This is insane. The FBI’s computer and filing systems are literally thirty years old. Their computerized case management system is essentially useless, leaving FBI agents and employees to use paper documents and ancient filing cabinets to keep track of incredibly important investigations. They’ve spent $170 million over the last five years on a catastrophic upgrade plan that would be comical if it didn’t have a chilling impact on the efficiency and capability of the FBI to do its job. The result? An enormous and incredibly expensive bureau-wide system overhaul was implemented poorly based on a set of misguided assumptions, screwed up so badly by a contractor and the FBI itself that the whole kit AND kaboodle were totally scrapped. On the rare occasions that FBI employees aren’t simply doing their work on paper, they’re using command line interfaces via shared workstations that connect through a mainframe. It’s hard to even imagine this. It’s basically like NBC trying to compete with Survivor by airing repeats of Newhart. Except, you know, our national security is at stake and, oh yeah, this is actually happening.
I dunno, maybe this should be a higher priority than banning toothpaste on flights.
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