skippy the bush kangaroo

Monday, January 30, 2006

scientific applications who?

charles roten at just a bump in the beltway points us to the baltimore sun article about scientific applications international corporation's 1.2 billion dollar boondoggle - they made a lot of money not making data mining software for nsa. here's your daily dose of zen, they called this program, which seems to have made nsa less effective, "trailblazer."

system error - the nsa has spent six years and hundreds of millions of dollars trying to kick-start a program, intended to help protect the united states against terrorism, that many experts say was doomed from the start. - a program that was supposed to help the national security agency pluck out electronic data crucial to the nation's safety is not up and running more than six years and $1.2 billion after it was launched, according to current and former government officials.

the classified project, code-named trailblazer, was promoted as the nsa's state-of-the-art tool for sifting through an ocean of modern-day digital communications and uncovering key nuggets to protect the nation against an ever-changing collection of enemies. [--snip--]

meanwhile, science applications international corp. (saic), the lead contractor on the project, did not provide enough people with the technical or management skills to produce such a sophisticated system, according to industry and nsa experts familiar with trailblazer. and, they said, the company did not say no when the nsa made unrealistic demands.

the company was initially awarded $280 million in 2002 to begin construction. [--snip--]

although the bush administration spent much of the past week defending the nsa's eavesdropping work as vital to keeping americans safe from terrorism, virtually no attention has been paid to the agency's failure to deliver the system the nsa said was key to fulfilling that mission.

that means the government has been standing by while the agency has been gradually "going deaf" as unimportant communications drown out key pieces of information, a government official with extensive knowledge of trailblazer told the sun.

oh that scientific applications

posted by Pudentilla at 5:27 PM |