When I got the email regarding the project, I noticed that it was in fact a forwarded email from a recruiter who wanted to "staff" a position at the Department of Justice...looking for a person who had experience with the Ping line. Then I saw this press release from Ping, stating:
...PingFederate will be part of the expanded RISSNET architecture used to enable law enforcement and criminal justice agencies throughout the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and the U.S. Territories to share intelligence and coordinate efforts against criminal and terrorist networks that operate in multiple locations.
That's some pretty serious stuff. Eric Norlin (who knows a thing or two about Ping) states this on his ZDNet blog:
Ping Identity announced that the U.S. Department of Justice selected them to provide federation to over 7,300 local law enforcement agencies and 700,000 law enforcement officials.I was interested. It was definitely something we could respond to. But the email's "staffing" approach of the whole thing kind of threw me off. The press release and the recruiter's email didn't seem to fit.
Anyhow, I got a phone call a few hours ago with the details. Worse than I imagined...they want a "resource" (guaranteed till February! yeehaw.), for a rate so low that we wouldn't even cover our costs. Could it be that the Department of Justice was just looking at a federation deployment for nearly three quarters of a million seats as something to throw a "resource" or two at? Anyone who knows anything about identity will tell you that federation could be pretty complicated stuff. Also, how could the rate possibly be so low? How many layers were between us and DOJ? Who's eating all of the service dollars? Even if there were alot of layers, would DOJ accept a team slapped together to deploy an enabling technology like federation? Somethings not right, definitely not right.
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