’ a little more poignant.
463 tables = The database designer was a government employee.
Brilliant find, Uncle Dave. Worth passing along.
I’ve seen worse than this. It’s the typical problem of a database focused person designing a system without a thought to usage and load.
This often happens when somebody writes a small system to do a limited amount of functionality and is told “upgrade it” for a big system. Or it could just be a case of dba’s gone wild.
Either way delete *.* is the only way to go.
It just slays me the way conservatives have gone from being knee-jerk, anti-government militia activists (under Clinton) to having blind faith in a totalitarian security apparatus (under Bush and McCain).
“Why doesn’t the government just hire a Google reject?”
Because for things like these ALL goverments work on the “The best you can afford with the least amount of money” policy.
463 tables = very enterprisey!!
What a relief! Judging by the comments, there’s others who don’t leave their database in first normal form.
#2 – Do not put the blame solely on the shoulder of our Government. The blame must go to the private contractors that are actually doing the work.
The US Government should have oversight and those in charge should be blamed.
The google reject would never make it thru the government vetting process for a security clearance. The few tokes of marijuana in college would disqualify him from getting the job.
#6 It amuses me that for the last 8 years McCain has been viewed as a thorn in the side of the Bush administration, but now the Democrats would have me believe McCain has really been sitting beside Bush as his most trusted advisor and confidant.
This was more like 464 departments all wanting and writing their own DataBase. No compatibility, no sharing, no outside access, no nuttin to do with other departments, even if they are in the same building. When initial permission was made for dbs, compatability and access with other dbs were not contemplated.
If you remember back in the 1980s when so many of these programs were initially written, the mainframes were often custom made and the program language differed according to what the vendor gave you. PCs were just too underpowered to use for large dbs. Those custom installations and programs are not upgradeable or even readable by more modern equipment. We saw this earlier this week when the FAA computers ran into difficulties for all the same reasons. More than one police department bought “crime bustin” programs that are obsolete but can’t be upgraded.
The best solution would be to scrap any planned upgrade and start from scratch. Existing dbs will have to be transfered manually. In the end, that would be less expensive and quicker than the mess we currently have. The type of platform this db sits on it less important than the access to the db in the first place.
Instead of a former Google employee, how about some of the brains behind Linux and / or Mozilla? These guys wrote all these programs that “just work” with little outside help or money. Most of these guys are loyal Americans that understand how minimum is better than multitudes of lines of code. So what if they smoked a little weed when younger or were detained during the 2004 Republican Convention.