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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.
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...
Renounce Empire.
<rant>
The Lord's Army in Uganda is a terrorist organization, so was the Shinning Path in Peru. What empire does Uganda or Peru need to renounce? When a Sunny terrorist blows up a Shiite mosque in Pakistan, what empire does the Shiite minority needs to renounce?
I could bring a large number of examples where terrorism has more to do with ideology, racism and religious fanaticism than with any notions of empire and its side effects. Just because the most notorious forms of terrorism (Islamic terrorism affecting the Western World) can be explained as a reaction of empire building, that does not mean the phenomenon of terrorism can be explained in those terms, much less solved from those premises.
The easiest way to answer a moral question without actually answering it is by pitching empty slogans. It sure feels great to say them (oh man, do you feel me? I do stand for something, so cliche... I mean avant garde!)...
</rant>
On another note, if the story is true, I do hope Montgomery and whoever up the intelligence food chain that was too stupid to paid him for his snake oil go burn in hell.
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
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.
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.
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"
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