Government Computer News
Bell tolls for the FBI’s aged case file system
Sentinel’s initial rollout signals taps for green screens
Some computer systems leave behind a puff of software vapor when they retire, and many exit along with a dumpster of broken plastic and metal. But few systems can be tagged with partial responsibility for enabling deadly espionage incidents. The FBI’s Automated Case Support system, formerly known as the Automated Case File System under the same acronym (ACS), is one such system.
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The rollout earlier this month of the first phase of the bureau’s new Sentinel investigative case management system cues the recessional for the obsolete and unlamented ACS.
FBI chief information officer Zal Azmi said in a recent telephone interview that the bureau plans to phase out the ACS system around 2009, as Sentinel progresses through its second, third and fourth development phases.
Sentinel’s initial phase, which the bureau deployed to some 30,000 users last month, provided a user-friendly online interface to data that still resides in ACS. The extreme difficulty of using ACS to enter or search for data deterred most FBI special agents from taking the time to learn its very slow and arcane functions.
ACS relied on mainframe hardware and presented its users with a green-screen environment. Many FBI agents delegated the drudgery of using ACS to clerical employees, while glacial paper information transfer methods remained central to the agency’s information flows.
System misuse
But notorious spy Robert Hanssen became an ACS virtuoso and exploited the system’s extensive flaws to protect and extend his career as a double agent for the Soviets and later the Russians while working for the FBI.
Hanssen was able to use ACS to keep tabs on counterintelligence agents who sought to expose him, without their knowledge.
Sentinel, by contrast, features multiple security improvements, including the ability to track the activity of any user and ensure that any changes or even inspections of data can be traced back to the people who carried them out.
Azmi described how part of the process of mustering out ACS will be extracting and scrubbing the data it holds. The bureau’s vendors will use a data-cleansing process when extracting the ACS information, Azmi said. “Whatever data sets [are taken from ACS] will be quarantined. We will cleanse the data. We will get only one shot at this, and we don’t want to go wrong.”
Azmi said bureau officials were pleased with the investigative case management system’s operational features. The first phase of the project cost the FBI about $59 million, which approximated its cost target, he added.
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