Anatomy of a fuckup.

And it all started with this cocksucker.

This is what happens when stupid people believe in magic (emphasis added).

The FBI computer upgrade that wasn’t
$170 million bought an unusable system
By Dan Eggen and Griff Witte
WASHINGTON - As far as Zalmai Azmi was concerned, the FBI's technological revolution was only weeks away.

It was late 2003, and a contractor, Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), had spent months writing 730,000 lines of computer code for the Virtual Case File (VCF), a networked system for tracking criminal cases that was designed to replace the bureau's antiquated paper files and, finally, shove J. Edgar Hoover's FBI into the 21st century.

It appeared to work beautifully. Until Azmi, now the FBI's technology chief, asked about the error rate.

Software problem reports, or SPRs, numbered in the hundreds, Azmi recalled in an interview. The problems were multiplying as engineers continued to run tests. Scores of basic functions had yet to be analyzed.

"A month before delivery, you don't have SPRs," Azmi said. "You're making things pretty. . . . You're changing colors."

Within a few days, Azmi said, he warned FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III that the $170 million system was in serious trouble. A year later, it was dead. The nation's premier law enforcement and counterterrorism agency, burdened with one of the government's most archaic computer systems, would have to start from scratch.

Failures of almost every kind

The collapse of the attempt to remake the FBI's filing system stemmed from failures of almost every kind, including poor conception and muddled execution of the steps needed to make the system work, according to outside reviews and interviews with people involved in the project.

But the problems were not the FBI's alone. Because of an open-ended contract with few safeguards, SAIC reaped more than $100 million as the project became bigger and more complicated, even though its software never worked properly. The company continued to meet the bureau's requests, accepting payments despite clear signs that the FBI's approach to the project was badly flawed, according to people who were involved in the project or later reviewed it for the government.
...

"SAIC was at fault because of the usual contractor reluctance to tell the customer, 'You're screwed up. You don't know what you're doing. This project is going to fail because you're not managing your side of the equation,' " said Kay, who later became the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq. "There was no one to tell the government that they were asking the impossible. And they weren't going to get the impossible."…

'Not on a path to success'

More than two years after Sept. 11, when a team of researchers from the National Research Council showed up to review the status of Trilogy, FBI officials assured them that the bureau had made great strides. That was true in part: By early 2004, two of the three main pillars of the program -- thousands of new PCs and an integrated hardware network -- were well on the way to being delivered and installed.
But, as the researchers soon learned, the heart of the makeover, VCF, remained badly off track. In its final report, in May 2004, the NRC team warned that the program was "currently not on a path to success."

The review team from the NRC, which is affiliated with the National Academy of Sciences, was made up of more than a dozen scientists and engineers from top universities and leading technology companies, all of them independent of the FBI and its contractors.

The report observed that the rollout of the new case-management software had been poorly planned nearly from the beginning. Months after the program was supposed to be complete, it remained riddled with shortcomings:

· Agents would not be able to take copies of their cases into the field for reference.
· The program lacked common features, such as bookmarking or histories, that would help agents navigate through millions of files.
· The system could not properly sort data.
· Most important, the FBI planned to launch the new software all at once, with minimal testing beforehand. Doing so, the NRC team concluded, could cause "mission-disruptive failures" if the software did not work, because the FBI had no backup plan.

"That was a little bit horrifying," said Matt Blaze, a professor of computer science at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the review team. "A bunch of us were planning on committing a crime spree the day they switched over. If the new system didn't work, it would have just put the FBI out of business."
...

Matthew Patton, a programmer who worked on the contract for SAIC, said the company seemed to make no attempts to control costs. It kept 200 programmers on staff doing "make work," he said, when a couple of dozen would have been enough. The company's attitude was that "it's other people's money, so they'll burn it every which way they want to," he said.

Patton, a specialist in IT security, became nervous at one point that the project did not have sufficient safeguards. But he said his bosses had little interest. "Would the product actually work? Would it help agents do their jobs? I don't think anyone on the SAIC side cared about that," said Patton, who was removed from the project after three months when he posted his concerns online.
...

One FBI manager estimated that the scope of the Trilogy project as a whole expanded by 80 percent since it began, according to a February 2005 report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine.

SAIC has consistently said that it was trying to meet the FBI's needs but that its efforts were undermined by the bureau's chronic indecision. Executive Vice President Arnold Punaro submitted testimony to Congress in February 2005 that cited 19 government personnel changes in three years that kept the program's direction in flux.
...

"We had information that could have stopped 9/11," said Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. "It was sitting there and was not acted upon. . . . I haven't seen them correct the problems. . . . We might be in the 22nd century before we get the 21st-century technology."

If you have ever toiled in the vineyards of IT for more than a minute, you have either worked on or been within the blast radius of a project like this.

Designed by committee, whose every whim and bowel-movement is praised as wise and sagacious beyond the consultant’s poor power to describe with mere words.

Absolutely yes, sirrah, using cutting-edge this and using new database theory that breaks the Normal Form barrier and cutting edge yadda yadds or our proprietary Natural Language interface using the latest in third fourth fifth sixth generation code we can and will build you the elusive Magic Box with the Easy Button on top.

The Super Ooper Duper Database that will bind up every wound and dry every tear.

The website that will make Almighty God Herself weep.

That’s when those of us who have been running in circles screaming that you are about to drive the division/company/country off a fucking cliff are told to STFU. To “get onboard or get out.”

Are called traitor as we desperately try to warn the decision makers that they are shoving a loaded gun in down the division’s/company’s/country’s throat and the consequences are going to be really, really bad.

“No, no, no,” we are told. “Everything is different now. The laws of cause and effect. Of human nature. Of history. Of thermodynamics. These have all been repealed by this New Majyk Doctrine! The New Majyk Paradigm! Now whatever we wish for…happens!

"It’s a miracle.

"It’s Amazing.

"It’s Fucking Wonkavision!!

“Don’t you see how new it is? NewNewNewNew, and sooo shiny!”

No, asshat, it’s not New. It’s Old. God Alone knows how old, but this scam of convincing idiots that doing something radically stupid is really, actually brilliant was old when Adam and Eve were playing “Snakes...In a Garden!”

And as to the moderns, technological gloss on this ancient con, I am only being semi-facetious when I say that it all began with that stupid, fucking IBM PC commercial. Where Charlie Chaplin toddles merrily around as tech and a few, slim, user-friendly manuals alight gently on his kitchen table.

He taps a few buttons and, Voila: Instant productivity.

Since that dark day, the treaders of the digital grapes have been fighting a rear-guard action against Stupid Bosses and Douchebag Consultants who insist that, with a little moxie and a little imagination -- and your name on this wildly open-ended contract -- all of the unicorns and Lucy Lius and 30% profit margins of your dreams will come positively rocketing out of the business end of the cornucopia we will build for you.

That’s when the money starts rolling in. Huge piles of it



delivered on palettes using C-5 Galaxies if necessary, and from that point on the death-spiral begins.

And to see this pattern in all of its perverse, pernicious, pervasiveness just substitute:

PNAC for SAIC.

The White House for the FBI.

The Iraqi Project for the Virtual Case File Project.

Because the Stupid Men at the top cannot admit failure and, oh, say, fire Don Fucking Rumsfeld without loss of face. They can take no corrective action because to do so they would have to confront the fact that everything their critics and opponents said was true, and everything their allies and friends have told them has been a lie.

And the dread of copping to that level of incompetence and cupidity -- of having to own up to being every inch the dribbling, inept idiot that the rest of the world outside his bubble already knows he is -- is a thing no Stupid Man with Power will ever, ever do.

They would rather die first. Or, more accurately, they would let the world die first.

So instead they redouble the bet, pour more money down the rat-hole, and fire the last, few, honest men within the organization who still dare to speak the truth and who still might be able to salvage the situation if given half a chance.

I have seen, up close, whole companies go under because of this scam. And, in the end, the parasites survive and scuttle on to leech the life out of yet another fat, dumb CEO and leave behind bankrupt pensions and ruined lives.

But of course, there is no bigger Hunny Pot than the United States Government, which is why the Bill Kristols of the world are calling for ever wilder, more insanely reckless action: They're going All In, because they know that after they're burned off of the flesh of this nation like the tics that they are, there is no place left for them to go.

For a long time there will be no more rich, bloated dimwits Preznits on which they can safely prey after the subpoenas start flying and George Bush and Neoconservativism vanish under weight of the blood-dimmed tide they created. Cast down, down, down into eternal infamy as the twin pillars of the worst Administration in American history.

This is the dawning realization that is scaring the fucktard rank-and-file of the GOP into ever more hysterical public behavior.

This is the sinking ship from which George Will and Tom Friedman are desperately trying to flee.

This is the existential kill-box of their own making that the Republican Party is now frantically trying to weasel out of, because of fucked projects and politics I know these six things to be true:

First, a fucked project at a bank for 100K, at the DMV for $5 million, at the FBI for $170 million, and in Iraq for $2 trillion are all depressingly similar in every characteristic except for order of magnitude of the costs and the scale of the consequences of failure.

Second, the oiliest “process reengineering consultant” or “visioneer” is no different from Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh, because there will always be Big Cake to be made pouring comforting lies into the ears of stupid, hateful people.

Third, these disasters take wing because Stupid Men with Power will always listen to flatterers and liars who tell them what they wish were true, and will always scream “Traitor!” at those who try to tell then what is actually true and stop the division/company/country from being stampeded into the abyss.

Fourth, as the project collapses, the criminals who created it will strive mightily to blame their failure on those who tried to warn them that this was a bad idea from the start. On badthinkfulness and a lack of sufficient corporate piety and prayer. God knows if they’re actually stupid enough to believe that a deficit of Tinkerbell Clapping is what’s driving their organization into the grave, but other than immediately admitting their error and atoning, this is the only card they have left to play.

Fifth, eventually they fall. They always fall, and they take lives and treasure down with them in an arc that was as predictable as the sunrise from the first moment they decided they could bribe Reality into changing the rules just for them.

Sixth, the funding that will be available to clean up the GOPs rubble and ruin will be vastly less than the cost of the original misadventure.

And the same people who broke the bank and spared no expense on hooch and hookers for the Big Iraqi Cakewalk Party, will be the first to bitch and whine over pennies and taxes when it comes to cleaning up the ocean of blood and vomit, debt and tragedy their short and despicable reign will leave behind.