| Subject: Re: Anonymous, OpMetalGear, and Gamma International |
| From: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> |
| Date: 5/5/11, 19:17 |
| To: Hashem Said <saidh@aljazeera.net> |
| CC: Naz Khan <nyk284@gmail.com> |
I understand about Iran. With regards to doing another piece on Anonymous, I wrote a press release regarding Sony that's been making the rounds and am doing an op-ed for The Guardian on the subject, but I have something more important for al-Jazeera if you're interested. For the last two months we have been conducting a crowd-sourced investigation called Operation Metal Gear which has been covered a bit in the press and which I announced on Russia Today early on. We're working with activists and several investigative journalists to prompt coverage and inquiry into the use of "persona management," something that was brought to attention from the e-mails we acquired from HBGary. It turned out that the US Air Force had been requesting software by which a single person could control ten fake online people complete with backgrounds, likes and dislikes, with the software helping to keep everything straight and not only translating into a particular dialect, but also keeping tabs on conversations and adding that info to its dataset. I made a number of calls to contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton, which had been talking to HBGary about these matters and which brought Aaron Barr in for a meeting to discuss them; I got VP William Wansley to lie to me on the phone about it (I recorded it from a single-party consent state so it's legal and I can link to the recording from an article if you like), claiming he "never" met with Barr even though the meeting is discussed at length in the e-mails we have. I finally got in touch with a former employee of Booz Allen who confirmed that they're involved in persona management and that it was a dangerous development. Meanwhile, after I went on Russia Today and Forbes and other publications began reporting that we had launched the investigation, we were approached by Barry Friedman, whose father William Friedman helped to invent cryptology during World War II (there's a wikipedia page about his father with more info) and who has been involved in software, intelligence, and psyops for decades. He put us on the right track, and we did a great deal of research into the subject which we're still compiling and also began to provide leads to several journalists that we respect so that they could uncover more details of which firms are involved in developing such things and where and how they're being used. CENTCOM now admits to using persona management for propaganda purposes in the Middle East but claim it's not used against Americans. Even if that's true, the software is being developed by perhaps a dozen federal contractors who are allowed to turn around and use it in service to their corporate clients, as we saw with Palantir and HBGary and all that, so it's very likely that these automated sockpuppets are already being used against civilians across the world. We compile our information at this wiki, which is in turn used by journalists who wish to conduct additional investigations:
http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Main_Page. Last night, I did a podcast with Ian Murphy, who's running for Congress in New York and who's also an editor and to whom I'm serving as an advisor, in which we discussed the problem and what's been discovered:
http://www.buffalobeast.com/?p=5939. The main page of that wiki includes links to some of the articles that have appeared in publications based on our tip-offs.
So, I'd very much like to write a piece explaining the implications of all of this and going into some of what we've told by our informants. We have reason to believe that persona management is being used in conjunction with things like Echelon, Carnivore, and other signals intelligence apparatus to perform surveillance and propaganda feats that are essentially destroying privacy as well as the integrity of online discourse. Meanwhile, we know for a fact that they're being used in the Middle East to achieve U.S. propaganda objectives at the expense of the truth, and we fear that as this capability is developed further, it will basically make it impossible for anyone to know where certain opinions are coming from while also assisting various powerful entities in controlling public opinion. This is essentially the most frightening thing I have come across in more than ten years as a journalist and five as an online activist in a position to see certain dynamics that most people are unaware of, and I'm going to be working for years if necessary to identify those responsible and prompt reasonable governments to find ways to combat this.