The man who conned the US govt out of $130 million with phony anti-terrorist decryption technology

Montgomery—then co-owner and Chief Technology Officer of Vegas-based "eTreppid Technologies" and a notorious gambler with $12 million in debt—staged false demonstrations on his laptop, using his "top secret software" to convince the previous administration about an absolutely stupid idea: Arabic TV station Al Jazeera was transmitting encrypted instructions which included "target coordinates" and flight numbers to sleeping Al Qaeda operatives around the world, using clues in their programming.

How serious was the government about this? On December 21, 2003, Montgomery's fake information fired up all alerts, getting the country into a mass panic attack after Department of Homeland Security's secretary Tom Ridge announced a risk of an attack "that could either rival or exceed what we experienced on September 11" based on "credible sources." The credible sources was Montgomery. Nothing ever happened then, but that was the beginning of the scam. Later, Montgomery declared that the Department of Defense paid his company "$30 million in contracts and and appropriated another $100 million in their black budget."

Quite an interesting article. This certainly offers one explanation of the seemingly random terror alerts over the years. It also highlights the incompetence of certain individuals.

As a warning, this article's source is Playboy and some images are NSFW, however I think the content is very important. (Only read it for the articles.)

The Man Who Conned the Pentagon [Playboy]

[edit on 26-12-2009 by AlphaTier]