May 2002. Dr. Hussein Ibrahim, co-founder of BMI and Ptech's chief scientist, and a delegation of other Ptech personnel come to JP Morgan at Singh's invitation, to demonstrate why Singh's blueprint project should buy Ptech software for its inference engine core. But the Ptech delegation has come to the Morgan offices unprepared, and they behave strangely: Singh's suspicions are aroused when Ibrahim offers to demonstrate the software on his laptop, using proprietary JP Morgan data. This would have compromised JPM information security and is entirely outside industry protocols ("a show-stopper"). In an adjoining room, Singh calls Roger Burlton, who runs Business Process Renewal in Vancouver. He tells her, "Don't let them out of your sight and don't let them leave with anything." Burlton recommends that she speak with Jeff Goins, a former Ptech employee. Goins informs Singh that Saudi terror financier Yassin Al Qadi is an investor in Ptech. Al Qadi claims to have met Dick Cheney in Jeddah before he became vice president, and that they still maintain "cordial relations." Singh confirms that Goins had taken his concerns to an FBI agent, and arranges to speak with that agent.
May 30, 2002. Agent Robert Wright of the Chicago FBI holds a press conference on the steps of the Capital and bursts into tears apologizing to the 9/11 families. Wright says his ten-year investigation into terrorism financing by Yassin Al-Qadi - whom he called bin Laden's banker - had been repeatedly shut down, that he had been censured for pushing it, and that if he had been able to continue and shut down the funding to al Qaeda, 9/11 would not have happened.
June 2002. Indira Singh is dismissed from JP Morgan.
June 2002. FBI validates everything Singh has said about Ptech, and passes her a copy of a news segment on Ptech by Joe Bergantino of WBZ TV, a CBS affiliate in Boston, which is set to air on September 11, 2002. Toward the end of his investigation, Bergantino contacts Rita Katz of the SITE Institute to validate some information. A former colleague of Katz notifies the White House that Bergantino's program will break the Ptech story.22
August, 2002. The White House intervenes to quash the story, and it never airs. Singh and Bergantino suspect that Jeff Goins, a Ptech vendor, makes a deal with Osama Ziade around this time. Goins handles an active White House account with Ptech, and he, too, alerts the WH about the story. Singh learns that the WH prevented several other journalists from going ahead with the Ptech story, including ABC's Brian Ross and John Miller,23 and NBC's Lisa Myers.24 Singh writes an Advisory Report on Ptech and, acting on information from Jeff Goins, she advises GHWB in that report that there is a related threat on President GWB's life.
September 2002. Singh delivers her report to GHWB. The persons of interest at Ptech remove their files and leave.
November 2002. Still no raid. Singh threatens to send her report to ten Chief Intelligence Officers per month until something is done (i.e., until Ptech is raided). She begins by personally bringing the Ptech story to Charlie Lewis, a Chief Technology Architect for Air Products and Chemicals (a powerful company which had earned over 5.7 billion dollars in sales during 2000); to the CIO of Gartner (a major enterprise architecture / IT firm); to the CIO of the U.S. Department of Defense; and to John Osterholz, DOD Director of Architecture and Interoperability.
December 6, 2002. Ptech is raided by Operation Greenquest, but the White House announces that Ptech is clean - on the very day of the raid: "The material has been reviewed by the appropriate government agencies, and they have detected absolutely nothing in their reports to the White House that would lead to any concern about any of the products purchased from (Ptech)."
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...1206-4.html#17.
April 2003. Singh is debriefed at the National Threat Assessment Center (CERT).
From Wall Street to the Wilderness
Early in the game, as the shady background of Ptech began to emerge, Indira Singh came to a point of decision. Should she go forward with Ptech's product, or reject the company? Were the allegations about Ptech serious, or were they disinformation from competitors engaged in commerce interference? She sought out the FBI agent to whom Jeff Goins had spoken. He sent her a video documentary produced by Joe Bergantino for WBZ TV, a CBS affiliate in Boston, about an Islamist charity called CARE International.
"The people in the video that the FBI were looking for right after 9/11 were Ptech employees: Muhammed Mubayyid and Suheil Laher, who had also worked for CARE International. But this was not the Care International everyone knows. This CARE listed its corporate office in the same suite as Al Khifah's Boston office25 - whose more famous location was the Al-Khifah Refugee Centre in Brooklyn's Atlantic Avenue, where mujaheddin recruits were processed for the CIA's Afghani "Operation Cyclone." It was later named as the locus of the 1993 conspiracy to bomb the World Trade Center.26 Muhammed Mubayyid, a Ptech employee and former treasurer of CARE, has donated money to Al Khifah's Brooklyn office.
Recall the notorious intransigence of the FBI in the 1993 WTC case - using Egyptian informant Emad Salem, the Bureau had successfully infiltrated the terrorist cell responsible for the bombing and secretly recorded myriad hours of the cell's planning discussions. It has never given a satisfactory account of its failure to act on that abundant advance information. As documented in Crossing The Rubicon, the same deeply disturbing obstructionism pervades the behavior of middle and high officials in the FBI's before and after 9/11/01.
This is the same FBI.
Indira took Joe Bergantino's video report down to Virginia and interviewed Ptech employees herself. Having confirmed fears, she demanded the FBI agent who gave her Bergantino's report re-open an investigation into Ptech. He said he couldn't. She told him to tell his supervisor. He already had, and was told there was nothing they could do. The FBI was one of Ptech's clients.
Her next stop was Mark Coughlin, the Chief Information Officer (CIO) at JP Morgan Chase. His particular position equipped him to understand the kind of damage the firm might suffer if it were to adopt a malicious program with Ptech's computational power. Moved and alarmed, Coughlin called Security, the General Auditor, and the CEO.
They contacted the FBI - at a very high level - who validated all of Indira Singh's claims about Ptech.
Coughlin was shaken. He sent her to William Moran, the General Auditor, who refused to meet with her until she had been debriefed by his security people. "They treated me like I was crazy, like I was the terrorist." And when the meeting finally happened, it was an Orwellian horror show. He asked where she had gotten her information, and as she named her individual sources Moran answered each name the same way, over and over: "That person should be killed... that person should be killed… that person should be killed."27
Hateful words, motivated by a terrible fear of the truth.
CODA: Knowledge is Power
The computational power of the Ptech evolution of PROMIS software represents of a daunting new surveillance-and-intervention capability in the hands of the same elites who planned 9/11, prosecute the subsequent resource wars, and are presiding over what may become a full economic and military disaster for the resource-consuming citizens of America and the world. Since the "War On Terror" and this coming dollar / natural gas collapse will necessitate new levels of domestic repression, this is just the capability those elites require. Ptech is Total Information Awareness.
It combines datamining, artificial intelligence, and "interoperability," the capacity for one program to read, operate, and modify the source codes of other programs. Datamining is a technique for detecting and extracting meaningful patterns hidden within vast quantities of apparently meaningless data. Applications include policing and case management (where PROMIS -- Prosecutor's Management Information System began), aviation (Mitre), banking and risk management (JP Morgan), enterprise architecture and knowledge management (Popkin), the gathering and sifting of political and industrial intelligence information (FBI, RCMP, et al.), and a wide range of military applications (NORAD, Navy, etc.).
Programs based on datamining are powerful analytical tools; finding meaningful patterns in an ocean of information is very useful. But when such a tool is driven by a high-caliber artificial intelligence core, its power gets spooky. The datamining capability becomes a smart search tool of the AI program, and the system begins to learn.
In recent decades, great strides have been made by the mutually fertile disciplines of mathematics, computer science, and neuroscience. Among the results has been a new discipline called cognitive neuroscience, which constitutes a powerful new understanding of the way the human brain works (see Churchland, Gazzaniga, etc.) While this has illuminated some very fundamental and grand issues of philosophy, it also has applications so practical that they have reshaped our world. "Neural Network" programming is modeled on the computational techniques used by the human brain - an electrochemical computer that uses neurons instead of semiconductors; the firing or non-firing of neurons instead of ones and zeros.
With neural networking, software has become much smarter than it had been. Now it can perform multiple, related operations at the same time through parallel processing; now it can learn from setbacks, and use genetic algorithms to evolve its way out of limitations. Now it can respond to more kinds of data from the electronic environment, including "fuzzy" values that don't come in discreet numerical packages. This kind of computational power supports an inference engine that can digest the mined data into results that are not only descriptive of the system's present state but predictive for imminent and, to some degree, even middle-term outcomes. That's why the same family of programs that does enterprise architecture, which is descriptive (and prescriptive if you take its descriptions as a mandate for cutting costs by firing people - "process management"), comes to include risk management software, which is predictive of the future. It extrapolates from current trends in a more than quantitative way.
Conventional electronic surveillance finds patterns in the data of other instruments; Ptech's Framework can exploit the patterns it detects and extrapolate future probabilities. Then it can integrate itself with the computers from which it's getting the information and intervene in their functioning. The result is a tool for surveillance and intervention. The program can identify suspect streams of cash in a banking network and allow a bank officer to freeze the suspect assets. Of course, a user could direct the same program to prevent detection. It can discover salient anomalies in a person's movements through a city and either flag those anomalies for further scrutiny, or erase them from the record. And it can find errant flights in an air traffic map and initiate an intercept response. Or not.
End Part I/Part III