We are now conducting a somewhat more extensive investigation; Metal Gear goes well beyond Booz.
Summary of what I dug into yesterday:
The tendering document as posted by law on the FedBizOpps.gov (FBO) website complete with contract Solicitation Number: RTB220610.
From this information you can find out a number of things:
§ It is proof that this type of thing, creating a false online population for various reasons, goes on and has acquired a surprising level of acceptance by a large number of people.
§ There are number companies involved in providing this type of service. In fact there is a pretty vibrant market offering such.
§ The purchasing of this type of service has fallen foul, in a comical manner, of US laws regarding government transparency of federal contract tendering.
Then type in the hbgary is the search box and select last 365 days in the post dated box, hit search for details of work hbgary has been involved in for federal government.
It is also interesting to click on the interested vendor list on some documents to see the companies who competed for the contract.
So the FBO website, in line with government law, publishes all fed contracts and stores them online for 365 days. Yet, the webcache and the PDF of the Air Forces software persona management tender is no longer online despite it being dated at less than 365 days old.
However, when it was up on the web this is some of the attention it received:
Peter Presland(?) uses some interesting terms:
So since the dates of the comments above linking the document, the FBO site has taken it down although there is still an overview mention of it on another FBO site which appears to attempt to support freedom of information:
But the one thing there is no cache of, and seemingly no record online of, is the page you would get if you clicked on the interested vendor list tag on the FBO site which would list every company who went in for the Air Force project and would indicate to Anon the number of companies involved in this work and their identities (as, it looks like, this is probably the most publicly advertised deal of this nature ever known).
Have already suggested what may be the eaisest way to get that info to Barrett
Couple of further points of interest:
When you read that the Air Force document states that the work is handled by Russell T Beasley (Contract Officer, Phone 813-828-4729, Fax 813-828-5111, Email russell.beasley-02@macdill.af.mil) out of Florida, MacDill Air Force Base, United States, 33679... and Kabul, Afganistan and Badghdad, Iraq.
And taken in conjunction with Peter Preslands comments They're clearly getting serious about flooding 'Target Sites' with disinfo-agents it is hard not to draw the conclusion that in a base in Florida there are 50 americans using persona management software controlling 500 online personas which appear to be Iraqi civilians (complete with social media profiles backgrounds and fakes IP addresses designed to look credible under a high level of scrutiny) who, when they arent commenting on news articles and discussion forums in a totally unbiased fashion, like nothing better than telling the online community of Iraq about how much fun it was being bombed a lot and how much they just love the US lead invasion forces.
But to add a level of even handedness to this there is a part of the tendering document that points to straight old fashioned spying and government espionage of the sort all governments get up to:
0006- Remote Access Secure Virtual Private Network. 1 each
Secure Operating Environment provides a reliable and protected computing
environment from which to stage and conduct operations. Every session uses a
clean Virtual Machine (VM) image. The solution is accessed through sets of
Virtual Private Network (VPN) devices located at each Customer facility. The
fully-managed VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) is an environment that allows
users remote access from their desktop into a VM. Upon session termination,
the VM is deleted and any virus, worm, or malicious software that the user inadvertently downloaded is destroyed. Anonymizer Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Solution or equal.
That would suggest that along with disinfo agents there is more than likely (out of the 500 personas) a number of personas involved in insurgent/terrorist (with significant capabilities of their own) infiltration and spying. As would be expected in the reality of any war, but in this day and age these things can be done via the web collecting electronic information on suspects.
Also, there is another FBO deal that catches the eye:
The purpose of this project is to provide Afghans with improved access to information and to empower local media. The Mobile Khabar service aims to enable the sophisticated news consumption behaviour of Afghans, who have highly developed skills for triangulating facts by accessing a variety of news sources. The service will connect users to live radio streams, including popular foreign news services which broadcast in any of the languages spoken in Afghanistan. The project is also intended to challenge regional and local media to improve the quality and relevance of their content by providing them with a national audience and national relevance.
Aside from all the interesting connotations of that, and of both deals taken together... when you add Gregg Houshs comments on the radio yesterday regarding Azerbaijan and Booz, Social Media and the arrests of several dissidents...
Then the capabilities of Motion Matters take on a massive twist given that the project they were awarded was the straight forward production of a mobile media network for news consumption.
Taken from the Motion Matters site(its the only comment they make about their products):
Motion Matters is pleased to present one of the most exciting innovations in social networking and location aware technology: Loc8Pro
Loc8Pro is a revolutionary approach to the mobile social network. It allows users all the same capabilities as current social networking sites (such as Facebook or MySpace) and search-capable phone apps (such as Loopt, BrightKite, Yelp and others which identify places, events and people).
However, it will also allow the user to search for new contacts using a much more detailed set or criterion. Profiles will be much more detailed and personal profile information more useful and diverse than any other social site or app today. The most astonishing innovation for contact search, however, will be location. Users will be able to seek out new contacts no matter where they are based on their current proximity.
But Loc8Pros most important and marketable difference will be the unmatched levels of privacy, safety and security, all within the users hands. This ground-breaking approach will allow the user to turn on and off any level of personal profile information on-the-fly, unique to any new friend request as they choose when they choose.
Its like HBGary and their security products... there was a very notable and dangerous flip side to them.
Motion Matterss solution appears to be good at mining more data (especially location aware data) out of social media while at the same time shielding the data that the person using their software exposes to others.
Well, you can see where the above is going...
At the very least the public should be aware of, and protected by, a very clear set of laws regarding this type of service and technology... maybe Anon/press should be asking for such?