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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.
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.
but fucked up the end-game, according to charlie wilson's war;-}
an i saw this story on network news last night...
I never understood why Bush planed to bomb AlJazerea until now.
In case you missed it: Bush planed to bomb the TV station in an allied country until GB Premier Blair stopped him.
The person who knowingly sells parts or software or equipment to the government is attempting sabotage. We need to return to the quite legal custom of executing saboteurs.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
just an fyi:
That was Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his inauguration speech in 1933 during the Great Depression. I was starting to wonder why I should bother posting this info until it prompted me to look for a bit more info on it and I found this cool site: http://www.bartleby.com/124/
which contains the texts of the inauguration speeches for all of the Presidents of the US. Here's the actual quote, with a little more context:
quite a contrast to the 43rd President!
Yes, And this is why information theory needs to be taught in kinder garden, the problems being that A. Most Teachers Don't Understand Information Theory and B. Nobody has come up with a way to conceptualize Information Theory in a way that can be thought to very young kids and then built on through out there education. B is probably quite doable but A is really going to be the big stumbling block. But since Information Theory can be applied to most anything it would very beneficial to our society to groove it in on the same level as a shape like a triangles.
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.
“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.
Totally agree. I took Amtrak recently and I was *shocked* that there was absolutely no baggage screening or even a metal detector I had to go through to board the train--you just show up with your bags and walk in without any security, ID checks, or bag checks whatsoever. They don't even check for your ticket until about a half hour into the train ride. Sure, airport security sucks, but the last couple of major terrorist attacks in Europe were on trains and we still don't care about trains? This convinced me that the security circus crowd is correct...
The scary thing is that they did to background checks. And security checks. If you believe TFA, they did "due diligence" multiple times. The perps managed to scam that in two ways - first, they scammed the government into handing over millions for "R&D" and they pulled that scam off several times with different groups throughout the government. Second, they somehow managed to come in contact with a number of influential people, both within government and the just plain rich and dumb and they scammed them for all it's worth.
Sociopathy and social engineering. A win every time. For a while, at least.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!