After counterterrorism became a top priority, the US government has excelled at funding painfully dumb IT projects that are supposed to help defeat Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and anyone else who looks at us cross-eyed. The mistakes are all too familiar:
- The Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB) became an enormous (and therefore useless) data dump. Exploding past the 1 million record mark, the watchlist is the natural result of putting no thought into the quality of data entered. (In 2001, according to Marc Sageman, Al Qaeda had only 200 members.)
- The Total Information Awareness (TIA) system attempted to be an even more ambitious, and therefore silly, über-repository of information.
- The FBI's long, expensive attempt to replace an antiquated case management system failed in 2006 because of "poor conception and muddled execution." (In other words, poor requirements, poor design, poor quality assurance--you name a part of the SDLC, they fumbled it.)
And the goofy projects just keep coming. The latest is a kind of "Sim-Afghanistan," an electronic model of a country under attack from guerrillas. The problem? None of the assumptions behind this model came from the military and civilian experts in counterinsurency. And even the experts have a hard time believing that such a model, dependent on a level of social scientific exactitude that no one really has, is even possible:
This kind of modeling has drawn from the counterinsurgent community... well, skepticism doesn't even begin to describe it. "Wait a minute, you can’t tell me who’s going to a win a football game. And now you’re going to replicate free will?" retired Lt. Col. John Nagl, who helped write the Army's manual on defusing insurgencies, told Danger Room in 2007. "They are smoking something they shouldn't be," retired Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper quipped to Science magazine. "Only those who don’t know how the real world works will be suckers for this stuff."
While the new President and Congress are looking at ways to reduce waste in the US government, they might consider hiring a team of experienced IT pros, who can sniff out and veto projects that violate the most basic best practices of the computer world.