Fw: [ISN] DIRT-Magic Lantern Firm Barred from Gov Work

[John Young]

Arturo asked:

>Does anybody found any reference with a stronger argument 
>than "is reportedly"?

Now, nice, god-fearing, sober, honest programmers and 
security consultants will not want to read the following.

The claim about DIRT and Magic Lantern has been challenged 
by readers and the source for the allegation sent an amplification 
which has been appended to the file.

  http://cryptome.org/dirty-lantern#readers

Also sent were conviction and probation documents on Frank
Jones, the marketer of DIRT which includes a letter concerning a
dispute between Jones and Eric Schneider, the programmer
who initially wrote DIRT and who later had a falling out with Jones.

  http://cryptome.org/dirty-jones.htm

According to this information several programmers worked 
on multiple iterations of DIRT, it was never as good as Jones 
marketed, and due to repeated failures to live up to contractual
obligations and after many gov-customer complaints with
looming criminal charges, Jones offered the DIRTy code and 
documentation to the FBI and other government agencies. 
The FBI allegedly wanted the debris of DIRT to be used as 
"seed" for a surveillance program which included the word 
"lantern" in its title.

The "lantern" allegation was two steps removed, made by 
a participant in one of the Jones' presentations.

As we have seen in discussions here, producers and programmers
who do government work are hampered in telling publicly every
aspect of what takes place in product negotiations. And winners
and losers of contracts and turf battles are subject to bias.
Government agencies blow smoke about their wins and losses
as a matter of perdurably ancient policy, and an aspirant for
government work must abide those obnoxities and/or leak
in the manner of officialdom.

So the truth of DIRT and Magic Lantern, in the spirit of all
surveillance, rests on lies by seeminngly nice producers 
and programmers, one step removed from prison or in a
prison of secrecy lifelong.

One reader claims to know who is the author of Magic Lantern
and says it is not the author of DIRT. However, it is not clear
if this person knows there were several parents of DIRT.

However, it is likely that if Magic Lantern includes any of the
DIRT code it will be a source of attack by others than the
FBI.