A Q&A with the FBI's data czar
A: Of the data transition. When you are transitioning the data from legacy system into the new relational databases, the security must match. If the security doesn't match, then you have all of the data sitting in a database that provides no security. So, all of the sudden 30,000 users have access to all of the data. That is not how ACS works. Everybody has his own credential. Everybody has his own purpose.
Q: The system that SAIC developed had none of that?
A: I don't know. The way they have delivered it right now, with the source code that I have, no. The source code that we've evaluated, no.
Q: Now, when was Congress first told that most likely this is going to fail?
A: We did one briefing I think in May [2004]. The director did a briefing in May that told them that we would deliver certain capabilities by December . . . and we did good on that one [the New Orleans pilot project]. And I think the next time we told them the VCF was not going to make it before the beginning of this year because by then I had the draft reports I was looking at.
Q: Should they have been told earlier?
A: Ah, no, because these are the things that you always want to have a final proof of . . . in your hand. You just can't go out there and accuse organizations that they couldn't deliver if you haven't done your homework. So, you want to be very careful. Because it almost sounds like FBI is accusing SAIC. And that was not the case. FBI was evaluating SAIC's software. And once we had the proof at hand, that's when we told the director and the director actually made courtesy calls.
Q: Now when was the SAIC contract given out?
A: The initial contract, I think, was in 2001.
Q: Shouldn't somebody have known earlier that it wasn't going to work?
A: I think most of the people should have known. And most of the people should have told him [Mueller]. I mean, SAIC should have known, our supporting contractors should have known, I mean . . . software just doesn't go bad overnight. . . . You have to, to keep in mind that when you look at a program of the complexity of VCF and you've seen the demos that it works, and you have spent all of this time on it, all of this money, and energy and it's very difficult to believe that after three years of software . . . and a company of SAIC's magnitude . . . So a company like this should be able to deliver. And without having that final document that says, okay, we looked at all of these things, we took every one of the sections of the source coding documentation, we mapped it against best practices, we mapped it against standards for software development and we found out that there's no assurance that the software's going to work.
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