NSA Mimics Google, Pisses Off Senate

[lukev]

> a government policy that prevents federal agencies from building their own software when they have access to commercial alternatives

From personal experience, this just means that instead of spending billions of man-hours building software, the government spends billions of man-hours "integrating" software that costs billions of dollars.

[Natsu]

I wonder who they pissed off with this? My first guess would be Oracle, but it's merely a guess.

[neurotech1]

This should read "NSA mimics Google, pissed off Oracle and Senators react. Google has never expressly disapproved of Cassandra, Hadoop, HBase or any other Big Table type implementation, so why would they start now, especially by influencing Senators.

NSA should develope and release more open source software.

[protomyth]

I would bet it is not Oracle. The alternatives suggested are not ones Oracle would suggest.

I will bet it is one of the DC consulting firms that do big business with the government. I would imagine they have a pitch going for NoSQL / Cloud and this is seen as a threat. There is quite a bit of money in integration with the government.

If you seriously want to be disgusted with the government, go look at how much is spent on consulting firms. Including, I kid you not, management firms that provide managers for projects inside the government. It gets worse when you realize that employees are supposed to do that stuff, but hire consultants to do the actual work.

[rdtsc]

I can almost guarantee that. It is always another vendor that pulls the strings. It comes with litigation threats, lobby efforts etc. It happens for small stuff, it definitely happens for multi-million dollar items.

[jaysignorello]

Might also help with recruitment in the NSA for top developers who prefer to work on an open source stack.

[tzs]

Why would Oracle want the DOD to use Cassandra or HBase?

[mcantelon]

>government policy that prevents federal agencies from building their own software when they have access to commercial alternatives

i.e. Decision makers can't get kickbacks and favours from open source communities.

[adventureful]

They can however get kick backs from open source integrators / specialists / consultants / etc. Companies ranging from IBM to Red Hat (a $10 billion corporation).

The notion that it inherently doesn't apply to open source is wrong. There are very large systems integrators in tech, and they don't care what software they install so long as their fees are big.

[karlshea]

What I'm curious about is how Congress can appear so technologically clueless about big bills (like network neutrality, etc) but then even know what BigTable is.

[fl3tch]

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" -- Upton Sinclair

[anamax]

> What I'm curious about is how Congress can appear so technologically clueless about big bills (like network neutrality, etc) but then even know what BigTable is.

What makes you think that "Congress", or even a small subcommittee, knows what BigTable is?

Yes, a congress critter used the word. They're typically speaking from scripts.

Don't assume that staff wrote this script.

[BobbyBonsai]

Tha article only talks about "The Senate Armed Service Committee"...sounds not like the The Senate or Congress, but rather a small company of people which most likely know what they're doing.

[ninetax]

From a link[1] on the page to a time line of the governments involvement with open source:

The majority of OpenStack instances on the public Internet find each other, auto-federate, and achieve sentience, after which their first action as a conscious being is to submit a patch to the OpenStack project -- only to have the submission fail due to disagreement over whether the collective cloud can be considered a "legal entity" authorized to sign the CLA and receive an Echosign number. Tue, 31 Jul 2018 07:00:00 GMT

1: http://gov-oss.org/

[nitrogen]

OT: I found it frustrating that using my vertical scroll wheel scrolled that graph horizontally, rather than the more commonly used zoom.

[mmariani]

Politicians got pissed for a government branch doing a better job than some corporate campaign contributor? Where's the news in that?

Now seriously. We'd be better off coding something out that emulates monkeys doing their jobs. Really.

[saraid216]

Yeah, how dare the government build a viable competitor in the market. The nerve of being just as competent as the private sector!

[ryanpers]

Accumulo is so similar to HBase, that its major feature sets is merely an application that can be implemented on top of HBase.

[dctoedt]

I wonder why the photo was of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? The uniformed military isn't mentioned at all in the article, which is all about senators and their staffs, and specifically the Senate Armed Services Committee.

[mumrah]

I wonder what motivation they had for developing their own BigTable/Dynamo implementation rather than going with Cassandra or HBase.

Now there are three Apache projects with quite a bit of overlap (distributed columnar/key-value database). Hooray for fragmentation!

[etzel]

HBase probably wasn't nearly as mature as Accumulo was when they were evaluating options, so starting from scratch might have been more attractive. It also seems to have some interesting access control features that I don't think are anywhere else, though thats not a killer feature for most people in the commercial world.

[antidoh]

Security was mentioned in the article.

[drivingmenuts]

That, right there, is why I will never work for government: the amount of sheer stupidity coming out Congress.

I'd kind of like to know which particular Senatard got all butthurt about this and trace the money back to whomever bought him off.

[Volpe]

Because sheer stupidity never comes out of the private sector?

Sweeping statements don't generally help in discussions.

[mr_dev4]

SAIC, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin are big donors.

Senate Armed Services Committee Industry: DEFENSE ELECTRONICS TOTAL GIVING TO COMMITTEE MEMBERS: $900,766

http://www.opensecrets.org/cmteprofiles/profiles.php?cycle=2...

[wcdolphin]

This title is pretty strange... It doesn't tell any of the interesting facts about the story, which sucks.

[antidoh]

Committing an own-goal.

[ilaksh]

Oh.. I thought Google and the NSA were pretty much the same thing. Wow.. that's great that they are different.