Brendan I. Koerner

The full-page ads that Siebel Systems began running in Beltway publications like Government Executive last January were certainly eye-catching. "Who Are the Mohammed Attas of Tomorrow?" the headline asked, accompanied by a grainy surveillance photo of the September 11 hijacker passing unhindered through airport security in Portland, Maine. The copy pitched the software giant's new data-sharing product, Siebel Solutions for Homeland Security, as a tool for officials seeking to combat terrorism: "With Siebel, they can better monitor, analyze, and share… more

The Internet post-mortems are coming fast and furious nowadays, from John Cassidy's trifling Dot.con to James Ledbetter's forthcoming Starving to Death on $200 Million a Year, a tell-all about The Industry Standard's fleeting heyday. So far, this literature of failure has portrayed the technology boom as a madcap adventure, and the subsequent bust as little more than a sitcom comeuppance for a handful of arrogant louts. Sure, a couple billion dollars got lost in the shuffle, and some… more

Ed Yourdon was on a tarmac in Pittsburgh when he got a glimpse of the coming software hell. His New York shuttle had been cleared for takeoff when the pilot pulled a U-turn and headed back to the gate. The flaps were stuck. "We're going to have to power down and reboot," the pilot announced. It was the aeronautical equivalent of Ctrl+Alt+Delete. "Makes you think," says Yourdon, author of Byte Wars. "Maybe they had Windows 95 underneath the hood."

Word of the hidden epidemic began spreading in the spring of 2001. Local newscasts around the country reported that as many as 10 million Americans suffered from an unrecognized disease. Viewers were urged to watch for the symptoms: restlessness, fatigue, irritability, muscle tension, nausea, diarrhea, and sweating, among others. Many of the segments featured sound bites from Sonja Burkett, a patient who'd finally received treatment after two years trapped at home by the illness, and from Dr.… more

Frayed news clippings from murder trials, blowups of spent bullets, and collages culled from medical textbooks adorn the corridors of the Connecticut State Forensic Science Laboratory. One of the macabre mementos is a poster-sized array of photos connected to an old attempted homicide. In a corner of the frame is a snapshot of a state trooper's jacket, badly creased and caked with dirt; in the opposite corner is a close-up of a tractor-trailer that's also in need of… more

After nearly a decade of boisterous economic growth, investors have been taken aback by recent falls in share prices around the world. America's Nasdaq stock market has fallen by 70% since the beginning of 2000; some emerging markets have fared even worse. Financial pundits have fingered a number of plausible culprits, from the popping of the dotcom bubble to the fallout from September 11th. But when all else fails, critics turn their fire on a centuries-old scapegoat: short-sellers.

The small fraternity… more

Had Alexey Vladimirovich Ivanov been born in Chicago rather than Chelyabinsk, he'd likely be well on his way to joining the geek elite. His three-page resume lists computer skills that would dazzle any Silicon Valley headhunter. According to his employment history, Ivanov began working at a regional telephone company in Russia while still in his mid-teens, installing Web servers and Cisco routers. His programming talents include tricky languages like C++ and Perl, and he has mastered 18… more

The case against Robert Hood is far from airtight. The Colorado Springs resident is charged with aggravated robbery and kidnapping; in June, he allegedly forced his victim into a car trunk at gunpoint and drove him around for hours, demanding his ATM password, before abandoning the vehicle at a 7-Eleven. When the victim mentioned that his attacker sported a gold tooth, detectives immediately keyed on Hood, who is also a suspect in a separate murder case.

Besides that lustrous tooth,… more

The attacks of September 11 were stunning not only for their brutality, but also for their simplicity. It is estimated that the entire operation cost al-Qaeda just $300,000, and the expertise involved -- from piloting skills to document forgery -- was relatively unsophisticated. Yet the terrorists were able to cause an estimated $200 billion worth of damage to the United States economy, in addition to cutting short thousands of innocent lives. Those jaw-dropping figures do not include the additional havoc… more

Until recently, energy-trading giant Enron was hailed as a paragon of corporate governance. The firm's rapid ascent was credited to an ambitious leadership, which maintained solid earnings despite an aggressive expansion strategy that drained cash flow. Institutional investors fattened their portfolios with Enron's high-octane stock, and CEO Kenneth Lay hobnobbed with then-Governor George Bush at baseball games.

Yet behind the facade of success lay dirty secrets. Enron executives are suspected of concealing massive losses from shareholders through a series of… more