[Sigia-l] FBI

[Listera]

I keep coming back to this, sorry, I can't help it.

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal had a long article on the first page: "How
FBI's Antiquated Filing System Hinders Fight on Terrorism." For those of us
for whom security has ceased to be an academic issue after 9/11, it's a
depressing reading. Talk about lack of faceted classification :-)

The last graf is an interesting tidbit I wasn't aware of:

"The bureau's case-numbering system, for example, dates back to the days of
J. Edgar Hoover, who worked at the Library of Congress before joining the
FBI in 1921 and imposed a kind of Dewey Decimal System on the bureau for
classifying criminal acts. The system, which is issued to each FBI agent in
a little blue or yellow booklet, still includes offenses related to
Prohibition, white slavery and sedition."

I'm hoping for someone to come up say that this is all disinformation, that
the FBI is just trying to get money from the Congress, that this is
pre-emptive blame deflection, that it just isn't that bad, etc. It forces
one to think of joining the ranks and adding an @fbi.gov to one's email
address. Does anyone really know from experience if the security agencies'
filing and retrieval capabilities are this antiquated?

Best,

Ziya