Dennis Montgomery, a programmer from California, was the principal software engineer for at least two companies who appear to have defrauded the US government. His software, originally designed for colorizing movies, failed to generate any interest. At least, until he started claiming that its image-processing capabilities could find secret terrorist messages in Al Jazeera broadcasts and isolate images of evildoers in Predator drone videos.
Security is, unfortunately, a hot item these days – there’s a lot of money being thrown around, and that means a lot of snake oil salesmen trying to get their hands on a bit of it. Millions of dollars later, I’m sure that the feds wish they had done their due diligence. Their response has been to lock down the story in the interests of “national security” – more likely, they’re just hoping the story quietly dies and spares them some embarrassment.