Re: P.J. O'Rourke
Subject: Re: P.J. O'Rourke
From: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com>
Date: 4/21/11, 11:48
To: Gemma Sieff <gemma@harpers.org>

Gemma-

Barrett Brown here; by way of a recap, I’m 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, McSweeney’s, National Lampoon, and other outlets, and I’ve written a few books and done some political consultancy work as well.

I’m preparing to write a comprehensive piece regarding an investigation I’ve 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 that’s been discovered thus far, in my opinion, is the development of what’s 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, that’s the short version of all of this. I’ve 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 what’s been discovered thus far on this issue.

On Wed, Jul 7, 2010 at 9:35 PM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
Gemma-

Thanks for considering the idea. I have just now received the final draft of the manuscript from the publisher and have attached it here in case you would be interested in taking a look. I have already pulled some sections that could serve as excerpts; please let me know if you would like me to send those along.


On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 10:37 AM, Gemma Sieff <gemma@harpers.org> wrote:
Dear Barrett: Thanks for this; it's an interesting idea. Let me discuss it with a few of my colleagues and I'll be in touch soon. Thank you for thinking of us! Yours, GS


On Sun, Jun 20, 2010 at 8:36 PM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi, Gemma-

This is Barrett Brown; to recap, I'm a contributor to Vanity Fair, Huffington Post, Skeptic, Skeptical Inquirer, The Onion, and a number of other outlets, and my first book - on the intelligent design movement - was released in 2007.

I have another book coming out this August and I wanted to see if you might be interested in taking a look at some excerpts, or perhaps an original article on the same theme. The book is an examination of the state of American punditry, focusing on Pulitizer winners such as Thomas Friedman and Charles Krauthammer, both of whom have made an astounding number of terrible predictions without having ever managed to predict anything that wasn't already obvious to most educated people; likewise, both have routinely contradicted themselves, shown an absolute disregard for basic research of the sort that would have prevented factual errors, and otherwise done more to misinform even relatively reasonable and moderate American citizens than any other commentator of whom I am aware.

Aside from the excerpts, I also have a large amount of notes left over from writing the book due to the sheer volume of the failures in question, and thus I could provide original pieces on Friedman, Krauthammer, Martin Peretz, Mort Zuckerman, and several other allegedly reasonable media figures who collectively made the book a very easy one to write.

Let me know if this interests you.


On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 5:30 PM, Gemma Sieff <gemma@harpers.org> wrote:
Dear Barrett:
Sorry for the delay in our reply. The article doesn't fit our needs at the moment, but Roger and I wish you luck placing it somewhere else. I like the detail that you have to move to Austria to escape racist vitriol.
Best,
Gemma


On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 2:54 AM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi, Gemma-

Wanted to see if you and Roger might be interested in this one. I've been writing some pieces for HuffPo on former Washington Times editor Robert Stacy McCain (wrote Donkey Cons with Lynn Vincent, Palin's biographer), whom I and the conservative blogger Charles Johnson are attempting to expose as a white supremacist. In response, he's made a series of goofy attacks on the two of us, though he isn't refuting anything because he simply can't in this case; it seems he wrote an article for the white supremacist publication American Renaissance under a pen name, along with a number of racially charged messages on various internet forums under that same name and occasionally even his real one, and has also posted links to the neo-Nazi site overthrow.com at the popular conservative forum Free Republic. He's a character.

I've just finished a piece that further details his various racist escapades, with particular attention to the 2002 Times article he wrote regarding Professor Jonathan Farley, the black mathematician who received hundreds of racist e-mails and death threats after writing that the Confederates were traitors, and who has since just given up and moved to Austria after having received continued harassment. I spoke to him at length over the weekend and he seems convinced that McCain was intentionally setting out to destroy his career; what's more, it's now evident that at the very same time that McCain was writing this "news article," he was also in direct and constant interaction with various neo-Nazis as well as making numerous racist comments himself in various forums under a false name. Remember that this fellow currently writes for American Spectator as well as the popular Republican blog network Hot Air and is directly associated with dozens of prominent conservatives.

Please let me know if you'd like to see the piece.

Thanks,

Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY

On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 4:56 PM, Gemma Sieff <gemma@harpers.org> wrote:
Dear Barrett,
Thank you for thinking of Harper's for this idea, but we don't have a place for it right now. Roger and I wish you luck placing it elsewhere.
Yours,
Gemma, assistant to Roger D. Hodge

--
Gemma Sieff
Harper's Magazine
666 Broadway, 11th Floor
New York, NY 10012
(212) 420 5774




--
Gemma Sieff
Harper's Magazine
666 Broadway, 11th Floor
New York, NY 10012
(212) 420 5774



--
Regards,


Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY
512-560-2302



--
Gemma Sieff
Harper's Magazine
666 Broadway, 11th Floor
New York, NY 10012
(212) 420 5774




--
Regards,

Barrett Brown
512-560-2302



--
Regards,

Barrett Brown
512-560-2302