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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.
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.
That's pretty much exactly what happened to a few of the people who ended up at Guantanmo Bay -- rewards were offered for tips that led to the capture of terrorists or terrorist sympathizers in Afghanistan in ~2001-2002. It worked great, as they began receiving a ton of tips from the formerly unhelpful local populace. It seems fairly obvious now that a not insignificant amount of the tips were completely fabricated, indicating that people who were completely unrelated to any real sympathy for al'Qaeda, or perhaps people who were the target of grudges, were doing things that they were not doing, or wanted to do things that they did not want to do.
Nobody seemed to care very much, since it didn't involve US citizens, and since people had let fear control their lives and did not want to take any chances, no matter how remote they are. Hey Sarge, Habib from Jalalabnotgonnaworkhereanymore says this derka farmer in a village 10 miles away hates America! What are the chances Habib would lie to us?
Because the US is now self-terrorizing, no bombers needed. We needlessly disrupt and frighten on our own to keep people on edge. And because once grown, government never shrinks, the massive increase in HSA and other such frightmongering will be a part of our culture (and budget) for the rest of United States history.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
i agree with your first point, this whole "do something" disease has to stop. doing something just for the sake of doing something is never the right solution.
as for your other point. while i don't agree that we trained all the terrorists in the world today, i know we train people we shouldn't train and they will come back to haunt us. however, i will not agree that we betrayed most of them and surely that is not why they want to blow themselves up. stop with this battered wife syndrome mentality of it's our fault, if we just didn't upset them they won't beat/kill us anymore. ridiculous!
take for instance Afghanistan. we "trained" them to fight the Soviets(biggest problem at the time). when the Soviets left, we used diplomacy and agreed with them to keep our hands off Afghanistan, there was no longer any Soviets in country for our new "allies" to fight. leaving them to form their own country is not a betrayal. do you really want to argue that we should of went in and set up our form of government? we did the right thing and it came back to bite us in the ass. damned if we do, damed if we don't. it's a little more complicated then, we upset some people 20 years ago and they are still trying to pay us back. if anything, diplomacy with our enemies(Soviets) led to this.
There you go.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2005/11/22/exclusive-bush-plot-to-bomb-his-arab-ally-115875-16397937/
Second hit on Google. Now that wasn't so hard, was it ?
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
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.
the nation
The reality is that there is one and only one way to combat terrorism against the US: stop training terrorists and betraying them.
Bzzzzt!
The only way to effectively combat terrorism is to stop freaking the fuck out. By definition terrorists want to create terror. So stop over-reacting. Stop treating terrorism as some special evil that is a force unto itself worthy of endless news coverage and the constant ratcheting up of 'safety' rules. Live our lives as the free and the brave, not pathetic slaves to fear.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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.
or tortured to death despite being completely innocent. [wikipedia.org].
And the people who killed him were charged with murder.
No. The low-level guys got minor slaps on the wrist and the officers got awards.
For example, the officer in command of the unit that tortured people to death at Bagram (Carolyn Wood) was awarded awarded a bronze star and then transferred to Abu Ghraib where the prisoner famous abuses then took place and then she was awarded another bronze star.
So,just from that, it's pretty clear that the Bush administration (and their supporters) really just didn't care. But more fundamentally, it's been common knowledge in civilized countries for hundreds of years that if you set up a "justice" system without proper checks and balances (right to counsel, habeas corpus, etc) that your "justice" system is going to do bad things (torture) to innocent people.