Will the Real U.S. Government Please Stand Up?

I've never doubted for a second that the government would spy on its own citizens -- any government -- not just ours. Information is, as the saying goes, power -- always has been, always will be. So, as much as my civil libertarian side hates it, the realist in me shrugs each time a new piece of evidence surfaces that they are up to doing just that.

Or more precisely trying to do just that.

As I downed the final dregs of a cold Corona the other day, I recalled all the stories I had written over the years about monumentally expensive failed government computer system upgrades. In fact, hard as I thought, I couldn't recall a single story lauding a government agency for a successful computer project. Not one. Ever.

Just last year we learned that the FBI had wasted $700 million trying to develop a modern networked computer system able to track criminals and terrorists, and allow its offices around the nation to talk to one another -- for the first time.

That one didn't work either. Still doesn't. In fact the FBI is now busy chucking that system and starting over.

That story produced a shrug from me, too. I recalled a 1994 meeting I had with an FBI agent just appointed to head the FBI's San Francisco office's new computer crimes division. I was working for a nascent internet company at the time, and he asked if he could drop by and check out this new thing called the internet. He explained that, though the FBI did have a computer crimes division, none of the FBI's computers were online. "Yeah," he said. "They don't allow it. It's a security issue."

Remember … this was in San Francisco … the hottest hot bed of internet R&D at the time.

Last week everyone was atwitter over news that the NSA has been scooping up all our phone records. Some say that since 9/11 they have squirreled away as many as one trillion phone transactions. Again, I shrugged.

Which brings me to the theme of this rant.

Will the real U.S. government please stand up?

• Are you the black-helicopter flying, eyes in the sky, ears to the ground, all-knowing Big Brother government?
• Or are you really the Maxwell Smart, bumbling, money-wasting, last-to-know-anything government?

Help me out here.

For starters, I find it difficult to imagine that it can be both at once. Are we to believe that within the same government whose top national police agency, the FBI, can't install a computer system that works, another agency, the NSA, can? It's possible, but nothing in my direct experience with government agencies would cause me to believe it.

And sure enough, it's not so. There is plenty of evidence that the NSA's computer systems are just as big a mess as the FBI's -- certainly a more expensive mess and likely an even bigger one.

Recently, reporters for the Baltimore Sun got a peek under the NSA's Cone of Silence. They reported that the man now up for the top CIA post, former NSA head, Gen. Michael Hayden, managed to blow $2 billion during his tenure at the NSA on a failed agencywide computer upgrade:

Two technology programs at the heart of the National Security Agency's drive to combat 21st-century threats are stumbling badly, hampering the agency's ability to fight terrorism and other emerging threats, current and former government officials say … One is Cryptologic Mission Management, a computer software program with an estimated cost of $300 million that was designed to help the NSA track the implementation of new projects but is so flawed that the agency is trying to pull the plug. The other, code-named Groundbreaker, is a multibillion-dollar computer systems upgrade that frequently gets its wires crossed.

Is it just me, or doesn't the NSA phone spying story collide a wall of contradictions? I mean collecting a trillion pieces of data is the easy part. (Because the NSA didn't collect them in the first place. The phone companies did. They could because, unlike the NSA and FBI, they have computer systems that work.) But once in possession of such a huge and ever-growing mountain of data, then what? You need to slice it, dice it, find matches, produce tracking reports, integrate data into spreadsheets … and so on. And you need computers and software that works for any and all that.