Working with the FBI folks at the TSC (Terrorist Screening Center), being dumb and incompetent doesn't even begin to describe what I saw. The FBI is the most b

Working with the FBI folks at the TSC (Terrorist Screening Center), being dumb and incompetent doesn't even begin to describe what I saw. The FBI is the most backwards agency technologically -- the leadership is mostly composed of people who actively oppose innovation. At any other government agency, you can host user created applications that consolidate workflows and make peoples' lives much easier. Some even have teams that are dedicated to creating these one-off solutions that don't fit into a general commercial/OSS workflow program. The FBI, however, doesn't allow programming of any sort outside of the scope of their contracts, which mean that a regular analyst is storing data in an excel spreadsheet and trying to pass it around as a database. I say actively oppose innovation, because I've seen people told to get in line and shut up when speaking out about how to make processes better. This attitude mostly comes from a culture of "special agents" who are their own cool kid club. Imagine a bunch of movie-stereotypical dumb jocks. Now imagine them in front of a computer. FBI. The most egregious of technological sins I witnessed was when we told the FBI that if they appended a row id to the scattered data they were sending us, that it would literally save on the order of 10 million dollars a year in people not having to manually input things, but being able to parse the data out. Their engineers came back and told us that it was not technologically possible. I said that not knowing their systems, what languages they were using to program the database, or even the database structure itself, give me one hour in the code and I will make it happen. Let's just say that didn't go over well.