There is an interesting story in the Times this morning about a man named Dennis Montgomery. He apparently developed software that he claimed could detect and stop the next Al Qaeda attack on the US and the US paid him more than $20 Million.
But the technology was an elaborate fraud.
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.
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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. Senior administration officials even talked about shooting down planes identified as targets because they feared that supposed hijackers would use the planes to attack the United States, according to a former senior intelligence official who was at a meeting where the idea was discussed. The official later called the idea of firing on the planes “crazy.”
When claims have been brought regarding the technology the Federal government has deployed a “state secrets” privilege in an attempt to keep the fraud a secret.
Do recall that President Obama has pledged to limit the use of the state secrets privilege to substantively important matters, as highlighted by Glenn Greenwald back in in 2009 and as shown in this excerpt from his campaign website

Once again, the current Administration fails to implement the “change we can believe in” and it rolls out the state secrets privilege not to protect security-related secrets, but rather to cover up governmental incompetence.