As technology rules more of our lives, stories like this will become much more common place:

An electronic monitoring system tracking sex offenders, parolees and others shut down, leaving authorities in 49 states blind to offenders’ movements for about 12 hours, authorities said Wednesday.

A system operated by Boulder, Colo.-based BI Incorporated unexpectedly hit its data storage capacity Tuesday morning, which blocked notifications to prisons and other corrections agencies on about 16,000 people being tracked, BI spokesman Jock Waldo said.

Tracking devices continued to record movement, but corrections agencies couldn’t immediately view the data. The company has substantially increased its data storage capacity and hasn’t heard of any safety issues, Waldo said. People being monitored were unaware of any problems.

And the article leaves you wondering about the credibility of the company charged with monitoring criminals, who in large part want to prey on our children. They reached a “data storage capacity”? Don’t they monitor their own hardware? Even Windows warns you when your hard drives are getting full. There are also tons of tools to monitor if you are reaching your peak on bandwidth.

All that makes this statement even more frustrating:

“In retrospect, we should have been able to catch this,” Waldo said.

That’s about like saying “hey sorry our electric got cut off and we couldn’t track offenders. In retrospect, we should have paid the bill earlier”. It’s piss-poor management, not an “oversight”. I have personally fired people for not properly monitoring infrastructure, and this is usually on things like websites, not something as important as tracking sex offenders.