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Fraudulent Anti-Terrorist Software Led US To Ground Planes
The Register, citing this Playboy article, reports that a Nevada man named Dennis Montgomery was able in 2003 to connive his way into a position of respectability at the CIA on the basis of his company's claimed ability, using software, to "detect and decrypt 'barcodes' in broadcasts by Al Jazeera, the Qatari news station." Montgomery was CTO of Reno-based eTreppid Technologies, which produced bucketloads of data purported to represent "geographic coordinates and flight numbers" hidden in these broadcasts. All of which, it seems, was hokum, finally debunked in cooperation with a branch of the French intelligence service — but not, says the article, before the fabricated information, chalked up to "credible sources," was used as justification to ground some international flights, and even evacuate New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
If one guy can pull this kind of stuff off, imagine what would happen if he "tipped" some of his worst enemies to them. And to the terrorist prison camps they go.
Frances Townsend, a homeland security adviser to Bush, said she did not regret having relied on Montgomery's mysterious intelligence. "It didn't seem beyond the realm of possibility. We were relying on technical people to tell us whether or not it was feasible," she said.
"It didn't seem beyond the realm of possibility. We were relying on shit like this to maintain the illusion that we are doing something to combat terrorism. When he asked to close the museum of modern art, we were overjoyed. Talk about high-profile!"
The reality is that there is one and only one way to combat terrorism against the US: stop training terrorists and betraying them.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
“What were we going to do and how would we screen people? If we weren’t comfortable we wouldn’t let a flight take off.”
Why are they still following flights and such so closely, while leaving all the other ways open? It wouldn't have the same effect this time, because terrorists just go for emotions of people to get their message out.
Seems like hysterical thinking for me.
Playboy article? I guess the real news here is that someone actually reads playboy for the articles. Who knew?
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
The author was on NPR a few days ago [transcript and audio], in case you won't visit PlayBoy or get distracted once you get there :-)
Here came someone with a magic box who provided an easy solution, and the eggheads and their political masters bought it hook, line and sinker. What I find extraordinary is that the NSA was not involved or asked to vet this guy's findings. Billions of dollars and some of the finest brains working there, and no one thought to call them? Looks like even in 2003 inter-agency cooperation wasn't going very well.He was CIAs asset, and they were not going to share.
My conclusion: con man, and he will probably get away with this, because the government can not publicly prosecute him without looking like an Idiot.
That software, coupled with the (ok, Hanlon should be right) stupidity of the ones believing in this software was right and acting according should be punished. They were doing the work of terrorists, spreading panic between people.
In the other hand, should be a lesson to government between the difference of open and closed source. Snake oil is harder to sell if you can peek at the formula.
How about detection of satanic messages in music. They are everywhere as this http://blogs.igalia.com/berto/2008/01/22/satanic-messages-in-the-computer-era/ person nows. And imagine the target audience. Concerned parents are so much easier than bureaucrats to convince. Hope this idea is still unpatented.
"Military intelligence"
So, who do you think will be prosecuted for this? The guy who told them this nonsense, or the CIA guy who payed him to produce the "intel" they wanted to hear?
Along with the recently-revealed origin of the "45 minutes" claim here in the UK, this starts to paint a picture of the way the War on Terror is justified: agencies don't make stuff up: they pay some idiot to make stuff up, so that when questions are asked, blame can go to the idiot instead of the highly-trained people that somehow end up listening to idiots.
This also shows how easy it is to fool most people by treating computers like magic. You can't say stuff came to you in a vision anymore, but claim that magic software told you and most people are too scared of technical stuff to think to hard about it.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
but fucked up the end-game, according to charlie wilson's war;-}
an i saw this story on network news last night...
The next Woodward and Bernstein... to be brought to you by playboy?
Renounce Empire.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I worked for a Very Large Company looking to buy image compression software from this dude many years back. A co-worker did some extremely clever testing of the compression software that proved conclusively that the compression algorithms were cheating, and that it was intentional fraud. Upper management still wanted to believe the cheater and not our own internal debunking. Amazing how non-objective people can be, even (or especially) managers of scientists and engineers.
you aint seen nothing yet. There is this site called 4chan and the users are posting hidden messages in pictures. Some are harmless others ..... well i won't speculate here in a public place :P
Fear-ridden sheep will believe anything you tell them if it make them sleep at night.
- Nietzsche
Playboy has articles?
I know from someone who worked in the DOD these cons can come across a single desk more than once a week, with, interestingly, professional presentations totally at odds with the quality of the science. If it were your job to sort through these, and if you had to sort through HUNDREDS in your career, then the one con who got lucky guesses (law of averages and all) during your testing of him would end your career. Remember a 99% accurate test is wrong 1% of the time. Also consider it can be just as bad (or worse) if you turn someone away who did have something novel, especially if it costs lives.
we still don't care about trains?
You can't hijack a train, and take it somewhere else, later ramming it into a huge building full of people in some other city.
That hasn't stopped the NYPD from routinely doing baggage screening of passengers before letting them on to NYCT trains.
Amtrak's policies say they will conduct baggage screening before letting you on their trains, but they just don't have the budget to actually screen more than a handful of bags per-station/per-day because they can't pay their screeners' salaries out of the gigantic NYPD budget or the bottomless Homeland Security budget.
If security screeners at the airports similarly had to be paid out of the airlines' operating budget you can bet there would be a whole lot less of it.
Comparing our voluntary invasion of sovereign nations to WWII and the Revolutionary War is completely ridiculous. Afghanistan's government requested Soviet military support to quell the fundamentalist Islamo-Fascists from overthrowing their secular Marxist government. We decided to punish the CCCP by "giving them their own Vietnam." We gathered every crazy Islamic fundamentalist we could lay our hands on, trained them, and showed that it was possible to defeat a world superpower. We poured billions of dollars of weapons into the country, and Russia poured billions in, and we had a proxy war that completely destroyed Afghanistan, and killed possibly millions of people. Then, as soon as the Russians left, refused to give a dime to build anything.
If it was just limited to Afghanistan, I could say it was an honest, one time mistake. However, we have invaded and overthrown so many democratic governments that it's almost a farce at this point to claim that we support freedom. It's obvious that we support whatever entity follows our orders. The only thing that will make the US care about your freedom is if you have some resource under your feet and a governent that is not playing ball.
And here's the amazing part about your post:
And I suppose we fought the British solely because they trained us how to fight during the French and Indian war and like us should have had the decades of foresight to know they'd be better off not providing aid and letting their enemy take over those lands.
Now, who decided that Britain's imperial claim to whatever they wanted was moral? Because if all you need to justify taking the lives of foreign nationals is the desire to have their stuff, then apparently you do not subscribe to any sort of value system, other than might makes right.
And of course everyone buys that magazine because of articles like this. Hmm ... and of course *everyone* reads the articles.
So how many of those terrorist scenarios that they avoided have been for "real"? Does it mean that teh
"Montgomery looked up at Bauder and told him it was okay. They would communicate via an open cell phone line. He told Bauder to listen to the phone. “‘When you hear the tone, I want you to hit the space bar on the keyboard.’” Bauder, in other words, would be secretly communicating with Montgomery" Dumb ass... Montgomery should make program to automaticaly press the space key when he hitted his cell phone number. With that he would have a witnessa against him.
A co-worker did some extremely clever testing of the compression software that proved conclusively that the compression algorithms were cheating, and that it was intentional fraud.
Cheating how? Either it decompresses or it doesn't...
Yes, that's the "War On Terror" alright.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
> repeat the same mistakes with Iran.
i think u mean iraq;-) and yes, appeasing the peace@anyPrice-nix by pulling out would be repeating our mistakes:-(
i think it was colin powell who said we broke it, we bought it...we have no choice but to protect the world's energy supply...
Everyone is under a lot of pressure to perform. I worked for a defense contractor for 2 projects. The 1st project was a success, and the 2nd was a complete disaster. On that 2nd project, the customers were asking for a great deal, and many of them didn't understand that. They wanted in 1 year what had previously taken 15 years to do, and instead of being helpful, kept on throwing up idiotic roadblocks, for political reasons. As in, no non-American software allowed, because terrorists might have programmed in back doors and booby traps. That wasn't the real reason-- what they were really trying to do was force the use of what they were comfortable with, which was Windows. Security was the ultimate excuse, and was roundly abused to justify anything they wished.
Unfortunately, our management opted for dishonesty, in so far as they could agree on anything at all. Kissed up mightily, promising to do the job in 6 months knowing full well that they could not, and then tried to baffle with bull. Played along with the politicking. Leaned on their own people to rubberstamp things, or dress stuff up, and fought with each other over what we should do. Paralyzed by impossible and contradictory demands, and rank incompetence, we ended up accomplishing absolutely nothing. Gave the customers manure for a year, and that was not entirely unwelcome to some of the customers as they used us to hire a few favorites, and order equipment they'd get to keep after we crashed and burned. When enough of the customers at last got wise, the management blamed everything on us underlings and fired us all, to gain themselves more time. That didn't work for long, and finally, the contract was cancelled. Was the most miserable job experience I ever had.
This sort of scam is entirely believable. The defense people are suckers for security theater. Not the brightest at seeing through it, nor are they particularly good at telling the honest and competent from the dishonest and incompetent, even when it should be obvious. They don't help themselves when they engage in their own brand of lying, and collude. Honest contractors have a rough time being heard above the noise made by the legions of incompetent liars who are willing to promise anything to get that contract.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
"Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time...." ... as he sits in a dark jail cell somewhere waiting to be convicted of treason. We hope.
that the U.S. C.I.A. is the United States Central Idiot Agency.
They should have the actor who's puppet channelled Jerry Lewis's "Nutty Professor" in Speilberg's movie "1941" as their Director.
Yuk Yuk Yuk.
How about "Gen. Buck Turgidson" from Dr. Strangelov who was played by George C. Scott, as the C.I.A.'s Chief Scientist. In this way, "Climate Change" becomes Emergency Attack Plan R, and Obama channels the character Gen. Jack Ripper, also from Dr. Strangelove, and turns Hawaii in the Burpelson Air Force Base, where he dutifully awaits retalliation from the French/Brits/Ruskies/IPCC while preserving our vital body fluids.
Human irrationality has many well known forms - this is only one of them.
Stuart Sutherland's book Irrationality is a fascinating read and explains this sort of apparent craziness.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Irrationality-Stuart-Sutherland/dp/1905177070
lossy advertized as lossless?
Drop every second outgoing frame from 50FPS stream, send at 25FPS, then double each arriving frame and advertize maintained 50FPS?
Provide just some scrambling with zero compression?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
But the original poster said that it took "extremely clever" analysis to discover the fraud. Subtraction of the compressed image or frame from the original is a standard technique to check compression accuracy (besides eyeballing). How did the charlatan fool that metric?
Table-ized A.I.
It might have hidden part of the data elsewhere. I can get an illusory 1% edge over any existing product by moving 1% of the resulting file somewhere else and pulling it back when uncompression occurs.
The usual cheating is to pretend to "compress" the data, but actually hide it some other place on the machine.
So you get a smaller filesize, and it decompresses alright too.
But copy the "compressed" file to another machine without copying the hidden data and it "fails" to decompress.
Does my bum look big in this?
Perhaps he promised a lossless algorithm but it was lossy? That wouldn't take cleverness to expose, though. Perhaps it does something like split the file into two parts and hide the other deep in the computer, so it appears to have achieved a factor of compression twice what it should have been?
I wouldn't imagine CIA would be so inept they would not ask for and look into the source code.
There must be some other explanation.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Its incidents like this that have produced a lot of the hatred towards the US overseas.
Its important, if you claim the moral imperative, to show that you are ensuring your armed forces are living up to it. While I think the invasion of Afghanistan was the correct move, and I support the troops over there wholeheartedly (including those from Canada, my home country), I think Iraq was actually a mistake, or at the least has been grossly mismanaged. All the US is achieving is to produce a few thousand more people who hate the US in the end.
All this shows is that Bush, Cheney etc (who are ultimately responsible for the horrendous abuses of the Geneva convention that have occurred in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo bay), really should be tried as war criminals. That won't happen because the US has evidently decided they are not subject to the same rules that they insist be applied to everyone else, but it should happen if the US truly was dedicated to supporting the goals of its Constitution and the agreements it has signed in the past.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
I thought the tongue in cheek was pretty clear. Yesterday's Freedom Fighter is today's Islamo-Fascist Terrorist. Anyway...
I've read a bunch about what lead to the conflict in Afghanistan, even the interviews with Brzezinski on how the CIA plotted to draw Russia in. What is your source stating that the Afghan government told the Soviets that they didn't want support?
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html
January 1998
Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?
Brzezinski: It isn't quite that. We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.
Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?
Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?
Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?
Dennis has been at this awhile in one form or another:
http://www.sqnlaw.com/2008/01/page-v-superior-court.html
Search for the word "oral".
The title quote is from the 2006 German film "The Lives of Others."
how do you cheat with compression. Either it compresses or it doesn't. If it doesn't decompress then you know it doesn't work.
Now maybe if he indicated that it was lossless compression and it was actually lossy, that would be a different matter, but it shouldn't take all that much to figure that out, definitely not clever work.
The usual cheating is to pretend to "compress" the data, but actually hide it some other place on the machine.
So you get a smaller filesize, and it decompresses alright too.
But copy the "compressed" file to another machine without copying the hidden data and it "fails" to decompress.
It's better than that. If you're using NTFS or HFS+, you can squirrel the data away in an Alternate Data Stream/Resource Fork and the data will be copied around with the file. In a real sense, it is part of the file and yet not. Might even get copied to another machine if the medium was a suitably-formatted device (not sure about that).
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
AC has garbled the story slightly. The fraudulent part was not the degree of compression, but the software's supposed ability to recognize objects in a video stream.
http://www.lvrj.com/news/47141377.html
Which explains the credulity. This software would have been very valuable if it had been legit.
You mean like hiding parts of it in the TEMP folder? That *would* be sneaky.
Table-ized A.I.
Yes, you can do that with NTFS.
I used to store some of my passwords in the NTFS alternate stream of some other file, until I discovered TrueCrypt. (Yes, it was "security through obscurity", so it doesn't really work; but everyone forgets to mention that it is fun)
The data is preserved as long as it stays on NTFS. It is lost when transferred through FTP, copied to another filesystem, zipped, etc.
If I remember correctly, it is preserved when copying through a Windows network to another NTFS drive.
The emails are not in dispute. But in Nevada, and even at the Federal level, funny things happen with investigations of powerful people. Jim Gibbons later claimed that this was were probably references to campaign contributions, which he said were lawful and reported in accordance with campaign finance laws. Everyone accepts the later claim that these emails "...were probably references to campaign contributions, which he said were lawful and reported in accordance with campaign finance laws." [quotation from the Wall Street Journal]. Right, Warren Tripp went FRANTIC about lawful and proper campaign contributions, which were to be handed over within International Waters on a cruise ship? Anyway, Warren was obviously a computer expert, knowing that "Erase this message from your computer right now!" would destroy all references and copies of the email. (guffaw.)
So from a taxpayer's perspective, and the perspective of anyone who has been abused by the "truthiness" of that software in production, they ALL suck, and Dennis, the "creator", sucks worse. But I feel that Warren and Jim are "worse"- because (IMO) they're not showing signs of overwhelming mental illness. They're just greedy, lying. cheating, criminal bstrds.
Yea, I don't know why those crazy fundamentalists would want to replace that lovely secular government that was in bed with Russia that executed around 27,000 people while attempting to implement their "modern" Marxist reforms. And after all, Russia was just there at this government's request to protect them from their own people, even if part of this protection involved having Spetsnaz forces assassinate the president of Afghanistan because he seemed like he couldn't be trusted. All under the "Treaty of Friendship" of course. Cause you know, go ahead and assassinate our leader if you don't trust them is a common provision in such treaties.
So we gave afghan fighters the ability to take their country back from a foreign power and then at the end of it our supposedly heinous crime is letting them alone to run their own country as they see fit rather then substituting our power and influence for Russia's? If that's your big complaint then you must have been ecstatic that we went back in and are now staying there and funding rebuilding.
And I suppose we fought the British solely because they trained us how to fight during the French and Indian war and like us should have had the decades of foresight to know they'd be better off not providing aid and letting their enemy take over those lands.
Now, who decided that Britain's imperial claim to whatever they wanted was moral? Because if all you need to justify taking the lives of foreign nationals is the desire to have their stuff, then apparently you do not subscribe to any sort of value system, other than might makes right.
Ummmm...I'm not aware that anyone did, let alone I. I mean, did you honestly read that single sentence about the ridiculous foresight it would take to see the Revolution during the French and Indian Wars and somehow glean a position on my entire value system and my perception on the morality of the actions of the British Empire? Or are you just making up an untrue position, saying I subscribe to it, and then arguing against it to discredit me, which is an actual strawman, unlike simply pointing out apt historical examples whose frequency show that any time you help someone militarily at one point it's likely to come back to you at another and it's ludicrous to expect the foresight to ignore a current danger and not help a supposed ally in the fear that they may one day turn against you.