March 1998 – FTW predicts that promised open congressional hearings into the CIA's role in drug trafficking during the Contra era will never occur. In the summer of 2000 the investigation is closed without a single public hearing on the evidence.
Oct. 1998 – FTW publishes detailed excerpts from Volume II of a CIA Inspector general's report, including declassified records proving the CIA 's direct role in the drug trade.
Dec. 1998 – FTW publishes a detailed investigation, including copies of US government documents, describing how twenty-eight C 130 aircraft had been funneled through the Forest Service into the hands of private contractors. Instead of fighting forest fires, many of the aircraft wound up smuggling large quantities of cocaine and heroin. Court records established a CIA link and confirmed the details of this covert operation.
April 1999 – FTW reports on the role of a young Assistant DA named John Kerry in Middlesex County Massachusetts in the questionable 1979 prosecution and murder conviction of Special Forces soldier Bill Tyree after Tyree threatened to expose covert CIA operations moving cocaine into Panama.
May 1999 – FTW publishes a story by former Assistant Housing Secretary Catherine Austin Fitts on ethnic cleansing in America. Using data obtained from HUD, FTW becomes the first to publish a map clearly connecting the 1980s crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles to a systematically planned and executed operation to create thousands of single family mortgage foreclosures in the area.
August 1999 – FTW publishes a two-part investigation, including interviews with state and federal officials as well as the publication of “sensitive” DoJ documents showing the direct funneling of drug money into Democratic Party campaign chests.
August 1999 – With the help of former Assistant HUD Secretary Fitts – also a past managing director at Dillon Read – FTW becomes the first news agency to report on a series of documents showing massive financial fraud at HUD connected to covert operations and the manipulation of financial markets.
Sept. 1999 – FTW breaks an exclusive story tying the Bank of New York (BoNY) to the laundering of up to $15 billion in stolen IMF funds and organized crime proceeds from Russia. This cash flow nearly quadrupled the Bank's share prices and resulted in three successive 2:1 stock splits. In a prelude to the Enron scandal FTW also shows how the compensation packages for BoNY execs increased by 600%.
Sept. 2000 – A fter being contacted by members of the RCMP National Security Staff, FTW breaks an exclusive story on the use of PROMIS software by intelligence agencies to monitor financial markets, track terrorists and manipulate sensitive financial, intelligence and natural resources data bases. The story also documented that Canada 's version of the software had been compromised, and tracked the history of US and Israeli use of the software against friend and foe alike. This became critical when, after 9/11, the FBI and DoJ officially acknowledged that they had been using the software after reports had surfaced that the software had been given to Osama bin Laden.
Oct. 2000 – FTW publishes The Bush-Cheney Drug Empire, a scathing exposé of Halliburton; its political corruption, documented connections to drug smuggling, and campaign donations right before the 2000 election. The story predicted that under a Bush presidency, Halliburton, once chaired by Dick Cheney would engage in unheard-of levels of political and economic corruption. This story was cited by author Kevin Phillips in his 2004 best-seller American Dynasty.
Jan. 2001 – As the Bush administration takes office FTW describes the regime as a “war cabinet” and states that the US has become an Empire intent on major new conflicts beyond anything imagined up to that point. FTW labels the administration as a bully which would not hesitate to use military and economic bludgeons to manipulate and control world events.
Sept 9, 2001 – FTW issues to its subscribers the first of the only two economic bulletins in FTW 's history thus far. It warns of an imminent collapse of US markets. The 9/11 attacks two days later prompt a massive US Treasury intervention which prevents the collapse. As a result of the attacks George W. Bush is able to tap into the Social Security trust Fund.
Sept. 2001 – Again, less than a week after the attacks FTW becomes the first publication to expose and detail long-standing business relationships between the Bush and bin Laden families, including their joint participation in The Carlyle Group.
Dec. 2001 – FTW begins its now legendary scientific coverage of Peak Oil, the fact that the world is beginning to run out of hydrocarbon energy, including natural gas. The reality of Peak Oil has since been confirmed by CNN, The BBC, The Wall Street Journal, Nature, The Guardian, ABC News, The Financial Times, and official energy sources including former British cabinet minister Michael Meacher.
2002-2004 – FTW pioneers a groundbreaking series of stories in biological warfare and the mysterious deaths of as many as 15 world-class microbiologists, all of whom have specialties connected to gene sequencing and/or disease agents. Newspapers in Canada, Great Britain and the US follow up and post similar stories. In August 2002 the New York Times expends 8,000 words in a futile attempt to debunk what is obviously a string of related murders.
FTW Online
Mining the Matrix
By Jim DeFede
September/October issue
MotherJones.com
The idea came to him while sipping a martini. It was September 13, 2001, and Hank Asher was sitting in his $8 million home in Boca Raton, Florida, seething over the terrorist strikes. Asher, creator of advanced data-processing software, suddenly realized he could program his company's computers to hunt Al Qaeda members hiding in the United States.
Within a day, Asher's new program had sorted through 30 billion records—public and private—that his company, Seisint Inc., had obtained over the years. The result? The names of 419 people he believed the government should investigate. He invited state and federal agents to his office to review his work, and they were amazed: The FBI was already investigating five names on the list, and a sixth turned out to be one of the hijackers. The agents became fixtures at Seisint's Boca Raton headquarters, helping Asher to develop a terrorist profile. The program then culled through databases, rating millions of people for terrorist potential according to a combination of factors including: age, gender, ethnicity, criminal record, credit history, how they shipped or received packages, anomalies in Social Security numbers and driver's licenses, and addresses within the vicinity of known terrorists. Within weeks, the system had a list of 120,000 names with High Terrorist Factor (HTF) scores.
Three years later, Asher's brainchild has blossomed into the MATRIX—the Multistate Anti-TerroRism Information eXchange, a network of state databases subsidized by the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department. While Seisint provides its databases, technology, and facilities for the project, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and a nonprofit research institute in Florida manage the day-to-day oper-ations. Law enforcement agencies in four other states—Connecticut, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania—are enrolled in the project, which allows them to conduct searches for criminal investigations in return for putting their own databases into MATRIX. Although a number of states have withdrawn from the program, citing administrative costs, Florida governor Jeb Bush, a strong backer of MATRIX, is working to recruit more.
The American Civil Liberties Union, however, wants to eliminate federal funding for MATRIX. "They are searching through disconnected records, which may not be accurate, looking for patterns and drawing conclusions about people," says Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Project. "One conclusion they drew is that there are 120,000 suspected terrorists in the United States. If there are 120,000 terrorists in America, then we are in much deeper trouble than anyone ever imagined." Even worse, the list has never been made public, meaning that thousands of people are unaware that they have been singled out as potential terrorists.
Steinhardt notes that federal officials are administering this program through the states, letting the MATRIX avoid scrutiny. "There is no question they have hidden this from Con-gress," he says.
Law enforcement officials today describe MATRIX as nothing more than a powerful search engine that can simultaneously scan billions of records. They say that it merely consolidates databases already available to them but dispersed across multiple computer systems. According to Mark Zadra, chief of investigations for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the MATRIX is no longer used to generate lists of terrorist suspects.
Yet that wasn't the spin MATRIX advocates used to hype the program. In convincing states to join, Seisint and Florida officials developed a PowerPoint presentation highlighting the system's ability to root out would-be terrorists. According to Seisint's own promotional material, within one week of receiving the list of 120,000 names, "several arrests" were made, and in subsequent months "other arrests using the HTF" followed. Officials refuse to provide details about the arrests, though it is believed most were for immigration violations.
After producing the list at his own expense, Asher, a 53-year-old who was already a mega-millionaire from his AutoTrack system, was eager to gain national support for his new project. Although he is a Democrat, he wrote two checks in late 2002 to the Republican Party—$5,000 to the Florida party, $50,000 to the national party. In January 2003, he was invited to the White House to give a presentation to Vice President Dick Cheney, FBI director Robert Mueller, and Homeland Security director Tom Ridge. Jeb Bush was also present.
Inside the Roosevelt Room, Asher demonstrated the MATRIX's potential. According to a document titled "Briefing Points for the Vice President of the United States," which the ACLU obtained through a public records request, the "factual data analysis portion of the project…holds the most promise of identifying potential terrorist cells and solving other crimes." It also notes that Florida was already a partner in the project with Seisint, a firm that specializes in providing data for employee screenings, debt recoveries, and identity verifications. The Department of Homeland Security subsequently awarded the MATRIX $8 million as part of a "cooperative agreement" that requires a Homeland Security project manager to "maintain managerial oversight and control of the activities, including redirection of MATRIX activities or resources."
For civil libertarians, the MATRIX conjures up memories of another data-mining project—Admiral John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness program, which the Senate, out of civil liberties concerns, nixed in January 2003 before it launched. MATRIX, however, has escaped congressional scrutiny since it is considered a state program. And while MATRIX officials say that they are not using the system to create lists of potential terrorists, critics worry that nothing forbids them from doing that in the future.
But Asher is unlikely to be involved in such a decision. In July, Seisint was sold to Reed Elsevier, the Anglo-Dutch information and publishing company that owns LexisNexis. He had already resigned from Seisint's board of directors, as federal officials last year became aware of his smuggling planeloads of cocaine into the United States in the early 1980s. (He was never charged with a crime and became an informant against other drug traffickers.)
Still, Asher thinks the Feds are mistaken in not using the system to its full, terrorist-scoring potential. "If the terrorist attacks continued and the Sears Tower came tumbling down and the Golden Gate Bridge collapsed and Lake Superior was poisoned and a dirty bomb went off in Houston," he says, "would we be talking about whether we find it offensive for the government to look into our personal records to determine we are not terrorists?"