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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."
I worked at one of the 'Agenices' and during my time there (in the last 3 years) I worked with a similar fellow. He was introduced to me as this utter genius. An independant subcontractor who, with his never seen friend, had come up with a software solution that could allow their laptop to snoop on any Internet traffic, anywhere in the world at any time...instantly. "It sees everything, you just look at the part that interests you", he explained to me. Sort of like a machine running Wireshark with the NIC in PROM mode, but for the entire Internet. No one in the Gov questioned him. No a single soul. He was a contractor (like myself) and was being paid so much that he was given two billets to cover the cost. So I sat through his presentation and immediately threw a BS flag. He flipped out, stormed out and no one knew what to do. I did my best to explain the facts that made his claims impossible. I asked the room if they'd ever tested his system in a real world environment. "Call your wife, have her get online and tell her what's going on. Then have Peter look at her traffic". After about a half-hour, they started to realize what had happened, you could see it on their faces. Thing is, this guy had been paid millions in funding a salary. I don't think his business partner ever existed. What did they do about it? Nothing. You see, in order to go after him, they'd look foolish. Not going to happen. Not in the Intel community.
I've actually found Al Jazeera reporting to be much better than most American news sources. The Al Jazeera articles are usually well written, don't have sensationalist headlines, and you don't have to sift through all the latest celebrity crap. And the bias is nowhere near as blatant and pervasive as CNN, Fox News, and the like. I can't comment too much on the Arabic version however, as my Arabic is nowhere near good enough for that yet.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
More than ever, especially at the government level?
With closed source, they just get magical black boxes that somehow work (or not, in this case), without actually understanding what it does. Unless they want to spend more money reverse engineering the whole thing.
I realize this is winter..but must we go on with the repeats?"
It's a bit more interesting than that. This guy had been outed two years ago. The Federal government, instead of just admitting it got screwed, decided to toss the whole incident under the rug and declare it a secret. This is even more outrageous than the initial fraud and incompetence. Using secrecy as an excuse for incompetence is nothing new, however it is such a serious issue that it needs to be brought up every time it's discovered.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Sure, of course there are going to be differences. Analogies are always imperfect. However, the original comment stated that the criminal should be "left alone" and the government punished for the failure. If you find that approach to be in any way reasonable, there's something very wrong with you.
(and no, I'm not suggesting that YOU do, I'm only explaining why I responded in the way I did)