Did the United States get swindled by Dennis Montgomery?

On a rather lazy Sunday morning, I pick up The New York Times and stick a sliced bagel in the toaster oven. My morning ritual has begun.

There, staring back at me on the front page is an article entitled "Hiding Details of a Dubious Deal, US Invokes National Security." I scan the rest of the headlines and read something else first. Namely, that article about how we won't be able to fund the government in another month. Granted, I knew in November that we will probably not pass a Federal budget for another two years, but somehow I'm still reading about this process as if something useful wil come of it.

After being disappointed by the budget article, as I often am, I returned to that first one. This is when I discovered there is something more interesting in the details here than the usual Military-Industrial-Complex story we hear time and again involving companies getting big contracts from the government in backdoor deals and shady people making oodles of money living off of fear of Americans. No, this one has an interesting technical bent to it.

Dennis Montgomery, formerly a biomedical technician, managed to get roughly $20 million in contracts to develop and deliver computer technology supposedly useful to the government for national security purposes. Now, Mr. Montgomery is also on trial in Las Vegas for over $1 million in bad checks to casinos. Let's not pretend that anything the government will do to him is anywhere near as bad at what the angry people in Vegas do to a guy bouncing that many bad checks. He'll get his just reward.

What I think is worth focusing on is how on earth the fanciful claims this guy made were ever acceptable to the government. Patenting algorithms and making claims that he could predict terrorist plots by analyzing the Arab media is absurd. The absurdity of this is at least two-fold.

First, it was using Al-Jazeera. Someone watching Al-Jazeera is not going to find hidden terrorist plots. If they find them there, they'll also likely find them on Fox News as well. I've been reading and watching Al-Jazeera for a while. It happens to have a lot of useful and interesting reporting in the Middle East that I can't find anywhere else. It also has been all over the Egyptian, Tunisian, Bahrain, etc. uprisings and has done an amazingly good job.

The second reason this is absurd is the underlying assumption; that there is a conspiracy of such a global scale as to be audacious enough and crafty enough to co-opt the media and broadcast coded signals via the media. The ideas and 'algorithms' are predicated on an utterly extreme conspiracy theory.

In a mix up of intergovernmental proportions, the CIA had rightly determined that the software was fake by 2003, but somehow this analysis never made it to the DoD Special Operations Command who had contracted Montgomery. In 2006, the FBI (as the NYT story relates) also had information indicating the software was bogus. All that said, in 2009, the Air Force still inked a $3 million dollar deal with them, despite warnings from a contract officer.

Much of the rest of the story is a sordid and complicated series of anecdotes and bad outcomes related to the technology. A particularly unsettling tale includes the grounding of planes coming from France and Britain. This led to the French initiating a study, where they concluded the technology was bogus.

As a scientist, this story and the farce technological claims troubles me. Where did things break down?

1. For starters, the communications between government agencies here was atrocious. The CIA, FBI, Dod (Special Ops), Air Force, and White House spent 7-9 years not being on the same page. Also, with something this technical, where was the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy? Right, under Bush and the absentee Science Advisor Marburger, anything went. What we can learn here is that some coordination for technologies that multiple agencies might want to use ought to be done centrally to collect both short-term and long-term information on the relative merits and concerns related to the technology. That was not done here.

2. Where were the science advisors and analysts? Why is a contracting officer, who has no technical background, presenting analysis on something well outside of his professional training? When the article in the NYT described an Air Force contracting officer saying he 'believed' in this and didn't care of he lost his job supporting it, one has to wonder. When it comes to something technical or scientific, beliefs have nothing to do with it, thinking is what matters.

3. The frame of all actors involved, including The New York Times. Nobody has questioned the underlying assumption I previously mentioned. To assume without questioning that a media organization could be so corrupted and brazen as to be entirely co-opted and part of a large conspiracy so as to justify the basic assumption for the fraudulent technology Mr. Montgomery sold for millions to the government is a disturbing sign of the frame of mind our government and military has.

One last point. I think this can and will happen again. There is next to nothing standing in the way of something this horrifically stupid from occurring. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy doesn't track this (and neither does their back-end analytical support at the Institute for Defense Analyses). The CIA, DoD, Air Force, and other stakeholders including DHS still don't speak to one another and have no means for coordination. And lastly, if you look at the requests for proposals from these agencies, they still predicate themselves on the flawed assumptions and are requesting technologies that are not only useless, but people are likely to make things up and lie to the government claiming they can make them, especially since the non-scientists are the ones hearing the presentations and handing out the money without asking technical experts to advise them.