I've worked with the FBI in the past and this is absolutely not the kind of behavior that I experienced. The FBI agent managed to lose the copy of documents that I put on a CD for him and then later claimed that we never gave them to him and that he never came to pick them up. Luckily there was 3 witnesses to him picking it up and the security camera but still, he was threatening us "for not complying" over it.
Then later when he couldn't figure out how to view the documents and didn't want to read the instructions that were sent with it he demanded that we print everything off on paper and again threatened legal action for "not complying". I wound up hand delivering almost a ream of paper for all of the documents and emails that they subpoenaed. In the end, the biggest mistake made was complying with the order in the first place as they were ordering us to provide documents from third parties for the most part who should have been served with a subpoena directly.
Agreed. I worked for the company that was infamously associated with FBI's 'Virtual Case File' fiasco.
Though I joined a few years after it was already finished, there were many employees still around who had worked on the project.
The reason the project failed was almost entirely the fault of the FBI project managers and other bureaucrats. Huge egos, technical incompetence, and petty politics were the biggest issues. This was coming from talented non-mgmt engineers, too, so i'm pretty confident in the veracity of their claims
Anyway, after working in gov. contracting for a decade, I've come to really believe that most Fed workers are actually pretty bright, but they become so fixated on politics instead of results, they end up doing far worse than their less educated counterparts in the private sector.
The more privileged the agency (i.e. FBI, other Intel agencies, State Department, etc.) the worse the politicking becomes as they are far more insulated from scrutiny and less limited with funding from Congress.
Then later when he couldn't figure out how to view the documents and didn't want to read the instructions that were sent with it he demanded that we print everything off on paper and again threatened legal action for "not complying". I wound up hand delivering almost a ream of paper for all of the documents and emails that they subpoenaed. In the end, the biggest mistake made was complying with the order in the first place as they were ordering us to provide documents from third parties for the most part who should have been served with a subpoena directly.