Category Archives: Military Untelligence IQ Trainwrecks

Slovak Police accidentally cause Terror Alert in Dublin

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The Irish and International media have been busy the past few days covering the story of the horrendously botched security test by Slovakian Border Police which resulted in 90 grams of high explosive RDX finding its way to Dublin from Bratislava in the backpack of an unsuspecting Slovakian electrician who was travelling back to Ireland after Christmas at home. This lead to a street in Dublin City Centre being closed this past Tuesday, with homes and businesses evacuated, while police and Army bomb experts raided the innocent electrician’s home to secure the explosives.

A full timeline for the story can be found here.

This is a tale which has a number of classic elements of an IQTrainwreck about it. Continue reading →

US Government Health (S)Care.

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Courtesy of Jim Harris at the excellent OCDQBlog.com comes this classic example of a real life Information Quality Trainwreck concerning US Healthcare. Keith Underdown also sent us the link to the story on USAToday’s site

It seems that 1800 US military veterans have recently been sent letters informing them that they have the degenerative neurological disease ALS (a condition similar to that which physicist Stephen Hawking has).

At least some of the letters, it turns out, were sent in error.

[From the LA Times]

As a result of the panic the letters caused, the agency plans to create a more rigorous screening process for its notification letters and is offering to reimburse veterans for medical expenses incurred as a result of the letters.

“That’s the least they can do,” said former Air Force reservist Gale Reid in Montgomery, Ala. She racked up more than $3,000 in bills for medical tests last week to get a second opinion. Her civilian doctor concluded she did not have ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

So, poor quality information entered a process, resulting in incorrect decisions, distressing communications, and additional costs to individuals and governement agencies. Yes. This is ticking all the boxes to be an IQ Trainwreck.

The LA Times reports that the Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that 600 letters were sent to people who did not have ALS. That is a 33% error rate. The cause of the error? According to the USA Today story:

Jim Bunker, president of the National Gulf War Resource Center, said VA officials told him the letters dated Aug. 12 were the result of a computer coding error that mistakenly labeled the veterans with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.

Oh. A coding error on medical data. We have never seen that before on IQTrainwrecks.com in relation to private health insurer/HMO data. Gosh no.

Given the impact that a diagnosis of an illness which kills affected people within an average of 5 years can have on people, the simple coding error has been bumped up to a classic IQTrainwreck.

There are actually two Information quality issues at play here however which illustrate one of the common problems in convincing people that there is an information quality problem in the first place . While the VA now estimates (and I put that in bold for a reason) that the error rate was 600 out of 1800, the LA Times reporting tells us that:

… the VA has increased its estimate on the number of veterans who received the letters in error. Earlier this week, it refuted a Gulf War veterans group’s estimate of 1,200, saying the agency had been contacted by fewer than 10 veterans who had been wrongly notified.

So, the range estimates for error goes from 10 in1800 (1.8%) to 600 in 1800 (33%) to 1200 in 1800 (66%). The intersting thing for me as an information quality practitioner is that the VA’s initial estimate was based on the numberof people who had contacted the agency.

This is an important lesson.. the number of reported errors (anecdotes) may be less than the number of actual errors and the only real way to know is to examine the quality of the data and look for evidence of errors and inconsistency so you can Act on Fact.

The positive news… the VA is changing its procedures. The bad news about that… it looks like they are investing money in inspecting defects out of the process rather than making sure the correct fact is correctly coded in patient records.

The terror of the Terrorist Watch list

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A source who wishes to remain anoynymous sent us this link to a story on Wired.com about the state of the US Government’s Terrorist watch list.

The many and varied problems with the watch list have been covered on this blog before.

However, the reason that this most recent story constitutes an IQTrainwreck is that it seems that, despite undertakings to improve quality, the exact opposite has actually happened given:

  • The growth in the number of entries on the list
  • The failures on the part of the FBI to properly maintain and update information in a timely manner.

According to the report 15% of active terrorism suspects under investigation were not added to the Watch list. 72% of people cleared in closed investigations were not removed.

The report from the US Inspector General said that they “believe that the FBI’s failure to consistently nominate subjects of international and domestic terrorism investigations to the terrorist watchlist could pose a risk to national security.”

That quote sums up why this is an IQTrainwreck.

Continue reading →

So, they’ve got guns and are trained to kill…

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let’s screw with their pay…

From the erstwhile The Register comes this story about on-going information quality problems in the British Forces pay and personnel system. There have been complaints of pay being withheld for months.

The MOD blames the data input monkeys  staff and insists that the system is working fine.

“Input errors based on a degree of unfamiliarity with the new scheme have resulted in a small number of pay inaccuracies,” according to the MoD.

“Thorough investigation of these errors has shown that the JPA system is working extremely well… JPA… requires accurate and timely input from… HR administrators.”

Additional training measures are, of course, being provided to staff and the MoD is keen to point out the long term benefits of the system in terms of reduced manpower needs in HR and fewer systems to maintain.

Of course, the complexity of the payroll system should not be underestimated, particularly if there are staff at similar grade with differing pay structures. Add to that the requirement for rock solid security (given the sensitivity of the information) and the system requirements become even more complex.

However, basic validation and verification of information (perhaps a reconciliation between the new system and the old system at data migration) might have mitigated this problem.

Why is this an IQ Trainwreck? Well, they’ve pissed off members of some of the most elite fighting units in the world… not something I’d do.

We all know toddlers are terrors…

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… but this story (again culled from The Register.co.uk) shows the lengths the US government goes to to stop these known terrors from getting on planes via the Terrorist Screening lists maintained by the Dept Homeland Security.

“USA Today tells the story of a Disney World-loving 6-year-old who shares a name with someone on the “additional screening” list. Little John Anderson hasn’t made it onto the cleared list because his mum finds the TRIP web site confusing.”

So Little Johnny Anderson can’t fly to Disney World without having to prove he isn’t a terrorist. Hard to do for a tired and pissed off six year old, as any parent will tell you. I can only imagine how they explain it to him:

Mommy Anderson: Now Johnny, the nice TSA man only wants to make sure you won’t try to fly a plane into the Magic Kingdom and kill Goofy

L’il Johnny: Whhaaaaaahhhhhh…. iwannagoseegoofynmickeynminniendonalducknowmommy…whahhhh (Johnny kicks TSA agent… join us next week for L’il Johnny goes to Cuba).

Processes are in place for people to get themselves taken of the list via a website… but Johnny’s mother finds the website confusing. Having looked at the site it doesn’t seem to have any clear process entry point for “The US Government thinks (correctly) my child is a terrorist but good God I can keep them under control, please let us go to Disney”. It would seem that Mommy Anderson might need to get L’il Johnny to fill out a form to allow her to make a complaint on his behalf. He’s six. He may not understand that words like pursuant, perjury or that if he lies on the form he could to prison until he is ELEVEN!!

So the process to correct errors in the information is not customer focussed. Mommy Anderson and L’il Johnny just have to put up with his being on a watch list because the process to correct the list isn’t friendly to the information consumer/creator.

L’il Johnny isn’t alone. The Register points out that he shares his story with Javaid Iqbal, a seven year old British boy who was stopped repeatedly at US airports when on holiday in Florida (which if you are seven years old translates as Disneyland). He shared his name with someone who had been deported from the US. His name was shared, not his age. L’il Javaid’s passport is now stamped that he underwent high level security checks, pretty much condemning him to a life of Eurostar trips to EuroDisney from now on. Imagine if his name had been Lee Harvey Oswald.

These are the easy funny stories that highlight weaknesses in the quality of information and processes in this important function of the US Dept of Homeland Security. A less funny story is that

  1. There is some confusion about how big these lists are… a government report says 7555000, but a spokesman for the TSA says that he thinks it is less than half that
  2. 97% of people who have managed to get through the process that Mommy Anderson finds confusing are simply namesakes of people on the lists.
  3. Less than half of the requests to be taken off the lists (to correct inaccuracy in information and improve quality) have been processed since the facility went ‘live’ in February.  41% are “still being discussed” or are awaiting further documentation to prove the claims of the people who complained.

Why is this an IQTrainwreck?

  1. The level of inaccuracy in the information causes disruption to people… L’il Johnny or L’il Javaid won’t understand what is going on. And in Javaid’s case it may actually affect his ability to re-enter the US (or other countries) in later life.
  2. There appears to be a lack of consolidated governance and control… not being able to answer “how many names are on the lists” and get a consistent response is like asking a company how many customers are in their CRM systems and getting mixed responses….( ohhh – bad example).
  3. The processes for correcting information are not ‘customer friendly’ and don’t seem to cater for the existence of children with names who might be too young to understand the processes or even the forms. The fact that parents find the process difficult to navigate suggests there is scope for improvement.

In any other context I’d be in favour of any measure that keeps screaming children off planes, particularly long flights (by which I mean any flight that lasts longer than 6 minutes).

However, I am reminded in these cases of why my father (a civil servant in the Irish Republic and, at the time, a senior trade unionist) used to hate going on trips to the North of Ireland.  Every so often some British Army squaddie or RUC officer would take him out of the car or off the bus for questioning because:

  • He had glasses
  • He had a beard
  • He wasn’t speaking with an English accent
  • therefore he must be Gerry Adams, leader of Sinn Fein and his id papers must be faked.

My parents had a hard time explaining that to the snotty-nosed crying kids in the back seat…

Nuclear warheads go AWOL on a B-52

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Various media (see below for links) have reported the story of the Advanced Cruise Missiles (ACMs) that were flown from a base in North Dakota to a base in Louisiana, apparently by accident, and sat relatively unguarded at both bases for a number of hours before the error was noticed. The flight was supposed to have taken non-nuclear ACMs on the journey to Louisiana to be decommissioned.

The root cause: An Airforce investigation uncovered that the ground crews who loaded the planes had abandoned the formal process for managing the loading and unloading of missiles in favour of their own ‘informal’ system. The Chairwoman of the House Armed Services Strategic Forces sub-committee was quoted as saying:

“These are not just rules that people dreamed up … just so they could check off the boxes,” she said. “This is fundamentally important to the security of the country and the world.”

The coverage from boston.com gives some detail on the various process checks that appear to have been missed or skipped.

The impact:

The potential impact in terms of the risk of nuclear material being stolen or the risk of nuclear contamination if the planes had crashed (the warheads would not have exploded) were thankfully avoided in this case.

However, the impacts have been severe on the careers of those involved. According to the AP Wire service (via AOL), four officers have been relieved of their commands, 65 Airmen have been de-certified from handling nuclear materials and the entire 5th Bomb Wing has been “de-certified from its wartime mission”. Which apparently was not to misplace nukes. Some media services report that the Airforce is planning to fire some of those involved.

Perhaps worryingly the original count of missiles that arrived in Louisiana was put at five and then later upgraded to six.

A conspiracy theorist’s dreamscape if ever we saw one.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article2396127.ece

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/10/21/wnuke121.xml

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/10/20/4_colonels_relieved_of_command_over_nuclear_armed_flight/

TB or not TB (with apologies to Shakespeare)

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The Irish Examiner newspaper today carried this story about an American lawyer who was let back into the US despite being red-flagged as a health risk.

It would seem that he had acquired a particularly nasty drug-resistant form of Tuberculosis – a diagnosis which was confirmed in Europe where he was travelling. He was advised not to travel and to seek treatment. Being a sensible personal injury lawyer with an understanding of duty of care to others who might be harmed by his actions and causal chains in litigation, he jumped on the next flight out.

Despite warnings from US health officials not to board another long flight, he flew home for treatment, fearing he would not survive if he did not reach the US, he said. He said he tried to sneak home by way of Canada instead of flying directly into the US.

When he got to the US/Canadian border his passport swipe popped a big red flag that advised the Border guard to restrain him, to prevent him from entering the US and to don a protective mask when dealing with this lawyer. The border guard promptly waved him through, despite the medical advice to hold him and quarantine him, because…

the infected man seemed perfectly healthy and that he thought the warning was merely “discretionary”.

While the guard is not a doctor, their future career as a border guard may also be in question (they are currently on ‘administrative duties’). The union representing the guard in question has gone on record saying that “public health issues are not receiving adquate attention and training” within the Dept of Homeland Security.

The right information was in the right place at the right time. It was accurate. However through a disregard for process the information was without value and the border security process didn’t work as expected. That disregard for process may have had a root cause in a failure of training to either cover the public health issue or a failure of the organisation to emphasise that the role of Homeland Security is to protect against threats – not just terrorist ones.