There is a “secure internal email system,” but otherwise about 75% of the 2,000 agents located in NYC have to use outside email accounts.
I don’t quite understand. If there’s an internal email system functioning, why is this separate from having .gov accounts for the agents? What is it that’s not affordable in this case? Is it the server capacity to handle the volume of .gov mail for all the agents? Tech people to maintain them? Why should agents even have to resort to outside email accounts in the first place?
Sounds like some info is missing from this article. Has anyone else heard more about the situation?
I thought the same thing at first but then I got to thinking. It does take time, money, and resources to maintain an email server, especially if you want it to be secure. In addition to the extra processing, storage capacity, and bandwith a server would need you also have to pay the techs and security people. You also have to upgrade your backup software/hardware to accomodate more users. So the short answer is that it really does cost lots of money to operate a secure email server for tons of people, maybe money they didn’t budget for.
I own my own domain name and it says I have “unlimited” e-mail accounts to go with it. It was pretty cheap too.
I guess I could just donate a whole bunch of them to the FBI to help them out. It would be cool to see them using like fuzzman@shagnasty.com [not my real domain name].
I’ll give them a call (I would e-mail them but oops).
Yes, buying servers costs money, as does buying gateways, firewalls and staff to keep it alive. Plus electricity, network bandwidth and space in the data center. The IDs themselves are free.
But… my company has somewhere around 150,000 end-users, and nearly all of them have an email address. Quite a while ago, it was decided that email was mission-critical, and appropriate physical, staff and financial resources were devoted to it. The basic email and messaging system is secure and we’ve got more users (over 10,000) than what the FBI’s dealing with on extra-secure systems that monitor and archive everything to permanent media for regulatory reasons (brokers and financial advisers, for example)
Apparently, the FBI decided proper email isn’t mission-critical. What can I say but “Oh well!”?
The ‘cost’ they are talking about may be more in the time it takes for FBI agents to deal with their email thatn the actual hardware costs of maintaining more accounts.
It can take a fair amount of time every day to go thru your email and throw out all the spam, jokes, forwarded charity appeals, help for dying kids, etc. Despite the best filters, quite a bit of this gets thru. If you set the filters too tight, good emails get trashed.
So several thousand FBI agents, spending even just 10 minutes each day processing their public emails – how much of your tax money would that take?
And then there would be the script kiddies – how many teenage hackers would think it real funny to spam-bomb jEdgar@fbi.gov? More effort needed to stop this, and possibly track down the originator.
Besides, is this mission-critical to an FBI agent? I’d think most of their communication would be with other agents via the internal system, or with state & local police. I don’t see the public internet used that much. And I’d wonder about the security of that, anyway.
I see your point, except that the article implies that many agents have to make use of personal email accounts to get business accomplished. Whether they’re clearing spam from their personal accounts or official accounts seems immaterial.
I get the impression that maybe the internal system only works inside the FBI offices, and a regular email address is needed to communicate with state & local police, etc. In that case, having to send an official email from “hottie4u@yahoo.com” wouldn’t be terribly professional, and I can understand the agents bitching about it.
I do understand that there are costs involved, but heck… I work at a government facility, and although I’m not a government employee I still have a *.gov email address that attracts very little spam and resides on a secure server behind a bitch of a firewall. My first thought when I read this article was that cost was a convenient excuse/cover for some other tech issue, but maybe it really is just all about the budget.
Cracking the FBI mail system could create conflicts and or jepoardize the integrity of any information regarding current ongoing cases. So the needed security and machines for 10,000 secure email accounts can get kinda ugly. I’m sure the fbi does plenty of manual auditing of the mail and dosent delete hardly anything for quite a while and may even back up just about every email ever sent for a few years just in case something comes back to haunt them. 100+mb per user to make sure sufficent space for photos and scanned docs can pile up for a few days is easily pushing terabyte level storage. Now where to store the backups…and the archives…
Just doing this for 20 end users can result in some hair pulling and hypertension.
This would be a boon for the FBI, not a bane. If these script kiddies weren’t attacking the FBI directly, they’d be attacking someone else, and it’s part of the FBI’s business in the first place to crack down on such folks. If the attacks are targetted directly at the FBI’s servers, that would likely give them more of the evidence they need to do so effectively.
There are a lot of great points mentioned already. In addition, from the end of the article, I got the impression that the issue wasn’t just email addresses, but also generic internet access. If you consider that an FBI office has a completly secure network, where every machine, application, and service has been locked down, then it could be quite expensive to allow generic email or internet access. The FBI office might have a security policy that “no computer on our secure network is allowed to also be on the internet”. Maybe it is even as strict as “no computer on our secure network is allowed to be in the same room as a computer on the internet.” You could see where these kinds of policies could really add up. It wouldn’t just be the cost of the email servers and staff, but possibly of extra hardware or real-estate.
I know of a financial company that has all of their computers locked down. You can’t use floppies, CD/DVD discs, USB devices, or even write to the hard-drive. It is not possible to download files from the internet. And all computers on the network are MAC locked, so when my buddy plugged his laptop into the network, two guys from the IT department showed up in the lab and asked him to unplug it. I would imagine the FBI policies would be similar or even more strict.
it must be budget time with the intelligence committees in congress.
Our local schools give out some propaganda similar to this every time they want to pass some bond issues. They give a press conference about how the schools are falling apart and have tv crews come in and see some wires/cables hanging down from the ceiling to the floor and tell how dangerous this is to children. (forget the teachers and other insignificant adults).
wouldn’t be terribly professional, and I can understand the agents bitching about it.