Something to remember G. W. Bush by...

Stung by repeated criticisms that the US government could have done more to protect Americans, that numerous warning signs were ignored, the Bush administration made a great show of initiating intrusive government oversight -- spying, some call it -- over broad swaths of American civil life, poking here, prodding there, trolling everywhere, looking for terrorists and suspicious folks in general.

Their efforts produced an ever-burgeoning mountain of names and information. It was to be all neatly organized into a central database, cross-indexed, instantly searchable...

That was the plan.

The latest version of the project is codenamed Railhead. According to the New York Times:

The new program, known as Railhead, is intended to fix the problems with the current outmoded program. That database — begun as an urgent priority after the Sept. 11 attacks — has been bedeviled by an array of problems, including the inability to do basic searches to find suspects’ names.

Bush administration officials have been pronouncing Railhead a success. But the investigation by a House Science and Technology subcommittee found it crippled by serious design flaws, management blunders and runaway contractors. Hundreds of private contractors from dozens of companies involved were recently laid off as government managers finally ordered a fresh overhaul in the face of “insurmountable” problems.

It turns out the Railhead database can't be searched for alternate or incorrect spellings, or soundalikes and users cannot create even a basic compound search using operators like and, not, or -- commonplace functionalities that users of free online search engines like Google or Yahoo know and expect.

“The program not only can’t connect the dots,” Representative Brad Miller, Democrat of North Carolina, declared. “It can’t find the dots.”