No Email, But At Least The FBI Has Really Sweet Pens To Write Letters
from the take-a-memo dept
Okay, so we already noted that the FBI is having problems giving all of its agents email accounts, saying that it's just too expensive. However, it appears that they have no problem at all spending $50,000 on "custom-made highlighters and pens," which we hope their agents are using wisely in place of those email accounts. This was among the $10 million in "questionable contractor costs" that a new audit has discovered, not to mention the hundreds of millions of dollars wasted on the useless computer system they had to throw out. Hope those FBI agents have good penmanship.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Should the FBI communicate by internet?
It could be that the FBI does use such proprietary technologies, and they are allowing the media to make them look bad, so their enemies underestimate them.
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Re: Should the FBI communicate by internet?
They do have an internal email system that they use already. This is for contact with people outside the FBI.
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Re: Should the FBI communicate by internet?
What??? A government agency do something intelligent???? You give them TOO much credit
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Leave it to the government to mess up
The time came when it was decided to move to a graphic geographica information system (called the EIS). You could bring up an air photo of the city and display various layers. All the layers were geocoded. From a visual point-of-view, it was a great system. From an information pov it was a piece of crap. Not all the information from the old database was transferred over. The solution was to introduce a new system (called AMANDA) for tracking permits, development applications, etc.
Unfortunately, the two systems are incompatible with each other. Despite the fact that zoning and planning districts are geocoded in the EIS, the AMANDA system is unable to pull this information - the data has to be entered in manually. I waste time on a function that should be automated. Further complication things, whenever a new module is added to the AMANDA system we experience problems with the data.
Why did this happen? Because the politicians, despite promising better customer service, cheap out on the projects and because no overall information needs study was done. Instead of improving productivity, we reduce it. So much for saving money and improving customer service.
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Re: Leave it to the government to mess up
Unfortunately, this happens in a corporate environment as well. The company I work for spent tens of thousands of dollars on a software solution, that when released did not perform half of the functions it needed to. But most importantly it slowed down the users versus the old system. They claimed to have gotten input from end users before starting development. But it was obvious they either ignored it, or asked the WRONG people.
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hey now, the FBI has to get their black highlighters somewhere
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haha
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Are they special pens?
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Goverments annoy me.
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Goverments annoy me.
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Silly you.
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Re:
Then Zeroth appeared...reminding everyone that, no, not everyone is that intelligent.
We would hope at least part of the FBI and government in general could be more logical than "society as a whole"
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I think that that is the point
But true, any government organization or department will have tons of questionable wastes of money, and fancy pens and highlighters rank right up their of the kind of excess the government is used to.
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FBI can't afford email?
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Government still exists
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Dumpster diving, anyone?
Anyone know where their dumpsters are? I could have some fun with that...
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government dumbness
How much dumber can dumb get.
Their 'mistakes' are so stupid, that there's got to be a good joke or 3 in there, somewhere.
It's like watching a bad reality TV show, that's just not entertaining.
Their stupid blunders are just pulling their popularity ratings further down.
I just hope that the highlighters were 2-sided with different colors...black and black, since they don't seem to know which end is up!
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