The Times had a great story today about a hustler, Dennis Montgomery, who scammed the American intelligence agencies for millions of dollars by making wild claims about computer software that he said could find the terrorists in aerial photographs and read encoded al Qaeda orders from the Al Jazeera web site.
The story is funny and sad. Mostly it's terrifying to think that the nation's military and its intelligence agencies can be had so easily.
Hooray for the Times?
Not so fast! The full story appeared in Playboy more than a year ago.
Yes, Playboy.
The Times give backhanded credit to Playboy, and to Bloomberg Markets: "Hints of fraud by Mr. Montgomery, previously raised by Bloomberg Markets and Playboy, provide a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of government contracting." Blah, blah, blah.
Playboy had a pretty complete story. The style is different, but the substance is the same. There is nothing evasive about the Playboy piece. It calls a scam a scam: "But there were no real intercepts, no new informants, no increase in chatter. ... This was, instead, the beginning of a bizarre scam. Behind that terror alert, and a string of contracts and intrigue that continues to this date, there is one unlikely character" (Who is the same Mr. Montgomery in the Times, and his company eTreppid).
I couldn't find the Bloomberg story. The most annoying thing about the Playboy story was the absence of a publication date. I hate it when publications don't state the time of their efforts. But plenty of bloggers and geeky websites wrote about the Playboy story when it came out in December 2009.
And so the Times, the pre-eminent news publication in the country, waves its hand and mentions Playboy in passing. You tell me why the Times is more worthy than the Huffington Post, or any other aggregator that gets rich on its net savoir faire.
NYT: Dubious Deal, Cloaked by National Security Claim
Playboy: The Man Who Conned The Pentagon
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