The Agony and Ecstacy of the U.S. Government's Relationship with Apple's iPhone, Part 5 - the Conclusion

"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.” – Merlin in The Once and Future King by T.H. White

All thoughts, opinions, and other words here are exclusively the personal opinions of the author and do not express any official position, statement, or other communication from or on the behalf of the U.S. government. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead or actual events is purely coincidental.

As I waited for the third event to change the game, I still had to finish "trading in" all of the enterprise BlackBerries for iPhones.

I was demoralized, confounded, and frustrated by how all of this had gone down over the past couple of years. But I realized there was something I could do to have some fun, especially after Patrick Bateman allegedly made several more underlings cry.

At the time, the latest iPhone model had three colors to choose from: black, silver, or the latest one...gold.

So I called Big Red Telephone.

Me: Hey there, I'm going to be following this up in email as well. I wanted to make sure all 1238 iPhones are gold.

Alexander at Big Red Phone: Gold?

Me: That's right. Every single unit. Gold. And Alexander, if a single one of those phones is a color other than gold–I'm going to hold you in breach.

Alexander at Big Red Phone: No, no, that's fine we can get them all gold. It just may take a bit to get that many gold units. They're pretty popular.

Me: I can understand why, they're beautiful. Any schedule risk for the added time it takes to get all 1238 phones in the gold color?

Alexander: No risk. It should only take a few days. I just have to make some calls to some other reps for inventory.

Me: Excellent, Alexander I really appreciate this. It will reflect well in your performance reporting if you pull this off. And Alexander, remember, every iPhone has to be gold or I'm holding your company in breach.

There's two things to note here. First, I said gold because I guessed Patrick Bateman would lose his shit over that color for not being "manly." The phones were immediately going into protective cases anyway, because we couldn't afford to break and replace any without going over the WTO threshold, so you would never actually see the back of them.

Later on, during Decennial field tests in warmer climates, the protective cases allegedly caused the phones to brick up from overheating, slang for shut down unexpectedly. It was more likely due to the cludgy software but that's another story.

Second, Alexander wanted to make sure Big Red Telephone had a good relationship with everyone because that mattered more than any formal reporting. That meant sales folks are willing to entertain basically anything from the government.

Very often it is the contractor companies who have to politely and awkwardly remind their government customers they can't do something, not just because it is likely illegal but because they'd be the ones caught holding the bag. Something all contractors try to avoid unless they're really making money off a situation like CGI during healthcare.gov who threw a literal shareholder party celebrating the site's failure. Because it just meant more contractual increases and changes were made to try and get the site to work, the more money thus profit would go to them. Until Mikey Dickerson and team got there, but that's a well told story.

But wait, why doesn't formal reporting matter?

Over the past decade and a half, I have had to bear witness to dozens of people think that they're the first one to come up with the idea of "Yelp for Government." Like technology sales fads/fashions, this solution sounded like it was low hanging fruit. If it was low hanging fruit, it was poisoned.

Mistaking complex, dynamic systems for a movie plot morality tale–that the problems in government were all attributable to the "bad actors" in industry–is sadly common these days for almost all issues. This one supposed that if we could just get accurate reviews of them, like a restaurant that gives you food poisoning, then that will "fix Government IT."

It'd certainly help and seemed like common sense. But the current landscape didn't end up this way by accident. It was by design.

While I was dealing with the gold enterprise iPhones, the head of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP) at the White House was giving a talk at a mandatory, annual Department-wide acquisition event. I always refer to the head of OFPP as the Procurement Pope.

At one point during the new pontiff's stump speech, the political appointee said to hundreds of government acquisition professionals he technically oversaw:

"I'm just a business guy, I don't know government but we should have a Yelp for Government Contractors."

He was the 3rd procurement pope I'd heard to make this declaration since I started in government, we cycle through execs fast. My supervisor and I decided to leave the mandatory event and went to my house. We just stared at the walls for a while but eventually went back for more "pep talks."

Shortly after this speech, our beloved procurement Pope "revolving doored" to a company that, ironically, got caught defrauding the government. Sigh.

Of course, we already have, and have had for a very long time, a "Yelp for Government." Now you would think the Procurement Pope not knowing this would be like the Catholic Pope didn't know about nuns while suggesting a role for women in the church.

The official "Yelp for Government" is called the Contractor Performance Assessment Reporting System (CPARS).

Now what the Procurement Pope meant was that the government should have something that worked, because, even though it did technically exist, CPARS was and is functionally useless.

Why is CPARS functionally useless?

Because it's by design. It's another instance of Congress and those pesky laws. And those laws restrict from government employees from just putting "I didn't like them" or something even worse like you might find on the real Yelp.

Instead, the government has to have specific, demonstrable evidence-based proof of any negative assertion against a contractor's performance. Meaning that any complaints must be tied to contractual performance shortcomings. Not just vibes.

Tragically, most government contracts are still not performance-based and usually written by non-lawyers attempting to sound lawyerly. So the CORs responsible for managing them almost never have anything substantive to prove poor contractor performance. Just vibes. Whoops.

Additionally, the government's rating in CPARS is something that contractors can sue over if they don't like it. Trying to legally defend yourself on vibes is historically not a winner in court.

So because the government: doesn't write a good performance-based contracts in the first place, doesn't document poor performers to the necessary level of legal sufficiency to be defensible when things go south, and contractors want to make sure they have great performance in official system of record, the CPARS, the actual "Yelp for Government," is totally useless.

This is the sad state of affairs with almost every "bad" government IT system. The actual software language, architecture, etc. is rarely the problem. Even if you deleted it and started a whole system over again from scratch, which might be the absolute dumbest thing you could attempt with software, you would just recreate the same issues T-1000 style.

I once caught a company, a rare actual bad actor with a habit of suing everyone for everything, committing outright fraud. Naturally, I thought it was my responsibility to get them banned from government contracting.

This didn't happen because my superiors didn't want "a scandal." For funsies, I checked the company's CPARS – it was flawless, stellar, exemplary. This included the very same contracts I had audited to discover fraud. When I checked with the program folks, they despised the company and also wanted them gone but their CPARS ratings were Tony the Tiger style Grrrrreeaat!

Because of this open secret about our feckless "Yelp for Government," the 1102 workforce typically claims that it checked CPARS. Usually they don't. If you really want to go the extra mile, you do check it, even if you know it's a bad company, and print the webpage to add to the paper file. If you're a super advanced, bleeding edge acquisition office you can PDF print it for the shared network folder.

But we know that there's never any useful, negative performance reporting in there.

And yet we're surprised we keep getting food poisoning at the same restaurants over, and over, and over again.

Anyway, somehow, a rumor started spreading that I specified all the iPhones had to be gold. It came up at the next Decennial Bi-Weekly Acquisition Planning meeting...

Patrick Bateman's Hatchet Man: I heard the enterprise iPhones are going to be gold.

Me: What? I did the order and I said the black ones. We want the black ones right?

Patrick Bateman's Hatchet Man: (sharply inhales air like Hannibal Lecter in a very unsettling way) That's right.

Me: Good, because that's what we're getting.

He left the meeting early because Patrick Bateman just texted him, which he announced to all of us as if he was just summoned to the Situation Room to coordinate the Bin Laden raid.

After he left, I told everyone in the meeting not to say anything, but it was true. All of the iPhones were going to be gold. And everyone laughed and carried on with operational planning that mattered.

Just to be sure, I went and called Alexander at Big Red Telephone again.

Me: Alexander are you telling people we're getting all gold iPhones?

Alexander: No, no, no someone called me and asked what color they would be.

Me: Good if anyone asks, we're getting black. But Alexander...Every iPhone. Gold.

Alexander: Understood.

Now it's strange and I have no idea why but, for some reason, the gold iPhone rumor wouldn't die.

It may have been because I continued telling people, like my supervisor, my counterparts, really everyone else short of skywriting it over the building, that we were getting them in gold. But who can say?

No one could stand Patrick Bateman so everyone was enjoying the idea of something bedeviling him, for a change. Sometimes my organizational role was to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

Those in the know included the "smoker's hut." The "smoker's hut" is where you went to get the latest news and rumors. Every agency has one or some equivalent of one.

The "smoker's hut" was populated primarily by people who'd been with Census for 20+ years and a lot of them were administrative assistants. These folks answered the SES'ers phones and did their calendars so they knew everything that was going on. And they talked during their union-enforced cigarette breaks. For a box of their preferred brand of cigarette, they would welcome you into the coven. For a carton of them– you were cosa nostra.

They, of course, thought it was hilarious that Patrick Bateman was going to get gold iPhones.

With the gold iPhone delivery rumor looming, they sent another SES Division Chief down to "talk to me." He was friends with my CAO and we also got along because he had a sense of humor. But that was only when he was drunk.

Fortunately for me, he usually was and also had an unfortunate habit of falling asleep during meetings. For anyone not read in on this and found this bothersome, I would explain away his sleep as a quiet moment of prayer. Unless, of course, if he was snoring and blew my cover. He usually did.

Drinker: Hey you're not getting gold iPhones are you?

Me: What? No. Those are super popular. I doubt we could get them even if we wanted them. I tried to get one for my wife and Big Red Phone said they were sold out for months.

Drinker: Good. (takes a big sip from what I can clearly smell as vodka in a coffee mug)

Me: Yep...real good.

But Census wasn't the only government agency who had to have sweet Chinese made Apple products. Apparently all of the children of Los Angeles yearned for the apps.

The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is the governing body for public schools in Los Angeles California. They typically have over 500,000 students under their purview in loco parentis.

Now, because LAUSD is still government, they couldn't just say "iPad buy" they had to gussy it up by calling it the Common Core Technology Project. It featured several phases and was talked about as if it was the building of the Shasta Dam, which my grandfather worked on as a Okie child.

LAUSD's decision to switch to iPads was curious for several reasons that varied from political, to contractual, to the technical.

First, iPads and actual school work don't really mix because of a tablet's basic form factor. Namely the lack of a physical keyboard or any ports, which also worried Census experts. LAUSD ended up having to spend tens of millions to get wireless keyboards for the few they rolled out because typing projects on a digital keyboard sucks

Second, they're just as expensive, if not more so, than a basic WinTel laptop of the same era. In a coup for LAUSD, they were "super good" negotiators and got the per unit price dropped from $1,125 to a mere $678.58.

For comparison purposes, a few years earlier, the One Laptop Per Child initiative, from a couple of gents out of MIT's Media Lab, wanted to create a computer for the world's youth based on a average daily budget of $2 a day. OLpC was aiming for a laptop that cost $100 a unit and it was deemed an abject failure, in addition to many other reasons, when the devices that were eventually produced cost just over $200 a unit.

Third, they aren't really secure or well integrated into legacy IT environments, especially in the education sector at the time. They found this out in hilarious fashion when the children, who were probably more adept with Apple products than the average LAUSD employee, figured out various ways to get full and unfettered access to the "pilot" devices and the open internet. It's refreshing to see LAUSD generate the kind of entreprenuerial environment for future tech CEO's, who figured out they could charge less technically astute friends money to unlock their pilot iPads for them.

When I found out about the LAUSD's iPad buy for several billion dollars, which they had to raise bonds to pay for instead of...well actual school buildings, my interest was piqued. I found a copy of their Request for Proposals (RFP). This is usually referred to as a "solicitation," no not that kind get your head out of the gutter. I called up the purchasing folks to learn more.

Me: Hey there I'm Joe Schmuckatelly with the Department of Commerce here in Washington D.C. I was hoping to chat with you a little bit about this iPad buy you're doing.

LAUSD Buyer: Okay are you submitting a proposal?

Me: Uh no, I am with the federal government.

LAUSD Buyer: Oh what do you want?

Me: Well I'm trying to buy them too and I was wondering what did you do about the sweatshop provision?

LAUSD Buyer: The what?

Unlike the federal government, LAUSD didn't have to follow the BAA or the TAA. But they did have a mandatory clause in all contracts forbidding harsh, illegal working conditions. This is called the "sweat shop clause" after the L.A. famous instances in the garment industry.

Unfortunately, the LAUSD buyer hadn't connected the dots between the "sweat shop clause" and the conditions of Apple manufacturing facilities at the time when nets had to be installed to try and catch workers jumping to their deaths rather than continue assembling iPads anymore. I guess that clause only counts if it's in the American made sweatshops versus offshored ones or something.

Me: Oh...I guess nevermind. Do you have any advice or tips about running this kind of procurement?

LAUSD Buyer: Oh sure! Page numbers! You have to make sure to specify a maximum number of pages. We didn't put that in and we got thousands of pages of sales material and other junk.

Me: (silence for several long moments) Ok well thank you very much for your time.

Much like some of my more experienced technical colleagues at Census expected, and kept raising as a point to Patrick Bateman to no avail, the program was a complete disaster.

There was an FBI raid, never a good sign, and a two year SEC investigation into top officials that eventually led to no charges, but the damage was done.

Emails, there's somehow always emails, were published that showed the whole thing was basically "wired" for Apple and the education material company Pearson from the beginning by the LAUSD Superintendant.

Any good procurement person could read between the lines of their RFP and knew this already. When a solicitation is "wired," it means that it is clearly intended for a single manufacturer or company. It's a tactic to dissuade anyone else from bidding as they will pick up on this and not want to spend bid and proposal costs on something that can only end in litigation, and/or heart break.

My favorite email was when the LAUSD Superintendant, John Deasy who even owned Apple stock, sent short #humblebrag about chatting with Apple leaders like Tim Cook by first name:

“I had an excellent meeting with Tim at Apple last Friday,” referring to Apple CEO Tim Cook. “The meeting went very well and he was fully committed to being a partner.”

But the head of LAUSD wasn't the only "executive" in government that had it bad for Apple.

So too did the the head of GSA's Federal Acquisition Service (FAS) at the time.

And unlike some putz in a school district, no matter how large, the GSA FAS Commissioner has real big government power. Operationally, the GSA FAS Comissioner is the de facto Number 2 for not just GSA but procurement across all of government.

To give you an example, the head of procurement only at the Air Force at one time was nicknamed The Dragon Lady. Just being in charge of procurement for one branch of the military meant that she held all of the real power, which eventually led to her corruption and downfall.

The problem was that Apple products were still illegally made in foreign plants with suicide nets. So the FAS Commissioner decided to use his immense power to...let's diplomatically say "follow the letter while ignoring the spirit" of the laws.

Using the "letter of the law," the FAS Commissioner decided that the iPhone was no longer a handheld computer. In fact they were almost negligible, meaning we could just ignore their per unit cost. Because the little pocket computers were annointed as "Service Enabling Devices."

Unless otherwise specifically agreed to by the Government, a SED includes all equipment (hardware, firmware, and software) needed within the contractor's network to provide service (e.g., any wireline access arrangement-implementing equipment, such as a SONET access arrangement Add/ Drop Multiplexer (ADM)).

A SED could be of the following technology-based categories:

Wireline SEDs, such as a Channel Service Unit/Data Service Unit (CSU/DSU), a router, or a multiplexer.

Wireless SEDs, such as a cell phone.

Satellite SEDs, such as a Very Small Aperture Terminal (VSAT).

Management & Applications, and Security services SEDs, such a teleconferencing unit or an Anti-Virus software.

So wait, you're saying just changing the name magically transforms the phone?

Yes, at least that was the official position of the FAS Comissioner.

And considering Western, Eurocentric legal philosophy, this is true of almost all human acts. Otherwise how could we distinguish the simple act of killing another human being as either "murder," probably the most basic illegal act, or "self-defense," which can be legal?

Further, the FAS Comissioner issued a public decree when he did it. And no one objected because they too wanted that delicious, Chinese made tech. Now you can't actually link to it because it's within a government only portal, but it exists.

The legal mechanism GSA used to pulls this off is called a FAR deviation. A discretionary authority buried in the regulations that let them ignore the BAA/TAA laws. Although, it was coupled with a very "belaboured and tenuous" legal analysis to get there.

The logic here contradicts itself but only if you read it from start to finish, which most people do not.

The FAR's group offer analysis referenced above is a somewhat complicated test used when you have an American thing up against a foreign thing.

Let's suppose the U.S. Government needed wireless service, and for some reason, a major telecommunications company out of Europe, like Deustche Telekom or Vodaphone, decided to throw their fancy foreign hats into the ring and submit a bid against AT&T or Verizon.

In that scenario, the government would have to conduct a rigorous analysis and price evaluation to determine the ratios of each distinct, traceable cost in the basket of corporate goodies. This process analyzes the whole group's offer one by one.

The problem is that when GSA wrote the deviation to justify the SED's as de minimis, fancy lawspeak for negligible or inconsequential or I totally didn't even think of this because it's so teeny tiny, no foreign company ever offered a bid.

Therefore, you would never use the group offer analysis. As GSA's own justification admits, the cellular service is domestic in origin.

But again, no one objected to the public declaration that didn't track.

This was the equivalent of cutting out a chapter of Moby Dick and shoving it into the third act of Hamlet for a local community theater performance.

One would think that shoving a long Ishmaelian monologue into the middle of Hamlet would confuse the audience. That the actors are suddenly referring to each other by completely different names, using completely different speech patterns, and there being a whale suddenly in it would be jarring enough to make them ask questions. Like what the hell was going on here?

But what if 99.5% of the audience didn't ask questions about why there is suddenly a white whale out of 19th century New England in Hamlet?

What if the audience love the whale? What if they wanted more whale in Hamlet?

Congress didn't say anything about this deviation, or the gazillions of precious taxpayer dollars spent as a result. Because Congress was also largely using their Chinese made iPhones that the Congressional 1102's just bought for them. Because, again, Congress exempted itself from following the FAR and the laws they passed for Executive Branch.

And companies like Google, who had successfully sued the government in the past, didn't sue for some reason, despite having a major financial incentive to do so. Neither did the Canadian Research in Motion (RIM) who made BlackBerries. They just died a slow death.

About a year after Rick Perry's iPhone spiking, Google sold Motorola...to the Chinese company Lenovo and American Moto X factory in Texas shut down.

At the time, Lenovo had been slowly cannibalizing former American tech icons like IBM's ThinkPad line.

For example, when Lenovo acquired IBM's server product line, which was used extensively across federal data centers, this led to a "fun" shopping period that resembled the Cabbage Patch Kids riot in the 1980s. It was the end of the fiscal year, and everyone was trying to stock up on the remaining TAA compliant servers like Elaine's Today Sponges.

To this day, I will always wonder whether or not the government would have changed the outcome of history had it followed its own rules. Maybe it wouldn't have, but we'll never know.

But it is a fairly pathetic state of affairs that the current President of the United states, the supposed leader of the free world in the greatest nation to ever exist, has tried to unsuccessfully force Apple to make the iPhone in America. Literally whine and beg.

Since the Cuban Missile crisis, the President of the United States has had the ability to launch nuclear missiles that would eradicate almost all biologial life on the planet in about 5 minutes. A responsibility so great, that a presidential advisor once recommended that the launch ability should be surgically sealed inside a Presidental aide's chest cavity. The prospect of nuclear annihilation was so great, that the President would first have to cut someone open with a knife and their bare hands to kill everyone.

This suggestion was never seriously considered because the chiefs at the Pentagon were worried it'd prevent the President from ever actually launching them...

But here is that same nuclear empowered President essentially chastising and pleading with the CEO of Apple to make little computer in America.

Back in my timeline, my CAO eventually found out my gold iPhone scheme and sadly forced me to switch them to black, even though we'd never see the back of them.

The plan for Decennial became to use the new GSA created deviation to buy as many as we wanted.

A host of other misadventures and battles ensued over the years, some of which I'll cover here in other posts. At one point, frustrated by a cloud initiative that was bedeviling me at the same time, I jokingly suggested at a Decennial Bi-Weekly Acquisition Planning meeting that we should just do the phones "as a service" like the cloud.

They took my joke seriously, a habit that would consistently lead to trouble, and did that instead. This raises a whole host of other legal considerations around restrictions on leasing, et cetera, but we won't go down that rabbit hole.

And at this point, the battles over trying to do the "right thing" caused me to leave before it got implemented. Patrick Bateman also got shown the door, which is a whole other story. Even my CAO, and lots of the Agency's IT and Acquisition divisions, like Patrick Bateman's Hatchet Man, fled before the consequences of these shenanigans caught up with them.

The team that stayed on got an innovation award for it, and yet somehow still screwed it up.

"As a service" has since become a standard practice for people who want to use illegal Chinese-made tech without the responsibility of owning it, despite never knowing it's genesis was a joke because it seemed so blatantly illegal.

People, especially in government, inherit solutions from problems they had never been witness to, which is why I'm writing this in the first place. There's also a futility in wondering what could have been, whether or not we actually have any control over outcomes, and how it all works.

But the real trick is to learn something, especially if you're sad.

This concludes Part 5 and the lesson(s) from the iPhone story.