A classic case of earmarks - WA State version

The Seattle Times has a nice investigative piece on a Port Townsend company that decided, rather than prosper with superior technology, they chose instead to prosper using a lobbyist and some cash. Here is an excerpt from the article:

Congressional ties bankroll area company
Not long after Nelson Ludlow and his wife started a technology business in Port Townsend with money scraped together from friends, family and retirement accounts, they spent precious dollars in an unlikely way:

They hired a lobbyist and started giving to a congressional campaign fund.

The lobbying paid off. Soon, an $800,000 earmark for the Ludlows was tucked into a 2003 spending bill, giving their tiny startup, Mobilisa, a no-bid contract to provide Internet service on Puget Sound ferries.

Mobilisa is one of a new breed of companies sustained by lawmakers handing them government contracts through line-item appropriations known as earmarks.

These companies make their sales pitch not to experts in places like the Pentagon but to lawmakers and their staff in the halls of Congress. The startups rely on dollars from taxpayers rather than from venture capitalists who demand a cut of profits. All the while, company executives usually give campaign donations to lawmakers.

Nelson Ludlow and his wife, Bonnie, have donated generously in the past five years, giving $11,500 to U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and nearly $20,000 to U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Bremerton.

At the same time, the Ludlows have mastered the earmark game. Since 2003, Murray and Dicks have favored Mobilisa with at least nine earmarks worth $20.3 million.

Must be some very cool high-tech stuff if they had that much funding:

In July 2002, Murray announced she was sponsoring an earmark for Mobilisa to set up free Internet access for ferry passengers.

The $800,000 federal grant Murray got for the Washington State Ferries came with strings attached: The state had to put up an additional $200,000 and was instructed to award a sole-source contract to Mobilisa, despite its meager track record.

"We were told by the federal government what to do with that particular contract," said Tami Grant, a contract manager at the Washington Department of Transportation.

The Internet service on the ferries was free. And the initial feedback was good. But an independent review, paid for by the grant, found slow download speeds and lost connections were common over the water.

Murray got Mobilisa another $1 million earmark in 2006. Ultimately, the federal government paid more than $200 for each of the 8,000 passengers who the state agency said tried the free service.

And Mobilisa lost in 2006 when the state did a round of competitive bidding. They are also involved in military security:

Mobilisa, for example, sells a bar-code scanner to swipe ID badges at security gates on military bases. The off-the-shelf Motorola scanner retails for about $3,000. Yet Mobilisa sells the same handheld device to the government for nearly $7,000.

And

Mobilisa's biggest success has come in creating a system to check the ID badges of people entering military bases. In 2005, Dicks got the company a $4 million earmark to research and implement an ID-check system. Mobilisa focused its research on reading driver's licenses, a technology that other companies were already selling.

By then, however, the Defense Department was issuing expensive "smart" cards, which are difficult to counterfeit and store biometric information, such as fingerprint images. The cards are intended to offer the highest level of security.

Mobilisa used an off-the-shelf bar-code scanner to build its system, a technology that industry sources say fails to read the advanced security features embedded in a chip in the Defense Department cards.

"When you've got a chip card available, using a bar code is living a little bit in the past," said Neville Pattinson, vice president of government affairs for Gemalto, a multinational smart-card company that is not a Mobilisa competitor. "If they chose to use bar codes as a convenience, that's fine. But they should be aware of the risk of fraud."

Christ on a Corn Dog -- it's our tax dollars at work, supporting a couple people's banal mediocrity. They come out with systems that rely on old technology and in the case of the ferry system, "slow download speeds and lost connections were common". Cripes -- Motorola makes an internet access point with typical distances of five to ten miles, a couple access points and you would have complete coverage. (Their Canopy system - excellent products!) Why screw around with transponders on buoys when for about $10K per access point (not counting the structure it's mounted on), you can get a really fast connection (quoted spec is 14MBPS - by comparison, a T-1 line is 1.544 MBPS) As for sticking with the bar-code scanners when "smart cards" were already deployed, that is the hallmark of a Clueless Dip-shit Manager. Mobilisa's website is here: Mobilisa And BTW, when the 2008 elections roll around, that was U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash. and U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks that need to be defeated for supporting this kind of stupidity and waste. And to close, I know that you should not try to implement the bleeding edge technologies when rolling out something large but still, using tech that is several generations older than the current Commercial-Off-The-Shelf technology is indefensible and downright idiotic...