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Main thought I have is “why haven’t I heard about this before?”. Surely, some MSM time could be spent on this instead of the (COC) they spend it on. Do you have any links to look into it?
WillowSpring, the only article I could find was the LA Times link in the OP. Every other article was from there. But you’re right: why hasn’t anyone been talking about it? I guess I might have missed it when the company was first hired. And I doubt they’d want to brag about their “success” with BioWatch. Let me know if you can find anything else.
This is quite a story. If the ball was dropped for no legitimate reason, I’ll have to file it under government incompetence–similar to its incompetence in ensuring our protection relatively inexpensively from EMPs, a subject that we’ve discussed before on Ricochet.
I wonder why Donald Woodbury’s successor has failed to take up the NVS Technologies case. The LA Times doesn’t say–the article stops rather abruptly with Woodbury’s retirement at the end of 2016.
It was the backgrounds of the people involved that I was interested in. I have done some checking on LinkedIn and based on that, unless something else is going on, I would trust the judgement of Segaran Pillai (who has worked extensively with biological vulnerabilities ) over that of Woodbury who seems to be into “Innovation management”. That seems a bit generic.
Thanks for bringing attention to this.
Good point, Marci. Now that a judge has reviewed the case (which I believe would have just ended) we should know in a few weeks whether he determines that bad faith was involved. At that point, I’m not sure what will happen.
Thank YOU for doing the additional research, WS. We agree.
When I read a story like this, I wonder about where it would go if we could follow the money. Was this a case of a product that would earn millions in government contracts for connected investors but turn out to not work as advertised in the real world? There’s no shortage of examples here where lobbyists and bureaucrats work together and get the government to spend money on something worthless, only to see those same bureaucrats retire to a comfortable second career working for the now established company. Or is this a case of established interests conspiring to crush a upstart, game-changing product? Again, there’s plenty of examples of big companies working behind the scenes to make sure that the government doesn’t upset the apple cart and damage their profit line. Where does the money lead this time? Did Woodbury retire from DARPA to take a job with whoever makes money off of Biowatch? How many of the people trying to get this approved ended up working for NVS Technologies? How much of a cynic am I that I’m not even considering the possibility that this isn’t one of these two scenarios?
Not more cynical than I am, Nick! This isn’t buy overpriced toilets! The sad part is that we are left less secure at this point. I hope we are both wrong, but the facts definitely don’t add up.
I am going to join you on this. But, it’s great we have an incorruptible FBI to look into this kind of thing… Oh wait…
[Groan]