More fun with government I.T.
Talk about the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. This is so laughably inept, you’d almost think they f’d up on purpose…
A half-billion-dollar emergency program to repair the nation’s main and deeply flawed terrorist watch list is “on the brink of collapse,” according to a Congressional investigation. That means that warning signs of a terrorist attack could again be lost in the chaos.
The new program, known as Railhead, is intended to fix the problems with the current outmoded program. That database – begun as an urgent priority after the Sept. 11 attacks – has been bedeviled by an array of problems, including the inability to do basic searches to find suspects’ names.
Bush administration officials have been pronouncing Railhead a success. But the investigation by a House Science and Technology subcommittee found it crippled by serious design flaws, management blunders and runaway contractors. Hundreds of private contractors from dozens of companies involved were recently laid off as government managers finally ordered a fresh overhaul in the face of “insurmountable” problems.
Some of the flaws discovered are mind-bogglingly basic. The Railhead database, it seems, also has fundamental problems with its search function. It failed, for example, to handle multiple word searches connected by “and” and “or,” and it could not offer matches for slight misspellings of suspects’ names. </em>
A half billion dollars and they can’t do a Boolean search? My damn cell phone can do a Boolean search!
Sleep tight America, have no fears. Your imperial federal government is rushing to protect you, using 1983 database tools and the management skills of five toddlers on a Slip N’ Slide.
