Feds Pay Millions For Bogus Spy Software 221
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 saw something very similar. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:AJ (Score:5, Interesting)
Doesn't this show the need for Open Source? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Yet Another duplicate article (Score:5, Interesting)
I realize this is winter..but must we go on with the repeats?" [slashdot.org]
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.
Re:I saw something very similar. (Score:2, Interesting)
The Arab revolutions did not catch 'intelligence' by surprise. The agencies warned the regimes in the mid-east were fragile for years. The hard part is predicting exactly what-when will set off a revolution. Maybe you have the secret, I'm sure they'd listen to you.
Hell, even Clinton warned the Arabs at a conference in the mid-East in October that they risked being swept aside if they didn't loosen controls. Bush warned them in 2002-3 that the U.S. would support democracy everywhere. Democrats and Republicans laughed. Reagan set up a democracy agency in the federal government which was bipartisan and whose writ was to support democracy movements everywhere. Then Obama came along and cut their funding.
Why is Slashdot using double spacing for some posts and not others...and how can I turn it off or is this another new feature?
Re:File suit against the government (Score:4, Interesting)
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)