This is Barrett Brown; I contacted you last year with a pitch. To recap, Im a journalist and activist currently
associated with the Anonymous movement. My work has appeared in Vanity
Fair, al-Jazeera, The Guardian, Huffington Post, New York Press,
Skeptical Inquirer, Skeptic, McSweeneys, National Lampoon, and other
outlets, and Ive written a few books and done some political
consultancy work as well.
Im
preparing to write a comprehensive piece regarding an investigation
Ive been conducting as a sort of outgrowth of the HBGary/Anonymous
incident from earlier this year, in which the latter compromised the
servers of the former and acquired some 70,000 e-mails after learning
that the CEO, Aaron Barr, had planned to out our alleged leadership to
the FBI. You may be aware that several interesting stories came from
this early on concerning demonstrable wrongdoing by not only HBGary,
but also Bank of America, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Palantir, the
Justice Department, and other entities. Nonetheless, we are still
discovering more as we continue to pick up informants and make phone
calls to those we know to have been involved in these matters.
The
most interesting thing thats been discovered thus far, in my opinion,
is the development of whats known as persona management software by
a number of companies at the request of CENTCOM, the USAF, and
presumably other agencies as well. As seen in a 2007 patent associated
with IBM and authored by three U.S. military software engineers, as
well as the description of desired software put out by the USAF in 2010
(and bid on by HBGary, incidentally), persona management entails the
creation and deployment of fake online personas to be operated en masse
with some degree of input from a human operator. The role of the
software is to facilitate all of this by providing the framework and
assisting the operator in maintaining situational integrity
throughout the resulting interactions with real people.
CENTCOM
has since admitted to using such methodology, although spokesmen claim
that it is only used abroad and never in the English language. Even if
this is true - and I have reason to suspect that it is not - the
various contractors that we know to have developed aspects of the
technology are often allowed to keep what is developed. As we know from
what has been exposed in the wake of the HBGary incident, there are any
number of contractors who are happy to provide such services to any
customer that asks for them, and against domestic targets.
At
any rate, thats the short version of all of this. Ive spent the last
two months looking into it and working with other investigative
journalists for the purpose of getting this better exposed. In the
process, I have called such people as Booz Allen Hamilton VP William
Wansley and caught them lying about the issue; Wansley claimed that
Booz had no relationship with HBGary, which, as I poined out to him, is
demonstrably untrue insomuch as that he brought the CEO in for a
meeting after discussing Anonymous and the methodology by which its
members can be sussed out. Luckily, I recorded the call, being in a
single-party consent state. For what its worth, Booz Allen and Wyle
Laboratories both received contracts from the USAF for nearly the same
amount of money at the same time last year, and for projects that would
appear to fit into persona management apparatus.
Let me know if you have any interest in a story on whats been discovered thus far on this issue.