FBI Spent Over $170M

This is total BS if you ask me!  Our tax money being wasted on a soon-to-fail software project that was implemented by friends of friends of retards (offshore outsourcing firm?). 

Lawmakers criticized FBI Director Robert Mueller on Thursday for continued problems with a costly computer project that was supposed to dramatically improve management of terrorism and other criminal cases.

Mueller acknowledged he does not yet know how much the FBI's Virtual Case File will cost beyond the $170 million already budgeted and largely spent, or when FBI agents and analysts will have it on their computers.

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Mueller made improvement of the agency's computer systems a priority. Members of Congress and the independent Sept. 11 commission said the overhaul was critical to enabling the FBI and intelligence agencies to "connect the dots" in preventing attacks.

But at a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing, Mueller acknowledged an agent with information to share still "faces a cumbersome, time-consuming process" to put it in an FBI database.

 

His remarks came the same day Justice Department inspector general Glenn Fine released a report that blamed planning failures and management weaknesses for many of the project's problems.

 

"Further, we are not confident that the FBI has a firm sense of how much longer and how much more it will cost to develop and deploy a usable system," Fine said in a statement to the committee.

 

Mueller said he would have a better idea about costs and a timetable in two months, after the FBI evaluates a test of a slimmed-down version of the Virtual Case File that is being run in the agency's New Orleans office. He said it is possible the entire system, designed by Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) of San Diego, is so inadequate and outdated that one will have to be built from scratch.

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I bet I can do a better job for a fraction of that!   $170 million down the drain...they probably did it all in Visual Basic...or even worse...ISAPI on IIS and Winbloze 95.  LOL!