The Government's Info Tech Crisis

from the going-to-get-worse dept

Yesterday I mentioned the problems the European Union is going to have trying to sift through even more data in their misguided attempt to spy on everyone in order to prevent terrorism. Today, we get an idea of just how silly ideas like this are. Business Week has an article looking at just how badly set up the federal government's information technology infrastructure is. The FBI stores all of its info in flat-file databases that are nearly impossible to search. So, why is it that they want to add even more useless data to this? That's still unclear. What they're going to end up doing is making it even more difficult to find the important data and doing a lot more harm than good.
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  • identicon
    William Snow, 11 Jun 2002 @ 11:42am

    Interesting problem, terrible article

    This article is phenomenally bad. The information
    is an incredible simplification of the technology
    involved, and is flat out wrong in many places.
    If I could figure out a way to comment to the
    BW editors on the article I would have done so.

    Describing tables in a database as "easily manipulated" is misleading at best.

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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