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by Furcifer 01/09/2020, 1:06pm PST |
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blackwater wrote:
A nerd gives his opinion of the new cloud era in USGov.
Multiply SENTINEL out a few hundred thousand-fold and you’ve got the future of federal IT. It’s going to be frightful, insecure, unreliable, and developed by the lowest bidder for managers whose idea of designing a complex system is reading a Powerpoint deck and saying “that sounds good.”
This why, to a degree, I am not super-scared of some of the scenarios we hear about, where the FBI is building a gigantic unregulated database of faces for facial recognition. My immediate reaction is “so what?” It won’t work in realtime, or even quasi-realtime, it will produce jillions of false positives, and it will be canceled at massive cost in 10 years. Of course the data will still be sitting on some AWS or Azure data-bucket (probably world-readable) but – again – who cares? The data will be worth about as much as if you took every .JPEG off of facebook and stuck it in a database, which is basically, what the FBI did (except they added drivers’ license pictures and arrest photos, too) it’s unregulated by anything but computing’s laws of nature: who cares if it’s unregulated if it doesn’t work?
I remember many years ago (pre-9/11, I think) some journalist pointed out that the FBI's propensity for keeping absurdly detailed files on so many tangential subjects probably did their agency more harm than good, in that they had so buried themselves in irrelevant minutia that they had trouble keeping track of legitimate threats right under their noses. This latest boondoggle sounds like just more of the same old self-defeating nonsense we've come to expect from them. |
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