NSA's Expensive Computer Systems Fail, So They Go Shopping In Silicon Valley

Computers

from the shop-away dept

Remember all the stories about how screwed up the FBI’s hyped up new computer system was? The one that went way over budget and was eventually scrapped because it wasn’t actually useful for fighting terrorism? Yeah, well, it turns out they weren’t the only government agency to spend millions of dollars on a crappy, useless computer system. You can add the NSA to the list, as the Baltimore Sun is reporting that the secretive agency has two massive computer projects that have been nothing but trouble, holding back the agency’s efforts to fight terrorism (where have we heard this before…?). From the report, it seems to suggest that billions of dollars have been wasted on the combined systems and the end results are: “agency computers have trouble talking to each other and frequently crash, key bits of data are sometimes lost, and vital intelligence can be overlooked.” Meanwhile, rather than focusing on fixing it, the article suggests that people in the NSA are working hard to… make sure this info doesn’t get out to the press (too late for that, apparently). Perhaps all that explains why a group of folks from the NSA came out to Silicon Valley earlier this month to ask VCs to find them companies that make technology that actually works for all of their data mining efforts.