Did US Government Agencies spend over 20 million USD on Bogus Software for Counter-Terrorism?

Eric Lichtblau and James Risen of the New York Times report that various US agencies spent a total exceeding 20 million USD between 2002 and 2009 for phony counter-terrorism technologies linked to a California computer programmer. Among the things which the programmer allegedly claimed to be able to do were "find terrorist plots hidden in broadcasts of the Arab network Al Jazeera; identify terrorists from Predator drone videos; and detect noise from hostile submarines." Reportedly, the technology provided the basis for the diversion and grounding of several US-bound flights in 2003. The story is available here in the Sydney Morning Herald. The news follows on charges from Senator Bernie Sanders that, between 2007 and 2009, the US Defense Department awarded hundreds of billions of US dollars to companies involved in fraud. Sen. Sanders’ assertion was based on a Pentagon report released in January.

News: Video Analytics to be Used by British Army to Spot 'Suspicious Activity'

From BBC News: Video analytics programmes are being developed at military research laboratories at Porton Down in Wiltshire. They are emphasising the use of the technology for tackling the use of improvised explosive devices. By automatically highlighting footage of unusual behaviour, such as going off road, captured by plane and helicopter mounted cameras, they hope to make the tracking of enemies more effective:

Andrew Seedhouse, from the Defence, Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), said: "Think of it as the ultimate CCTV system.

"An incident occurs, perhaps an IED goes off, and we can use this host of data to back track over time.

"Who was near the scene and where were they before the incident? What buildings or vehicles can we now associate with the incident?"

He said the research could help scientists to look for anomalies in behaviour and environment and alert appropriate forces before an incident occurred.

The video analytics are being combined with other methods for sophisticated modelling of the surveyed terrain, as you can see in the 'British Forces News' video below.

Also interesting is the same scientist Andrew Seedhouse's comment that the only way to tell insurgents from everybody else is "by what they do -so the whole experiment is about tracking people, finding what they're up to each day, who they're meeting, what they take with them, what they do, where they place things, and then hopefully we'll be able to track back through all that stuff and find out where they are now":