Terror Threat System Crippled by Technical Flaws, Says Congress Computerworld (08/27/08) Thibodeau, Patrick
as it appeared in the September 3, 2008 edition of ACM TechNews.
A U.S. House subcommittee claims that a $500 million IT project intended to find connections between terrorist suspects and prevent future terrorist attacks is a failure, and is unable to handle even basic Boolean search terms such as "and," "or," and "not." Most of the subcommittee's charges come from a memo prepared by subcommittee staff about a data integration project called Railhead, which is intended to help intelligence and law enforcement agencies discover terrorist plots. Railhead, scheduled to be ready by the end of the year, is supposed to combine and upgrade existing databases, called the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, and strengthen terrorism-fighting capabilities. However, the project has suffered from delays and excessive costs, and may be shut down, says subcommittee chairman Brad Miller (D-N.C.). "The end result is a current system used to identify terrorist threats that has been crippled by technical flaws and a new system that, if actually deployed, will leave our country more vulnerable than the existing yet flawed system in operation today," Miller writes in a letter to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Railhead uses XML to integrate data from dozens of data sources and a variety of agencies, but the design team behind the project says XML may not be viable. In testing by the Hewlett-Packard Quality Center, Railhead software was able to pass 148 tasks, failed to complete 26 others, and failed 42. Specific problems included a failure to create reports and failing to find non-exact matches for key entries, such as a suspected terrorist's name. Click Here to View Full Article
