When Harold Hendershot joined the FBI two decades ago, agents used three-by-five index cards to organize their case information.
The U.S. crime fighting agency has since bought computers, Hendershot reassured a crowd of tech enthusiasts at a trade show in New York recently, but it"s still far from wired.
"The system is broken," said Hendershot, chief of the counterintelligence computer intrusion unit at the National Infrastructure Protection Center, a division of the FBI charged with protecting U.S. infrastructure.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation remains plagued by a lack of basic technology the average office worker takes for granted -- the ability to search text using more than one term or the ability to run even the 7-year-old computer operating system Windows 95.
By upgrading the computers used by the agents, the networks that connect those agents, the databases that store the information, and the software used to comb through the data, analysts say the FBI will be better off.