OJ got off cause he had money. Drake did not and was fighting the deep pockets of the USG.

This is bad news. It means the media will no longer pay attention to this DOD mismanagement. The more people pay attention to fraud the less often it will take place. For other examples of fraud in the DOD see here: http://natsecurityeb.blogspot.com/2010/10/top-secret-america.html

I don't think we should make too many excuses for people who implement fraud. They should be punished for what they do. You seem to focus on the psychological aspect, the profession does not have the highest standard of scientific rigor and can be easily manipulated.

exactly

you don't point out that there is a hell of a lot of money sloshing around in all this, I doubt that these peoples motives are as pure, they are not just worried about 'national security.' Fraud in defense contracting is extremely common. See Boeing tanker contract fraud, BAE systems Bribery and the primary contractor for trailblazer, SAIC, has had previous fraud prosecutions for the FBI information system they worked on and the New York citytime contract: http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20110527/FREE/110529884 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/17/AR2006081701485.html http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/16/business/16tanker.html?_r=2 http://www.politico.com/blogs/laurarozen/0210/US_settles_with_BAE_in_Saudi_bribery_case.html This kind of activity is very common in the defense department and more generally in corporate america, see the massive amount of fraud that at least partially caused the 2007-2008 financial crisis. The U.S. needs to attack white collar crime much more vigorously. http://natsecurityeb.blogspot.com/2010/10/top-secret-america.html http://natsecurityeb.blogspot.com/2010/10/13-bankers-vrs-brooksley-born.html

There is a hell of a lot of money sloshing around in all this, I doubt that these peoples motives are as pure as you present them, they are not just worried about 'national security.' Fraud in defense contracting is extremely common. See Boeing tanker contract fraud, BAE systems Bribery and the primary contractor for trailblazer, SAIC, has had previous fraud prosecutions for the FBI information system they worked on and the New York citytime contract: http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20110527/FREE/110529884 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/17/AR2006081701485.html http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/16/business/16tanker.html?_r=2 http://www.politico.com/blogs/laurarozen/0210/US_settles_with_BAE_in_Saudi_bribery_case.html This kind of activity is very common in the defense department and more generally in corporate america, see the massive amount of fraud that at least partially caused the 2007-2008 financial crisis. The U.S. needs to attack white collar crime much more vigorously. http://natsecurityeb.blogspot.com/2010/10/top-secret-america.html http://natsecurityeb.blogspot.com/2010/10/13-bankers-vrs-brooksley-born.html

you don't point out that there is a hell of a lot of money sloshing around in all this, I doubt that these peoples motives are as pure as you present them, they are not just worried about 'national security.' Fraud in defense contracting is extremely common. See Boeing tanker contract fraud, BAE systems Bribery and the primary contractor for trailblazer, SAIC, has had previous fraud prosecutions for the FBI information system they worked on and the New York citytime contract: http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20110527/FREE/110529884 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/17/AR2006081701485.html http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/16/business/16tanker.html?_r=2 http://www.politico.com/blogs/laurarozen/0210/US_settles_with_BAE_in_Saudi_bribery_case.html This kind of activity is very common in the defense department and more generally in corporate america, see the massive amount of fraud that at least partially caused the 2007-2008 financial crisis. The U.S. needs to attack white collar crime much more vigorously. http://natsecurityeb.blogspot.com/2010/10/top-secret-america.html http://natsecurityeb.blogspot.com/2010/10/13-bankers-vrs-brooksley-born.html

Ok, I'll try not to get angry, it just seems most of your positions are incredibly misinformed and so frustrating to respond to. There was the fact of the low ball estimate of 300,000 muslims killed by U.S. that Walt gave compared to the 10,000 U.S. killed by muslims, something that rightfully angers muslims. Of course you can question those statistics but most of them are based on U.S. or international organization estimates. If you have no trust in any organizations statistics then I guess there is no point in arguing because you have no data to back up your points. I tend to think it is relatively unlikely for a harvard professor who is focused on these issues to be substantially misinformed. Also, Osama bin Laden himself has voiced his agreement with some of Walts writings, for example the Mearsheimer-Walt report on the Israel lobby (a University of Chicago professor and a Harvard professor). So your statement that the "hardliners want to kill anyone who doesn't subscribe to their narrow interpretations, including other muslims" is a vast oversimplification of even their leaders opinions on the matter, there was a recent Brookings institute poll that shows the vast majority of the middle east population is very angry with both Israel and the U.S. I am sure you could find a few inflammatory quotes by Bin Laden but I could find equally inflammatory quotes by GW Bush. Most of that crap is just the propaganda they use, and both sides use it.

Ok, I'll try to explain this to you one more time. Yes, image data is image data but if al-qaeda had a bias, say did not use porn to for their steganography then the NSA could put a lot more effort into looking at the images or users that did not have porn in their traffic, basically if they use anything that is different from the statistical norm of internet traffic the NSA could use that bias to help as a selector for further (still automated) analysis. So it is best to look like as average an internet user as possible for al-qaeda, that way the NSA gets swamped with false positives. Also the NSA is not omnipotent, they do have constraints on their compute power and capabilities. For instance I very, very much doubt they can break 2000 bit RSA (without something like side channel etc but that requires basically machine access). I really don't see why this is so difficult for you to understand, I'm trying to be nice about it this time though.

Yes you are, at least according to a Harvard professors article "why they hate us" and most other well educated people.(see above)

Yes, I know jack ass, I worked at the NSA for 2 years. They have someone called the 'porn queen' who deals with a lot of steganography (if anyone breaks into the NSA they will find a huge stash of porn there too). And yes, it is automated the problem is you do not understand the first thing about cryptography or steganography. In cryptography you choose your key size so that even with automation there is no way of breaking it. Using the most common traffic on the internet, porn, for your steganography makes it less likely the NSA will find it even with automation because you are increasing the search space.

no, I'm just stating fact, you are a moron.

"N.S.A. has a five-thousand-acre campus at Fort Meade protected by iris scanners and facial-recognition devices."--this is false as of a couple years ago~2009. They were experimenting with facial recognition (had some contractors working on it) but it was by no means widely implemented. There was only one office in the research building (R) of the ft meade campus that had an Iris scanner as far as I know and that was also just experimenting. "The electric bill there is said to surpass seventy million dollars a year." Partially because the NSA mismanaged the power supply. Building compute farms without figuring out where to get the power to run them (while I was there they would have regular power outages). When google builds a data center the first thing they do is figure out where they will get the power (usually building near the supply ie a hydroelectric damn). Another thing to note is that in late 2007 NSA started looking at Hadoop which is an open source implementation of some of googles infrastructure, map-reduce in particular. Who knows how much google cooperates with the NSA, at least a little. I was at a meeting at the NSA that included Vint Cerf, a prominent google employee, and they were using a google search product internally. In general it is pretty hard to not witness fraud at the NSA. Here are some examples: http://natsecurityeb.blogspot.com/2010/10/top-secret-america.html

You are misrepresenting the facts of why these people are angry. According to the article "Why they hate us" by Harvard professor Stephen Walt 288,000 is a low ball estimate for the number of Muslims killed by the U.S. in the last 30 years while Muslims have killed only 10,325 U.S. citizens. You don't have a clue why these people are angry. Before you speak at least understand some basic facts, dumb ass.

The NSA does have people looking for steganography in internet traffic. It makes their job harder if you hide your messages in the most common types of data flowing across the internet. It forces them to search for the needle in a much bigger hay stack--obviously something of benefit to those hiding the message, dip shit.

25% of total search engine requests are porn-related. Just because there are a lot of results for insects does not mean there is a lot of insect related internet traffic on the internet, just a lot of web pages no one looks at. For steganography what matters is what average people actually download. If you were agnostic about what to use for steganography porn would be obviously the most effective choice. When you are worried about the U.S. govt raiding your home and putting a couple bullets in your head I'm sure you too would be agnostic about what you used for steganography. Damn disappointing that one has to explain this stuff to slashdot users. Slashdot seems to be overwhelmed by a bunch of bible thumping DOD employees.

But pornography is probably the most common thing broadcast on the internet, if you want to hide in a crowd of clowns, dress like a clown. You seem to miss one of the basic points of steganography (also check your spelling, it is not 'stenography').

I would like to point out that it is possible this was used for steganography, hiding messages inside common images so that they would not attract attention. Basically pornography is really common on the internet. It does make for good U.S. propaganda though. A note about steganography should be prominent on a tech sight like slashdot, just goes to show how how crappy slashdot has gotten. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography#Digital_steganography