Right now on the front page, promoted from the diaries, is a distorted tale of the Army's rejection of a small and shadowy Fresno, CA company's body armor.
Let's see what we can figure out about this company. First, it is very small. At least once it was unable to provide the government with enough vests for testing. Despite being small, it has spent $160,000 on lobbyists.
The first mention of it in the huge LexisNexis news archive is in November 2001, where an article briefly mentioned how the company had 10 employees and was hoping to cash-in on 9/11.
Checking wikipedia, I see that one of those few employees has been manipulating wikipedia by deleting negative information about the company, and inserting company PR. This has caused Wikipedia to declare the page "semi-protected" to prevent further anonymous editing.
Having a company employee edit wikipedia is not by itself bad, but ANONYMOUSLY removing negative information from wikipedia is. Even worse, shortly after another Wikipedia editor pointed out that the anonymous editor was using the same Fresno CA internet service as Pinnacle Armor, the Pinnacle Armor employee responded by saying:
24.118.89.238 is a disgrace to Wikipedia
You've got a lot of courage, big man. logging in anonymously and constantly harassing me and defacing this site. What makes you think that your OPINION, that for some reason Pinnacle Armor should be portrayed in the most pointlessly negative possible fashion is more valid that the FACTS that I am posting.
Here is another Wikipedia username that has done nothing besides promote Pinnacle Armor. (click on the "diff" links to see the changes the user has made)
I don't blame the poster of the diary for not telling the whole story, which is not available without a lot of digging. The PRO-Pinnance Armor side has been heavily promoted all over the Internet, while the company has gone as far as deleting negative off of Wikipedia. It took me a lot of work to find the other side of the story. The whole point of Pinnacle Armor's PR/astroturf campaign is to fool people into doing its bidding. Obviously they would not do it if it wouldn't get some results.
Here are some facts not in the frontpaged diary:
Pinnacle Armor FAILED Army Tests
The Army's struggle to find a new, more flexible body armor was dealt a setback Friday when a California company's high tech Dragon Skin vests failed to pass military testing, a senior defense official said.
After three days of testing this week, the Army determined that the body armor does not meet military specifications
The DOD has already funded Pinnacle Armor
Campbell said initial military tests on small sections of the Dragon Skin armor had disappointing results. He said Pinnacle has received $840,000 in research funding to develop improved armor.
So the DoD has given Pinnacle 870K in research funding, and has purchased 120K in vests for testing. About a million dollars. That's quite a bit of money for a company that has only 30 employees. It's equal to $33,000 per employee. Pinnacle Armor has its mouth very firmly on the defense budget tit, and it wants a whole lot more.
So much of the claims about the Pinnacle Armor are impossible to verify. For example, what is the source of the "fact" that Bush's Secret Service detail use's the company's products. It is repeated at least 50 times on the web, but no trustworthy original source is ever cited.
A group called "Soldiers United for Truth" has been pushing Pinnacle Armor in "articles" that read very much like Occam's since late 2005. Have a look at the "Soldiers United for Truth" page for yourself to see thisslick PR campaign in action.