On 19 Apr 2011, at 19:38, Barrett Brown wrote:
Hi, Parmy-
Thanks for getting in touch. I'm aware of your work and appreciate the attention you've given to our work, particularly Operation Metal Gear, which I've been working on more or less exclusively since the Russia Today announcement last month.
Booz Allen Hamilton was indeed our first target due to the meeting that occurred between Aaron Barr and Booz Allen VP William Wansley in early February (I've wrongly described it as having occurred in late January, just noticed the error today); as you can see via the first link on this Daily Kos piece I wrote early on in our investigation, the e-mails leading up to that meeting are entirely pursuant to Barr's methodology in collecting information on Anonymous, which itself involved social networking-based social engineering as well as the primitive form of "attribution" he engaged in by comparing login times on Anonops with those of Facebook members suspected to be Anonops users in an effort to acquire identifying data. He also discussed Wikileaks' alleged ties to Anonymous (and to my knowledge, those ties consist merely of the two entities sharing a natural constituency). There's also a link here to a sound file of my conversation with Wansley early last month, in which I asked him about having a relationship with Barr and of course he lied and said no. Here's that post:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/03/13/955971/-Booz-Allen-Hamilton-VP-Caught-Lying
At any rate, I imagine that Booz Allen broke off any relationship they had established with Barr after the fellow became publicly tainted, and I'm not convinced that Booz was interested in Anonymous itself so much as the methodology with which Barr had allegedly discovered our "leadership." I thus suspected that Booz Allen was a central player in the creation of persona management software to be used for the operation of these fake virtual armies. I am now certain that it is involved in something of the sort based on several phone conversations I had a bit later with a certain person was in a position to know and who was concerned about this technology, which he described as "a good product" that was nonetheless akin to "a gun" insomuch as that it could easily be used in a malicious fashion. Around that time, it was discovered that HBGary Federal had bid on a USAF contract to produce the persona management software they requested. We came to suspect that perhaps Booz Allen itself had either won such a bid or came to work on a similar one for another party. At any rate, some form of persona management software was admitted to by CENTCOM, as you know; we have reason to believe that whatever was developed went beyond CENTCOM to some variety of U.S./UK/Canadian/Australia/New Zealand/ joint command, which collectively runs Echelon. This is based on direction provided to us by two different informants hailing from gov't agencies of two different countries, one of whom we can verify as being who the person claims to be and the other who we cannot, as that second person is understandably concerned about being found out. The first person warned us that the USAF contract was meant to be found; presumably this would be a means by which to prevent any attention to the methodology that might arise - as of course it did - from going beyond CENTCOM's claims that such things are merely being used against foreign targets and never in English. The second one told us that he had been briefed in the presence of two of his nation's generals that Echelon was to be either upgraded or replaced in June (apparently it was not clear from the briefing). Although this was told to myself and another Anon with whom I've been working about a month ago, and although my questioning of him left me satisfied as to the fellow's truthfulness, I haven't discussed this much since as I really had no way to confirm it. Just the other day, though, I went back to our first informant and asked the person directly about Echelon. This was the reply:
I do, although I have not officially heard about the June
timeframe. Do not think of Einstein, Metal Gear, Echelon, or
Carnivore as separate programs. Combine the capabilities of all,
and you have something as close to AI as we can possibly get at the
moment that can automatically target someone based on pre-
determined criteria, interact with them as if having real
conversations, and automatically update the persona to keep track
of the content, context, and order of events using the capabilities
of all of those programs. It also automatically builds a dossier of
the target and updates it to indicate relationships, sways in
opinion, and other important details. Even the shrewdest character
would have no idea that they were talking to an automated persona
because the depth of conversation is so realistic. SIGINT, OSINT,
and certain aspects of MASINT are being rolled into one on this
one. The system can also learn the online mannerisms and speech of
a real person and mimic that person, allowing him/her to have an
online presence without ever again taking an active part in the
online conversation.
Again, this informant, whose status we've verified, would be in a position to know these things. I haven't provided this message to anyone yet outside the small team of Anons with whom I'm working, but I am firmly convinced that it is an accurate depiction of the situation, and I plan to run it by certain people to see what they think. You are free to reveal it if you like.
Have you come upon In-Q-Tel yet in your research? Also, make sure you see Steve Ragan's piece on Metal Gear as well as Ian Cobain's piece on persona management in general if you haven't already, as both of these involve additional research on some of the entities known to be involved in all of this. You should also keep an eye on this wiki we launched the other day, which is still being filled out but the main page has a couple of links you might find useful, including to those two articles as well as another I've come across from NYT 2003 which seems to involve early versions of this same thing.
http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Main_Page
As for Azerbaijan, I've heard from the Amnesty International's central Asian affairs fellow, who just returned from Baku and got in touch out of concern that our allegations may in fact be true, but we have yet to pursue the subject in such a way as to really verify it. I continue to suspect it, but that's all.
Let me know if you have any other questions.