Hiding Details of Dubious Deal, U.S. Invokes National Security

Hiding Details of Dubious Deal, U.S. Invokes National Security

www.nytimes.com

.... The Justice Department, which in the last few months has gotten protective orders from two federal judges keeping details of the technology out of court, says it is guarding state secrets that would threaten national security if disclosed. But others involved in the case say that what the government is trying to avoid is public embarrassment over evidence that Mr. Montgomery bamboozled federal officials. ....

(visit the link for the full news article)

OK... we are hearing daily about Pentagon sponsoring NASCAR events ... about the DoD's sacrosanct budget.... about the "Defense" needs of our nation....

(Example follows)

Interviews with more than two dozen current and former officials and business associates and a review of documents show that Mr. Montgomery and his associates received more than $20 million in government contracts by claiming that software he had developed could help stop Al Qaeda’s next attack on the United States. But the technology appears to have been a hoax, and a series of government agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency and the Air Force, repeatedly missed the warning signs, the records and interviews show.

Oddly, the Al Qaeda bogey man engendered expense seems reasonable, after all .... what other enemies do we have? (aside from our own citizens)....

“The Justice Department is trying to cover this up,” Mr. Flynn said. “If this unravels, all of the evidence, all of the phony terror alerts and all the embarrassment comes up publicly, too. The government knew this technology was bogus, but these guys got paid millions for it.”

OK... politically-appointed rubes get hustled all the time.... even more so when you add the element of political lobbying and the military industrial complex in the mix.

So now it would be a threat to national security to learn that someone in the world of 'procuring contracts' was either a moron, or too proud to admit their mistake...?

Aside from the tiresome repetition of the fruitless wasteful expenses incurred on our behalf... there's more to be embarrassed about...,

The software he patented — which he claimed, among other things, could find terrorist plots hidden in broadcasts of the Arab network Al Jazeera; identify terrorists from Predator drone videos; and detect noise from hostile submarines — prompted an international false alarm that led President George W. Bush to order airliners to turn around over the Atlantic Ocean in 2003.

The software led to dead ends in connection with a 2006 terrorism plot in Britain. And they were used by counterterrorism officials to respond to a bogus Somali terrorism plot on the day of President Obama’s inauguration, according to previously undisclosed documents.

It's not like no-one noticed at the time....

C.I.A. officials, though, came to believe that Mr. Montgomery’s technology was fake in 2003, but their conclusions apparently were not relayed to the military’s Special Operations Command, which had contracted with his firm. In 2006, F.B.I. investigators were told by co-workers of Mr. Montgomery that he had repeatedly doctored test results at presentations for government officials. But Mr. Montgomery still landed more business.

In 2009, the Air Force approved a $3 million deal for his technology, even though a contracting officer acknowledged that other agencies were skeptical about the software, according to e-mails obtained by The New York Times.

The story is worth the read.....

It already has the DoD, FBI, Air Force, Justice Department and a glorious cast of characters being reported as doing exactly what they are paid NOT to do.....

Happy reading.

www.nytimes.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

Yeah, sounds interesting, but I am not going to log in to the NYT to read it..

I'll see if there is an alternate source somewhere.

www.post-gazette.com...

Found one.

It's almost understandable to a point, however not acceptable by any means. My guess is that by the time they realized this technology was crap, they had already invested way too much money to simply be placed in the loss column. They probably thought that they could, by spending even more money, use this technology as a launching pad to develop what they originally thought they already had. A foundation is better than nothing was probably the thinking.

Throwing more and more good money after bad seems to be the current mantra of government today. Better to waste more fixing our past mistakes than to admit we made the mistake and report the overall loss to the general public. The same public that they have to appeal to to get even more good money!

reply to post by rogerstigers


try this, the r=4 value after html forces to login.

www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/us/politics/20data.html

Originally posted by Maxmars
So now it would be a threat to national security to learn that someone in the world of 'procuring contracts' was either a moron, or too proud to admit their mistake...?

Do we not already know that even though "national security" was invoked?

It sounds partly like a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing, which was one of the complaints leveled about inter-agency information sharing that led to the 9-11 attacks.

But even without the national security-related details, isn't there still enough reason to believe officials got taken with doctored test results?

I guess they're people too and not immune from being swindled, but if nobody else told the officials procuring the contracts about the doctored results, perhaps they believed the test results?

The defense department also spent a lot of money on remote viewing research, and some people doubt the validity of that...interestingly it also involved 20 million dollars:

Remote viewing was popularized in the 1990s, following the declassification of documents related to the Stargate Project, a $20 million research program sponsored by the U.S. Federal Government to determine any potential military application of psychic phenomena. Although one Stargate viewer had been awarded in 1984 a legion of merit for determining "150 essential elements of information (...) unavailable from any other source",[6] the program was eventually terminated in 1995, claiming a lack of documented evidence that the program had any value to the intelligence community.

I think they had to research it, but it didn't need to cost $20 million and they biased their own test results.

But I suppose $20 million isn't much compared to the size of the defense department's budget.

reply to post by rogerstigers


Thanks for the alternate source.

I liked this tidbit.

A onetime biomedical technician with a penchant for gambling, Mr. Montgomery is at the center of a tale....

Wait a second. A history of gambling is SUPPOSED to be a big RED FLAG when dealing with secret clearances and stuff. This is because gambling debts can be used as leverage.

reply to post by rogerstigers


to rogerstigers,

Thank you for posting a way to read in depth stories without having to sign up with the NYT.