Dennis Lee Montgomery (born July 9, 1953) is an American software designer and former medical technician who sold computer programs to federal officials that he claimed would decode secret Al-Qaeda messages hidden in Al Jazeera broadcasts and identify terrorists based on Predator drone videos.
[1] A 2010 Playboy investigation called Montgomery "The man who conned the Pentagon", saying he won millions in federal contracts for his supposed terrorist-exposing intelligence software.
[3] Montgomery became a partner in 1998 to Warren G. Trepp, the former chief junk bond trader for Michael Milken at Drexel Burnham Lambert,[4] and another investor, Wayne Prim, to develop and sell audio, video, and data compression software under the banner eTreppid Technologies.
In 2004, eTreppid was awarded a $30 million no-bid contract with United States Special Operations Command and was ranked the 16th-largest defense contractor that year, according to Aerospace Daily.
[5] After his separation from eTreppid, Montgomery joined with Edra and Tim Blixseth to bring his alleged terrorist tracking software to other U.S. and foreign government clients.
Via Blxware, Montgomery, acting Chief Scientist,[4] pursued selling his terror tracking software to the U.S. and Israel governments, leveraging political connections of the Blixseth partnership.
[16] Lemons, citing an anonymous source in the MCSO, said that Montgomery had claimed that, using data he had obtained while working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), he could prove there was a conspiracy against Arpaio between the U.S. Department of Justice and G. Murray Snow, the federal judge presiding over a racial-profiling lawsuit filed against Maricopa County.
The computer programmer claimed the sheriff’s office had hired him to “hack into databases and websites to help them prove their beliefs about President Obama’s ancestry and birth information.” The suit was dismissed in 2022.