Washington, D.C. - History has repeated itself as the failed terror attack in Detroit has shown eerie similarities to the security failures leading up to 9/11. Like the Phoenix e-mail memo warning of the 9/11 terrorists flight training was ignored, so to was an e-mail about the Nigerian suspect in the terror plot. However this time the failure was the FBI's spam filter, not human failure.
Alhaji Umar Mutallab, former Chairman of Nigeria's First Bank PLC and father of the suspect, had warned authorities of his son's religious behavior. The information was being passes along by e-mail and got caught up in the SPAM system.
"Our spam blocker saw several signs that this was a 419 or "Nigerian Prince" scam. It included information purporting to come from a Nigerian banker warning of a destabilizing incident likely to occur," FBI systems administrator Al Dolcene said.
The FBI will officially review it's spam filtering and see if similar intelligence breakdowns could be prevented in the future. FBI spokesman Jan Nadeen said that a preliminary review has shown several other problems that FBI was not aware of.
"The FBI, in searching other filtered messages, has found information from our banks showing that due to system upgrades, our accounts could be at risk and we should send along our passwords so they can be maintained, as well as information claiming our computers could be at risk and a free scan could correct the problems. We have our technicians working with the e-mail senders as we speak," Nadeen said.
