What private enterprise projects could compare in scope and size? Google's infrastructure? Facebook? Could they have succeeded if they hadn't started small?
Amazon is a good example. If someone in France buys a "making bombs for dummies" book and then logs on a month after buying that book on the US site, guess what pops up? A subtle reminder like, "Here's some recommendations from our Terrorism for Dummies" series you might be interested in." And as far as I can remember, it always been like that.
However, If I were a terrorist and tried to cross the border near say Emerson North Dakota and they stopped me crossing, I could simply drive over to hwy 59 about 60 miles to the East and try again and their computers would have no idea I was just stopped from entering within the last hour.
This is the difference between Public companies and things the Government does. Government NEVER EVER gets it right. How about that huge project called the Office of Homeland Security? Even 10 years later, we still have agencies who can't easily share information they have in their databases. Even though this was the primary reason the office was even created in the first place.
While this too often seems to be true, I happened to see this the other day, which describes a few federal IT systems that apparently were implemented well:
http://www.volokh.com/2013/10/20/big-federal-web-deployments...
The other thing that bugs me is when people complain that Obama should have just pulled in his campaign people. Integrating with undocumented, legacy APIS, and strange law-driven requirements is a completely different challenge than the type of still very difficult but free-wheeling and modern integration the campaign people had the freedom to play with.
Healthcare.gov has 50(!) contractors supervised by HHS?
To fix it they are bringing in 'specialists?' Someone should send everyone in HHS a copy of the Mythical Man Month.
I believe the probability of this thing EVER working are pretty close to zero.
