FBI technology shortcomings hamper sniper investigation

The FBI doesn't have the technological capacity to handle the crushing volume of leads that agents and police officers in Montgomery County, Md., have received in the investigation of the Washington-area sniper, according to law enforcement sources.

A team of agents has set up a system known as Rapid Start at the sniper investigation command center in Rockville, Md. The team was sent from the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., and established a telephone hotline for tips from the public and a clearinghouse for leads about the investigation, said Special Agent Chase Foster, a spokesman for the team. Agents are manually entering the leads into a database at the command center, which organizes the information and assigns investigators to follow up, Foster said.

But the Rapid Start system was never designed to handle large volumes of information, and is now being pushed to its limits as more than 67,000 calls from the public have poured in.

Rapid Start was created by a group of FBI agents as a way to avoid working with the FBI's Automated Case Support System, said Ronald Kessler, author of The Bureau, an expansive history of the FBI and its leaders. Agents have devised more than 40 such alternatives to the case system over the years, Kessler said.

Rapid Start is an outgrowth of years of neglect of the FBI's technology systems, and was designed to handle leads about single events such as kidnappings, not multiple shootings crossing several jurisdictions, Kessler said.

Since Oct. 2, the sniper has shot 13 people in Maryland, Washington and Virginia, killing 10.

FBI agents in New York City deployed Rapid Start after the Sept. 11 attacks. As reports and leads came into the command post there, "Rapid Start became so overloaded that documents could not be retrieved," Kessler wrote in his book. "This led to delays in pursuing information that required investigation."

Bob Dies, the FBI's former chief information officer, told Kessler that after the Sept. 11 attacks, multiple teams of agents were sent unnecessarily to follow up on the same leads. "We needed those extra agents to work other leads," Dies said .

According to media reports Wednesday, FBI and local police officials in the Washington area are copying down leads by hand and then sorting them into separate piles by county and city.

Foster said that ordinarily when the FBI deploys the Rapid Start team, local law enforcement officials receive training on how to use it. On several occasions, the FBI has left the system in place for local police to run. The bureau retrieves the computers and databases when the investigation is finished, Foster said.

A spokeswoman for the Montgomery County Department of Police said the FBI has not handed control of Rapid Start over to local authorities.

The FBI's antiquated technology systems don't allow agents to share information among field offices or search FBI databases for complete criminal records. There is also no central means to manage case files. The Automated Case Support System that Rapid Start was built to circumvent was blamed for the loss of more than 4,000 documents in the trial of Timothy McVeigh for blowing up the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

Only in recent months has the FBI begun to make a serious effort to update its computer systems in a three-phase project known as Trilogy. The project is designed to replace the obsolete desktop computers agents use with newer models and create a new network to share information and better manage case files.