Wednesday, September 09, 2009

More Salient Points

- Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "MSF/MAS Debacle: Week 2 Salient Points":

http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2009/09/crimecamera_kickback_scheme_su.html

Interesting that no one has mentioned that Dell had a relationship with Tropos during this entire episode and that Tropos also recieved kickbacks from the city corruption cartel. There is so much more to this vast criminal enterprise yet the vastness of scope has only yet been scratched. What would happen to this lawsuit if the plaintiffs themselves weren't so innocent?

Dell had a relationship with Tropos regarding our crime cameras? For those of you wondering what Tropos is...they provide the antenna arrays which transmit the data from the cameras.

- Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "The MSF Contract":

Geospatial SOA means a geospatial service oriented architecture.

It's a concise and fancy way of saying they abstracted the geographic data system to it's own thing, and anything that needs geodata can make a call to their protocal and get it, instead of lengthy database queries.

However, ESRI is pretty much the definitive vendor for this type of tool, I hope MSF is simply managing data for a third party tool, as trying to recreate a comparable GIS tool would take a 50 man team at least a decade.

and the answer...

- Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "The MSF Contract":

I just got word from a reliable source that ESRI is a partner with MSF on this contract.

There was also some speculation that some of the exact same issues we had with our 311 and tech contracts occurred in Detroit as well. Anxiously awaiting that follow up, Anon.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

It is funny how you say the plantiffs are not innocent, According to the IG report, they over-charged the city by 250k, that they did not pay back on the first camera contract. Zombie please look into this as well. Did they pay Muppet with the extra money?

Anonymous said...

Rumor is the plaintiffs conspired with Meffert, et al to kick Camsoft out of the crime camera technology. Camsoft was the real innovator to the crime camera technology but Meffert & the boys wanted Camsoft out so they could insert themselves. The articles in the Times Picayne pretty much spell it out for us. I wonder why Camsoft didn't sue because they sure should have.

Anonymous said...

uhh, how "innovative" could any of the players be -- these are all just off-the-shelf parts hobbled together and hooked onto a wi-fi network.

how anyone could have charged 50k a pop is a joke.

cameras have been done before and its not rocket science. meffert's crew probably learned how to do them and decided they didnt need the plaintiffs anymore, and now its sour grapes.

only problem for meffert is they got greedy and dirty.

Anonymous said...

Someone please follow up on this issue of the moral standing of the plaintiffs.

In all of this one of the unasked questions is why cameras were seen as the best way to fight crime.

They increase surveilance, but there are other, cheaper ways of reducing crime that might have been smarter ways to spend the money.

Another unasked question is why "crime fighting" is the be all and end all of public safety discussion. The "war on drugs" and the "war on crime" and all the other little "wars" have not fixed a thing.

Looking at public safety primarily in terms of crime might not be the best. Can you imagine how useful it would have been if they'd kicked a couple million into a program to teach basic first aid and first responder skills to everyone in NOLA?

That set of skills would have helped the population in any kind of mass crisis or minor emergency: terrorist attack, hurricane, flood, earthquake, responding to a shooting or a car accident, helping if a lady started to go into labour right in front of you, etc.

I bet a fraction of the money spent on crime cameras and wars would have trained the whole population of the USA in basic, practical disaster readiness, and that would have substantially increased public safety.

There are lots of other things that might have made better use of those resources, but why even talk about them, if there is no way for the political class to take their little cut by implementing those programs?

Anonymous said...

Feds are all over the City Technology office today. Looks like the end is very near now. Nagin and others are the focus today.

Anonymous said...

Wonder what ever happened to the missing Tropos radios that were donated to the city. Last I heard they had vanished in thin air.

Anonymous said...

last I heard the missing tropos units were put at city hall.

Jason Brad Berry said...

To all anons asking about the plaintiffs....here is my response.

No...I don't think there nose is completely clean. But...I'm don't think any laws were broken. I think they quickly turned from benefactor to victim in this whole deal and the real question is why they were benefactors in the first place.

But having said that, its really water under the bridge at this point. What we need to concentrate on now, is the actual kickbacks and cyclic contracting which Meffert was incorporating and receiving the benefits from.

In a mile high view...we need to make sure we are vigilant against cronyism and complete waste of taxpayer's dollars. All I can think about now is how much the DA's office could have done with the money pissed out the window on the cameras, and any number of harebrained "tech" projects we pissed money away on.

just my two cents.

Anonymous said...

If the plantiffs were over paid by 250k, how is that not stealing if they did not return the money. I heard the money first came from a federal grant. If that is true, then FBI should be looking for that money. Did the plantiffs just take a 250k bonus?