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Feds Pay Millions For Bogus Spy Software
gosuperninja writes "The US Government paid tens of millions of dollars to Dennis Montgomery because he said he had created software that could decode secret Al-Qaeda messages embedded in Al-Jazeera broadcasts. Even though the CIA figured out that his software was fraud in 2003, other defense agencies continued to believe in it. To date, the government has not prosecuted Montgomery, most likely to save itself the embarrassment."
Mr. Montgomery is about to go on trial in Las Vegas on unrelated charges of trying to pass $1.8 million in bad checks at casinos.
I'd say he has more than a "penchant" for gambling, it sounds like this guy genuinely has a problem.
Gambling issue aside, the sad thing regarding his behavior is that it's probably more commonplace than we're aware of. After 9/11, government officials were and still are under serious pressure to produce results, and often all too eager to sign a few papers here and there if it would magically solve their problems. The government trying to save face is merely a symptom, and should be treated as such. The only things I can think of that would discourage this behavior is active prevention through transparency and follow-up enforcement when that fails. One way or another, these charades must not be allowed to continue. I'm sure there's a lot more where that came from which fell into the well along the way, and it's going to add up. After all, it is the taxpayer that will shoulder the weight of these transactions.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
It certainly does make them look stupid when they're supposed to be protecting us from a big, determined, ruthless threat like Al-Qaeda and it ends up that they can't even protect themselves from simple fraud. It makes them look unnecessary, too, and that's the part they can't stand. It's the sort of thing that can make the political pressures no longer operate in their favor. Until this event they had the whole "be afraid!" thing working well for them.
In any kind of merit-based organization that would mean firing and replacing every decision-maker who chose to invest in this software. That's how they could regain credibility, by showing that they won't tolerate such gross incompetence within their ranks. Otherwise the question remains valid: how do they propose to protect the entire country from shadowy underground terrorist organizations bent on our destruction if they cannot even protect themselves from a common con-man?
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
This kind of hoaxes happens all the time. Check out Quadro Tracker and friends...
if your story is remotely true, then you are an idiot.
You could have made millions on this - everybody is in on the game, so are you holier than the rest of them?
You should have approached this fella privately and 'sold' him a module to his application that would also provide ability to track all GPS systems installed in all cars/other vehicles with just a few simple clicks.
If/when he would have told you: "BS/impossible", you could have just point back at him and winÐ and said something like - "not less possible than whatever you are selling", and you would have been in business.
Millions, you could have made millions.
You can't handle the truth.
This is another tech story which doesn't really involve tech: humans can get paid a lot to tell people what they want to hear too. Feds would really like to believe that Al-Jazeera is somehow connected to terrorism, even though it's a preposterous idea, and they're happy to pay someone for that information so they don't look like frauds themselves.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
This month, our government has proposed a budget in which we confess that we're so fucking poor that we cannot afford to subsidize nutritional supplements for babies born with low birth weight. And yet there seems to be a whole parallel word of government, where insane shit like this must still look insane, but fuck it, we'll fund it anyway, because we're rich and we don't give a fuck. I mean seriously, who could possibly make the decision "Yeah, that's worth paying for" when they hear a sales pitch like this? Only an organization that's so flush with money that they're experimenting with using it for toilet paper. It's a little shocking, given the nature of all the sacrifices the government is forcing on normal people.
That's the thing, don't you see? That their agenda is not incredibly obvious, that they're not spouting hate and misinformation every 10 microseconds. The US govt can't help but think they're hiding something. Any self-respecting news outlet should be biased and trollish on the edges!
Blaming a woman for the way she dresses in a rape trial would be attacking her freedom of expression.
Blaming the government for spending millions of our tax dollars on a blatant scam would be attacking the government officials for being abjectly stupid.
The former is not okay. The latter is responsible and should be expected.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
I think our point is that you clearly suffer from a severe case of the "no true scotsman" syndrome. Seemingly, nothing we tell you can change your mind, and it looks like you will soon end up with "yeah but I mean real intelligence agencies like the one specifically in my office". Since you change your target every time new evidence shows up, it's unfalsifiable.
c++;
They were worried about those, too.
This is because they are goddamn stupid morons. I don't know why we have to pretend that their worry makes any sense.
If all terrorists need is a signal, there are dozens of ways to set that up without bothering with news media.
Stick a specific post on a well-read bboard or something. In fact, have a dozen places that such a thing gets posted.
Or, better, post on usenet...it's utterly impossible to monitor people who read a specific post, as it's on a thousand different servers, and people usually download entire groups at once. I can just imagine how that works: 'Well, we caught one guy, and he says he was instructed to search everyday his usenet client for the string '39457295' in alt.tv.lost, and read codewords in that post as a trigger. We better...uh...check the thousands of servers that carry them for the IPs of tens thousands of people who download that group, and then look up their IPs.' Yeah, that sounds like a workable plan to find the other terrorists.
And this is _without_ any specialized software that can decode messages hidden in files.
Or just run a fricking classified ad, like spies used to do decades ago. (Although pretty soon 'buying a newspaper' will be suspicious in and of itself.)
At some point, we really need to start back up on the whole eugenics thing. People who think 'Recording a message that is blatantly from terrorists is a good way to pass messages _to_ terrorists', as opposed to the literally millions of other ways to get messages to sleeper agents, none of which require them carefully watching obviously terrorist-produced video (Which is somewhat suspicious)...well, they need to be castrated and thus removed from the gene pool. (Or, alternately, if we could somehow figure out how to get them to be, or at least mate with, terrorists...)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?