Fraudulent Anti-Terrorist Software Led US To Ground Planes 147
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.
This just shows how broken it all is (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
diff needed (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:This just shows how broken it all is (Score:3, Insightful)
Flights (Score:5, Insightful)
“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.
Re:diff needed (Score:5, Insightful)
Must have missed the part where we betrayed the Mujaheddin to the Soviets as well as the part where any of those Afghani fighters were involved in the events of 9/11. Unless by 'betrayed' you mean the war ended, most of the foreign fighters left Afghanistan, we were no longer needed so stopped training, and the groups of foreign fighters began to self-radicalize as only the more radical members interested in fighting foreign powers rather than defending Islamic lands remained while the rest went home.
The 'your own fault for ever having helped them' adage is certainly drawing psychologically but doesn't really hold water. You might as well blame the Cold War on us helping the Soviets fight the Germans rather than any sort of clash of political and economic ideals. Or blame the German invasion of Russia solely on Russian's steel trade with Germany up until the morning of rather than even note Hitler is doing anything wrong in wanting to take over the world. 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.
Suprise surprise... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Deluisional idiot or con man? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or the eggheads took one look and facepalmed, but the political masters used it anyway, fully aware it was bullshit. Fear is useful to them.
Re:This just shows how broken it all is (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Suprise surprise... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The easiest way to stop terrorism: (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Flights (Score:4, Insightful)
Why are they still following flights and such so closely, while leaving all the other ways open?
Good question. I imagine the answer is because the terrorist groups that most concern the CIA seem obsessed with passenger airplanes along with some combination of bureaucratic momentum and "fighting the last war" going on.
Re:we won the war... (Score:1, Insightful)
US won the war, but lost the peace.
There are still plenty of lessons to learn that one, and it ain't worth holding your breath they won't repeat the same mistakes with Iran.
Re:This just shows how broken it all is (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:diff needed (Score:5, Insightful)
stop training terrorists and betraying them.
It's not just that. These people are also enraged at what they see as US imperialism in the Middle East. With all the invasions and troops deployed to the region, and all the coups, it is a wonder to me that the US isn't constantly being bombed by disaffected people of all stripes.
Re:diff needed (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:diff needed (Score:3, Insightful)
That's not entirely untrue. One of the reasons communist China existed as it did was because of pressure from the US for the USSR to declare war on Japan, most likely to help mitigate American casualties in any invasion of the Japanese mainlands. This pressure was also exerted to draw Soviet forces away from Europe, where there was a genuine fear about further war, after the Nazis fell, between the West and the Soviets. In hindsight this war was not very likely, but there was a genuine, well-founded fear and distrust of Stalin.
This also probably served as an impetus for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, both as a deterrent to the Russians, and as a way to end the war quicker, with a Japanese surrender to the USA, rather than letting the USSR grab up more territory.
The implications of the victory of communist forces over the nationalist Chinese is a lot more obvious, with the China/Taiwan split, communism on the Korean peninsula, etc. Not to mention the authoritarian regime in China today is largely a spawn of the communist government.
You do have a good point -- it's not quite cause-and-effect, it is much more complicated. That does not mean it's completely false. There has been lots of meddling in foreign affairs by the USA post-WW2, or post-WW1, which had largely been confined to the Western hemisphere and parts of the Pacific prior to that. There was certainly a great deal more isolationist feeling where people felt that goings on across the globe weren't quite their business, to the point where the political leadership of the USA had a very isolationist bent starting in the decades after the Revolution, declaring neutrality in any potential upcoming European wars. Can you imagine what the world would be like if the USA had been formed as a 'European' power, getting involved in the wars of the 19th century, like the Napoleonic wars, or the Crimean war?
It seems we could benefit from a bit of that isolationist feeling, if it could be reciprocated.
Re:diff needed (Score:2, Insightful)
One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter...
When "their" interests dovetail with "our" own short-term self-interest, we brand them rebels, or better yet, freedom fighters. When they're on the other side, they're always terrorists...
Conditions change, and the enemy of our enemy can no longer be our friend - betrayal ensues, and blood oaths are uttered - and suddenly the 180-degree transformation is complete. This is the folly of short-term, self-serving isolationist interest as a valid option for steering foreign policy.
Re:diff needed (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Possibly nobody (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:diff needed (Score:2, Insightful)
Nice strawman. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:This just shows how broken it all is (Score:3, Insightful)
Informative? Ahahaha. Right. That's one _hell_ of a source you have there. Don't get me wrong, Dubya was a retard and a horrible President but seriously, that's not what you'd call a credible source.
On an entirely different subject...Oh my God, I just found out Bat Boy trapped Santa! Holy crap! I even have a source [weeklyworldnews.com]
.
And thus so many people hate the US (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:This just shows how broken it all is (Score:4, Insightful)
So,just from that, it's pretty clear that the Bush administration (and their supporters) really just didn't care.
Oh, they cared. According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, as National Security Advisor Condaleeza Rice ok'd the use of waterboarding on a per-prisoner basis. Dick Cheney was involved in meetings about exactly what methods would be used.
It's not that the top brass didn't care: They did care, and approved of it.
Re:Possibly nobody (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, people should lose their jobs if they judge things based on the professionalism of the presentation instead of its content ("Good god! This isn't in green ball-point! Get me the President right away!"). Such a presentation, for something this wacky, would either have to be basically free of content, contain a different explanation from the one given now, or be detectable bullshit from even a quite cursory examination.
And even if some bored guy in an office somewhere flagged it as potentially interesting, I cannot believe that, at some later point, they didn't ask even vaguely what it was supposed to do before paying the fraudster, or at least before closing airports.
This may not actually be true. What sort of odds can they have thought this had of actually working? What is an acceptable level of risk? Would you, for example, shut all the US's airports to avoid a 1% chance of one flight being blown up? How about 0.01%, etc., etc. The risk of coded messages in Al-Jazeera's signal (especially in the form of "barcodes", FFS) being used to communicate with terrorists vanishes into "background noise", buried beneath the various potential mechanical and human failures that we inevitably risk by flying (yes, I know flying is very safe; I'm just reminding you that nothing we do is risk-free).