Despite agents reluctance to embrace the digital age, in 2000 the bureau finally began to deal with its outdated IT systems. At the time, under the direction of Louis J. Freeh, the bureau had neither a CIO nor documentation detailing its IT systems, much less a plan for revamping them. The task of creating such a plan fell to former IBM executive Bob E. Dies, who became assistant director in charge of the FBI Information Resources Division on 17 July 2000. He was the first of five officials who, over the next four years, would struggle to lead the FBI's sprawling and antiquated information systems and get the VCF project under way.

According to a 2002 report from the DOJ's Office of the Inspector General, when Dies arrived, 13 000 computers could not run modern software. Most of the 400 resident agency offices were connected to the FBI intranet with links about the speed of a 56-kilobit-per-second modem. Many of the bureau's network components were no longer manufactured or supported. And agents couldn't e-mail U.S. Attorney offices, federal agencies, local law enforcement, or each other; instead, they typically faxed case-related information.

In September 2000, Congress approved $379.8 million over three years for what was then called the FBI Information Technology Upgrade Project. Eventually divided into three parts, the program became known as Trilogy. The Information Presentation Component would provide all 56 FBI field offices, some 22 000 agents and support staff, with new Dell Pentium PCs running Microsoft Office, as well as new scanners, printers, and servers. The Transportation Network Component would provide secure local area and wide area networks, allowing agents to share information with their supervisors and each other.

But the User Applications Component, which would ultimately become the VCF, staked out the most ambitious goals. First, it was to make the five most heavily used investigative applications—the Automated Case Support system, IntelPlus, the Criminal Law Enforcement Application, the Integrated Intelligence Information Application, and the Telephone Application—accessible via a point-and-click Web interface. Next, it would rebuild the FBI's intranet. Finally, it was supposed to identify a way to replace the FBI's 40-odd investigative software applications, including ACS.

Based on the 1970s-era database Adabas and written in a programming language called Natural, both from Software AG, Darmstadt, Germany, the Automated Case Support system, which debuted in 1995, was antiquated even as it was deployed—and it is still being used today. Originally, agents and clerks accessed the program via vintage IBM 3270 green-screen terminals connected to a mainframe over dedicated lines. Eventually, the 3270 terminals were emulated on standard desktop PCs. By navigating complicated menus using function keys and keystroke commands, agents could do basic Boolean and keyword searches for things like an informant's name or the dates of a wiretap surveillance, information related to cases they were working. But according to Depew, only the most dedicated, computer-savvy agents had the skills and patience to learn the arcane system, let alone exploit it to its full potential.

"Nobody really understood why we would even use ACS other than as an index," said Depew. A notable exception: Robert Hanssen, the notorious FBI traitor, used the system to find documents his Russian handlers might find useful, as well as to check to see if anyone at the FBI was onto him [see "Mission Impossible," IEEE Spectrum, April 2003].

In May and June 2001, the bureau awarded Trilogy contracts to two major U.S. government contractors: DynCorp, of Reston, Va., for the hardware and network projects, and to SAIC for software. All three Trilogy components were to be delivered by the middle of 2004. Instead of paying a fixed price for the hardware, networks, and software, the FBI used cost-plus-award fee contracts. These would pay the cost of all labor and materials plus additional money if the contractor managed costs commendably. Crucially, if the scope of the project expanded or if the contractor incurred other unforeseen costs, the FBI would have to pick up those, too.

On 4 September 2001, Robert S. Mueller III became the tenth director in FBI history. One week later, terrorists pulverized New York City's World Trade Center and a piece of the Pentagon. The inability of FBI agents to share the most basic information about Al Qaeda's U.S. activities blew up into a front-page scandal. Within days, the FBI's pathetic technology infrastructure went from being so much arcane trivia to a subject of daily fulmination by politicians and newspaper columnists. As The 9/11 Commission Report would conclude in 2004, "the FBI's information systems were woefully inadequate. The FBI lacked the ability to know what it knew; there was no effective mechanism for capturing or sharing its institutional knowledge."

In the face of intense public and congressional pressure, Mueller shifted Trilogy into high gear. In October, he pulled Chiaradio up from his position as special agent in charge of the field office in Tampa, Fla., to Hoover Building headquarters in Washington, to advise him on the all-important software component of Trilogy. An accountant by training, Chiaradio would become the FBI's executive assistant director for administration in December 2001.

After discussions with Mueller, Chiaradio determined that the FBI's basic plan for the software portion of Trilogy—slapping a Web interface onto the ACS system and the four other programs—wasn't going to make agents more effective. So to help him figure out what would work, he brought in Depew. [See timeline, "Countdown to Catastrophe."]