It was a branch of the French intelligence services that finally helpedconvince the U.S. government in 2004 that the bar codes were fake afterthey and the CIA commissioned another company to try to detect themessages and were unable to uncover anything.
A programmer who claims he produced software that detected hiddenterrorist messages in Al Jazeera broadcasts was apparently responsiblefor a false alert in 2003 that grounded international flights. The 2003incident raised the government’s security level, according to aremarkable story published by Playboy.
The developer also allegedly faked software demonstrations andconned the Pentagon into investing in a program that fellow workerssuspect never existed or couldn’t do what the developer claimed.
In December 2003, DHS secretary Tom Ridge announced a terror alertbased on intelligence from “credible sources” about imminent attacksthat “could either rival or exceed what we experienced on September 11[snip]
Montgomery claimed he decoded the orders using a program developed byhis four-year-old Las Vegas firm, eTreppid Technologies. The softwarefound hidden bar codes in Al Jazeera videos that contained latitudes,longitudes, flight numbers and dates for planes being targeted forattacks, he reportedly claimed. He fed the information to a CIAemployee at the agency’s Directorate of Science and Technology, whopassed it up to CIA Director George Tenet, who in turn passed it to theWhite House.