Re: Please don't call it Metal Gear
Subject: Re: Please don't call it Metal Gear
From: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com>
Date: 5/12/11, 17:12
To: neal rauhauser <nrauhauser@gmail.com>

Thanks for all this. Regarding your points:

1. You're right, and I've started to fix the wiki and other materials to reflect that.

2. We used the term Metal Gear as a generic term to provide a single name to anything involving persona management or hypothetical "autopersonas." At that point, we had no idea what such things are actually termed and thus need a term by which the media could refer to them. It served its purpose but of course we'll start referring to actual instances/internal names now that we're learning of them. It's basically too late to change it and I know the Google-related problems but at any rate it's already in play and I'm incapable of reversing it. Shouldn't be a problem now that we can start using the actual terms.

3. We have an informant, a former employee, who is very disturbed by some of what he saw at Booz and who confirmed for us that the firm is indeed developing persona management. Also, William Wansley met with Aaron Barr pursuant to his work on Wikileaks and Anonymous, and of course Wansley was dishonest with me when I called him about it despite us having the e-mails. Likewise, we are concerned about Booz's presence in Azerbaijan and the potential for use of surveillance tech on dissenters there; a number of them were arrested after calling for protests via Facebook and Amnesty International's central Asia director was concerned enough about the possibility to get in touch. All in all, I want more scrutiny on Booz in general.

I'm detaching myself and the operation from Anonymous, which has too many distractions and internal disarray going on, and pursuing these efforts under Project PM along with the team I've accumulated over the past two years. Other than my own projects, I'm working on trying to get more people involved in online activism by use of the best tools available - particularly crowd-sourced investigations into corruption along the lines of the wiki. I'm not doing anything even remotely illegal and all of my people are likewise clean.

On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 9:02 AM, neal rauhauser <nrauhauser@gmail.com> wrote:

   This is a subset of the information that Congress and the FBI see regarding the HBGary email analysis. You may share this with people who are interested in analyzing the case. I would prefer to NOT find this in a torrent labeled "OMG WTF FBI INVESTIGATION LEAK!@!@!@!@" 


   You will need Timeline to see the timeline file and FreeMind to view the mindmap file. Google "Timeline sourceforge" or you'll never find the right stuff to read the timeline file.


   I have read some of the Echelon2 wiki and I am glad there is attention on this, but I have the following criticism:


1. Attribution is a technical term and it means something far different to law enforcement/intel than what the Wiki both states and implies. The attached Attribution.pdf is NOT part of the HBGary dump, but I included it because I thought you might be interested in both the content and the authors.


2. Metal Gear is a made up term. Magpii is something you will hear in a Senate hearing, assuming Judiciary actually touches this. You'll hear about Romas/COIN. Team Themis will come up. This is also unfortunate because it means something else - Google results are fairly useless for it in the context of these matters.


3. The fascination with Booze Allen Hamilton puzzles me. They're beltway bandit shitheads, no mistake about that, but why them and not TASC, which is the true source of the misconduct seen in these events?


   Yesterday I ate chips & salsa, drank ice tea, and the FBI agent across from me took seven pages of notes during our ninety minute meeting. We talked about three major criminal cases, a couple of minor ones, and some brewing security problems. I went back to my office and dumped the full version of this content and two similar things for the other two big cases. All three would be of interest to civil liberties activists but I can't go into details on the other two, since they are not yet public.


   This being said, they are aware of the names of some of the people who are being copied on this message. I will close with my usual admonition - "Do not do crimes. Consider carefully before associating with/assisting those who do, as conspiracy charges are possible."


  Do any of you have the 3.0 gigabyte trove of documents extracted from the HBGary emails? Not nearly enough reading has been done in this area.





--
Regards,

Barrett Brown
512-560-2302