http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/26/us/fbi-sees-delay-in-new-network-to-oversee-cases.html

June 26, 2004

F.B.I. Sees Delay in New Network to Oversee Cases

By JOHN SCHWARTZ and LOWELL BERGMAN

F.B.I. officials said yesterday that they would not be able to fully deploy a long-awaited computer system to manage the bureau's case files before the end of the year as promised, and that they could not predict when the entire system would be in place.

As a result, an important technological component of the administration's domestic security effort remains in limbo.

The Virtual Case File system, which would allow agents to share information easily -- a critical shortcoming of the present system -- is already two years behind schedule and one bureau official who spoke on condition of anonymity went so far as to suggest that the program might ultimately have to be abandoned.

Other F.B.I. officials denied that the situation was that dire, but they acknowledged that the program development was far slower than the bureau had initially expected. In a statement released Friday in response to inquiries from The New York Times, the bureau stated that it "continues testing" the system to "work through some remaining issues."

Officials said that instead of setting up a fully functional system by the end of the year, they would begin with a version of Virtual Case File that will have a small set of its planned functions in a small number of sites, probably including F.B.I. headquarters.

"The program is too large and too complex and too huge to say, 'On Monday, you'll come in and you're going to have V.C.F. on your desktop,' " said Zalmai Azmi, the chief information officer for the F.B.I. "You can't do that with 28,000 users."

Only after the initial functions have been  used reliably will its capabilities and network be expanded, Mr. Azmi said. But he insisted that the program was on track.

Mr. Azmi said that he did not have enough information to predict when the deployment might be completed, and that it would depend on how smoothly each stage went. The postponement represents a setback in replacing an antiquated system with shortcomings that were highlighted during investigations of the F.B.I.'s failure to detect  the Sept. 11 plot.

In the aftermath of the hijackings, Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, told a Senate panel that the bureau's computer system was so limited that it could not search its files for combinations of terms like "flight" and "schools," precisely the kind of combination that might have helped to discern the patterns of activity leading up to the attacks. Instead, Mr. Mueller said, the system could search for words like "flight" and "school" only one at a time.

As late as May 20, Mr. Mueller told the Senate Judiciary Committee that it was "my hope and expectation" that the new system would "be completed by the end of this year."

But in an interview this week, a senior agency official questioned why F.B.I. employees were now being trained in how to use the system if no one knew when it would become operational. The official, who declined to be identified because he was not authorized to comment publicly, said he thought that the continued delays might lead the bureau to re-evaluate the project.

Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, has been critical of the F.B.I.'s progress in developing new technologies and said yesterday in an interview, "The fact that now the virtual file is not going to be ready by December is a real disappointment."

"The virtual file is one of the best tools the F.B.I. would have in fighting terrorism," Mr. Schumer said. "It's taking too long, they've made many missteps in the past. They're beginning to recover, but this is an example of how far they have to go."

According to a staff report from the bipartisan commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, the F.B.I.'s primary information system, which was designed using 1980's technology, was "already obsolete when installed in 1995." The commission report said that "field agents usually did not know what investigations agents in their own office, let alone in other field offices, were working on."

In 2000 Congress approved the Trilogy project, of which Virtual Case File is a part. Trilogy was conceived as a 36-month plan to improve the bureau's computer networks, systems and software. The Sept. 11 commission staff reported that the technology consultant who was brought in on the project by Louis J. Freeh, who was then the F.B.I. director, had told them that "given the enormity of the task at hand, his goal was merely to 'get the car out of the ditch.' "

Now, more than $500 million into the four-year-old project, the F.B.I. has received new computers and access to e-mail and the Internet for agents. Last month in Senate hearings, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, held up that example of progress for ridicule.  "I've got a 6-year-old grandson who sends me e-mails," Mr. Leahy said. "This is not something that we should really say is a great accomplishment."

A National Research Council report released in May said that the F.B.I. was "not on a path to success" with the program, though a follow-up report released earlier this month said that the bureau had taken important steps to fix the problems and had made progress, but that "many important challenges remain."

Herbert S. Lin, an author of that report, said yesterday that the F.B.I.'s more gradual approach to introducing the Virtual Case File system was one of the most important recommendations of the report, and that it is, ultimately, "unquestionably good news," since "we never thought that this big-bang approach is the right way to do it."

Attorney General John Ashcroft argued before the Sept. 11 commission that the previous administration was to blame for the technology failings. "The F.B.I.'s information infrastructure had been starved," he said, "And by Sept. 11, it was collapsing from budgetary neglect."

But officials in government at the time speak of a technophobic bureau that neglected its computer systems. Bruce McConnell, an  information technology official in the Office of Management and Budget during the Clinton administration, said the problem had more to do with the culture and expertise of the F.B.I. than with money. He said in an interview yesterday that many F.B.I. agents, like other law enforcement officers, "are by nature conservative, and are not often the early adopters of new ways of doing things."

When agents rise through the bureau and become officials, Mr. McConnell said, their mindset does not change. "We gave them what we believed that they could spend wisely," he said, and also noted that Congress could have appropriated more money if it had seen fit.

Mr. McConnell had praise, however, for Mr. Mueller, who, he said, "to his credit, is spending a lot of time trying to figure out, 'how do I get my hands around this problem?' " Technology conversions cause headaches for the private and public sectors alike, he said.

The continued delays are nonetheless an embarrassment for Mr. Mueller, who has made the technology upgrade a centerpiece of his efforts to transform the F.B.I. into an organization that can fight modern terrorists as well as it solves crimes. Even privacy advocates who criticize the government for its efforts to cast a larger net for personal data say the F.B.I. needs to upgrade its internal network so it can make the best use of its own data.

"The F.B.I. needs systems like Trilogy in order to connect the dots," said Alan Davidson, associate director of the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington. "Why is Congress considering even greater expansions in data collection, raising real privacy concerns, when the F.B.I. is struggling to manage the data it lawfully collects today?"