*It's a lot easier to bamboozle politicians with high-tech war-on-terror blither when you've got good political connections.
*This guy's apparently fraudulent inventions are of a lot of interest. Kind of a GWOT
design-fiction for gullible spies and Republicans. A specialized audience, but hey, they sign big checks.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/us/politics/20data.html?_r=2&hp=&pagewanted=all
(...)
A onetime biomedical technician with a penchant for gambling, Mr. Montgomery is at the center of a tale that features terrorism scares, secret White House briefings, backing from prominent Republicans, backdoor deal-making and fantastic-sounding computer technology.
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...
The software he patented — which he claimed, among other things, could find terrorist plots hidden in broadcasts of the Arab network Al Jazeera; (((that must be interesting news for 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. (((Basically, this is the old "rock and roll backward-masking" hustle, all over again. The old ones are the good ones.)))
(...)
In December 2003, Mr. Montgomery reported alarming news: hidden in the crawl bars broadcast by Al Jazeera, someone had planted information about specific American-bound flights from Britain, France and Mexico that were hijacking targets.
C.I.A. officials rushed the information to Mr. Bush, who ordered those flights to be turned around or grounded before they could enter American airspace.
“The intelligence people were telling us this was real and credible, and we had to do something to act on it,” recalled Asa Hutchinson, who oversaw federal aviation safety at the time. (...)
French officials, upset that their planes were being grounded, commissioned a secret study concluding that the technology was a fabrication....
