I wrote this piece for al-Jazeera and it was set to go up on the site
yesterday but then some other editor jumped in and asked me to rewrite it,
"humanize" it, make it more "punchy," and do "at least four solid
interviews," so I cancelled the three-part series I was supposed to do. I
want to try to find a home for it, otherwise I'll just publish it myself on
Daily Kos or some shit. Any ideas? Basically, I'm revealing the nature of a
massive and unprecedented espionage program that targets the Arab world, and
which I'm presenting after having pieced together details from a couple
hundred leaked e-mails. I want to get this out soon without some other
incompetent fucking editor trying to "humanize" the fucking thing. Let me
know if know of anyone who might take it.
***
For at least two years, the U.S. military has been conducting a
sophisticated campaign of mass surveillance and data mining across the
Arab world. And were it not for a scandal that led to his downfall, the
ongoing operation may very well have been reorganized and even updated
further by a collection of intelligence contractors assembled in large part
by Aaron Barr one of the major players in a conspiracy by which he and two
other contractors sought to engage in unethical and potentially illegal
attacks on a series of domestic targets on behalf of institutions like Bank
of America and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
The nature and extent of the intelligence project, which was known as
Romas/COIN and which is scheduled for replacement this year by a similar
program known as Odyssey, may be determined in part by a close reading of
hundreds of e-mails among the 70,000 that were stolen from Barr's federal
contracting firm, HBGary Federal, as well as its parent company, HBGary.
Other details may be gleaned by an examination of the various other firms
and individuals that are referred to either as being among those who joined
forces in order to win the contract from its current holder or merely noted
in e-mail conversations as potential partners in the effort by virtue of
possessing particular skills or capabilities.
Compiling the numerous details with additional research and knowledge of the
industry results in a disturbing picture, particularly when viewed in a
wider context. Unprecedented surveillance capabilities are being produced by
an industry that works in secret on applications that are nonetheless funded
by the public. Their products are developed on demand for an intelligence
community that is not subject to Congressional oversight and which has been
repeatedly revealed as having misused its existing powers in ways that
violate U.S. law and American ideals.
Although the relatively well-known military contractor Northrop Grumman had
long held the contract for Romas/COIN, such contracts are subject to regular
recompetes by which other companies, or several working in tandem, can apply
to take over. In early February, Aaron Barr - CEO of the
increasingly-respected intelligence contracting firm HBGary Federal wrote
the following e-mail to Al Pisani, an executive at the much larger federal
contractor TASC.
"I met with [Mantech CEO] Bob Frisbie the other day to catch up. He is
looking to expand a capability in IO related to the COIN re-compete but more
for DoD. He told me he has a few acquisitions in the works that will
increase his capability in this area. So just a thought that it might be
worth a phone call to see if there is any synergy and strength between TASC
and ManTech in this area. I think forming a team and response to compete
against SAIC will be tough but doable." IO in this context stands for
information operations, while COIN itself, as noted in an NDA attached to
one of the e-mails, stands for counter intelligence. SAIC is a larger
intelligence contractor that was expected to pursue the recompete as well.
Pisani agreed to the idea, and in conjunction with Barr and fellow TASC exec
John Lovegrove, the growing party spent much of the next year working to
create a partnership of firms capable of providing the client - a U.S.
agency that is never specified in the hundreds of e-mails that follow with
capabilities that would outmatch those being provided by Northrop, SAIC, or
other competitors.
Several e-mails in particular provide a great deal of material by which to
determine the scope and intent of Romas/COIN. One that Barr wrote to his own
e-mail account, likely for the purpose of adding to other documents later,
is entitled Notes on COIN. It begins with a list of entries for various
facets of the program, all of which are blank and were presumably filled out
later: ISP, Operations, Language/Culture, Media Development, Marketing and
Advertising, Security, MOE. Afterwards, another list consists of the
following: Capabilities, Mobile Development, Challenges, MOE,
Infrastructure, Security. Finally, a list of the following websites is
composed, many of which represent various small companies that provide niche
marketing services pursuant to mobile phones.
More helpful is a later e-mail from Lovegrove to Barr and some of his
colleagues at TASC in which he announces the following:
Our team consists of:
- TASC (PMO, creative services)
- HB Gary (Strategy, planning, PMO)
- Akamai (infrastructure)
- Archimedes Global (Specialized linguistics, strategy, planning)
- Acclaim Technical Services (specialized linguistics)
- Mission Essential Personnel (linguistic services)
- Cipher (strategy, planning operations)
- PointAbout (rapid mobile application development, list of strategic
partners)
- Google (strategy, mobile application and platform development - long
list of strategic partners)
- Apple (mobile and desktop platform, application assistance -long list
of strategic partners)
We are trying to schedule an interview with ATT plus some other small app
developers.
From these and dozens of other clues and references, the following may be
determined about the nature of Romas/COIN:
Mobile phone software and applications constitute a major component of the
program.
There's discussion of bringing in a gaming developer, apparently at the
behest of Barr, who mentions that the team could make good use of a social
gaming company maybe like zynga, gameloft, etc. Lovegrove elsewhere notes:
I know a couple of small gaming companies at MIT that might fit the bill.
Apple and Google were active team partners, and AT&T may have been as well.
The latter is known to have provided the NSA free reign over customer
communications (and was in turn protected by a bill granting them
retroactive immunity from lawsuits). Google itself is the only company to
have received a Hostile to Privacy rating from Privacy International.
Apple is currently being investigated by Congress after the iPhone was
revealed to compile user location data in a way that differs from other
mobile phones; the company has claimed this to have been a bug.
The program makes use of several providers of linguistic services. At one
point, the team discusses hiring a military-trained Arabic linguist.
Elsewhere, Barr writes: I feel confident I can get you a ringer for Farsi
if they are still interested in Farsi (we need to find that out). These
linguists are not only going to be developing new content but also meeting
with folks, so they have to have native or near native proficiency and have
to have the cultural relevance as well.
Alterion and SocialEyez are listed as businesses to contact. The former
specializes in social media monitoring tools. The latter uses
sophisticated natural language processing methodology in order to process
tens of millions of multi-lingual conversations daily while also employing
researchers and media analysts on the ground; its website also notes that
Millions of people around the globe are now networked as never before -
exchanging information and ideas, forming opinions, and speaking their minds
about everything from politics to products.
At one point, TASC exec Chris Clair asks Aaron and others, Can we name COIN
Saif? Saif is the sword an Arab executioner uses when they decapitate
criminals. I can think of a few cool brands for this.
A diagram attached to one of Barr's e-mails to the group
(http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/7/pmo.png/) depicts Magpii as
interacting in some unspecified manner with Foreign Mobile and Foreign
Web. Magpii is a project of Barr's own creation which stands for Magnify
Personal Identifying Information, involves social networking, and is
designed for the purpose of storing personal information on users. Although
details are difficult to determine from references in Barr's e-mails, he
discusses the project almost exclusively with members of military
intelligence to which he was pitching the idea.
There are sporadic references such things as semantic analysis, Latent
Semantic Indexing, specialized linguistics, and OPS, a programming
language designed for solving problems using expert systems.
Barr asks the team's partner at Apple, Andy Kemp (whose signature lists him
as being from the company's Homeland Defense/National Programs division), to
provide him a contact at Pixar/Disney.
Altogether, then, a successful bid for the relevant contract was seen to
require the combined capabilities of perhaps a dozen firms capabilities
whereby millions of conversations can be monitored and automatically
analyzed, whereby a wide range of personal data can be obtained and stored
in secret, and whereby some unknown degree of information can be released to
a given population through a variety of means and without any hint that the
actual source is U.S. military intelligence. All this is merely in addition
to whichever additional capabilities are not evident from the limited
description available, with the program as a whole presumably being operated
in conjunction with other surveillance and propaganda assets controlled by
the U.S. and its partners.
Whatever the exact nature and scope of COIN, the firms that had been
assembled for the purpose by Barr and TASC never got a chance to bid on the
program's recompete. In late September, Lovegrove noted to Barr and others
that he'd spoken to the CO [contracting officer] for COIN. The current
procurement approach is cancelled [sic], she cited changed requirements, he
reported. They will be coming out with some documents in a month or two,
most likely an updated RFI [request for information]. There will be a
procurement following soon after. We are on the list to receive all
information." On January 18th of next year, Lovegrove provided an update: I
just spoke to the group chief on the contracts side (Doug K). COIN has been
replaced by a procurement called Odyssey. He says that it is in the
formative stages and that something should be released this year. The
contracting officer is Kim R. He believes that Jason is the COTR
[contracting officer's technical representative]. Another clue is provided
in the ensuing discussion when a TASC executive asks, Does Odyssey combine
the Technology and Content pieces of the work?
The unexpected change-up didn't seem to phase the corporate partnership,
which was still a top contender to compete for the upcoming Odyssey
procurement. Later e-mails indicate a meeting between key members of the
group and the contracting officer for Odyssey at a location noted as HQ,
apparently for a briefing on requirements for the new program, on February
3rd of 2011. But two days after that meeting, the servers of HBGary and
HBGary Federal were hacked by a small team of Anonymous operatives in
retaliation Barr's boasts to Financial Times that he had identified the
movement's leadership; 70,000 e-mails were thereafter released onto the
internet. Barr resigned a few weeks later.
Along with clues as to the nature of COIN and its scheduled replacement, a
close study of the HBGary e-mails also provide reasons to be concerned with
the fact that such things are being developed and deployed in the way that
they are. In addition to being the driving force behind the COIN recompete,
Barr was also at the center of a series of conspiracies by which his own
company and two others hired out their collective capabilities for use by
corporations that sought to destroy their political enemies by clandestine
and dishonest means, some of which appear to be illegal. None of the
companies involved have been investigated; a proposed Congressional inquiry
was denied by the committee chair, noting that it was the Justice
Department's decision as to whether to investigate, even though it was the
Justice Department itself that made the initial introductions. Those in the
intelligence contracting industry who believe themselves above the law are
entirely correct.
That such firms will continue to target the public with advanced information
warfare capabilities on behalf of major corporations is by itself an
extraordinary danger to mankind as a whole, particularly insomuch as that
such capabilities are becoming more effective while remaining largely
unknown outside of the intelligence industry. But a far greater danger is
posed by the practice of arming small and unaccountable groups of state and
military personnel with a set of tools by which to achieve better and better
situational awareness on entire populations while also being able to
manipulate the information flow in such a way as to deceive those same
populations. The idea that such power can be wielded without being misused
is contradicted by even a brief review of history.
History also demonstrates that the state will claim such powers as a
necessity in fighting some considerable threat; the U.S. has defended its
recent expansion of powers by claiming they will only be deployed to fight
terrorism and will never be used against American civilians. This is cold
comfort for those in the Arab world who are aware of the long history of
U.S. material support for regimes they find convenient, including those of
Saddam Hussein, Hosni Mubarak, and the House of Saud. Nor should Americans
be comforted by such promises from a government that has no way of ensuring
that they will be kept; it was just a few months ago that a U.S. general in
Afghanistan ordered a military intelligence unit to use pysops on visiting
senators in an effort to secure increased funding for the war; only a few
days prior, CENTCOM spokesmen were confidently telling the public that such
other psychological capabilities as persona management would never be used
on Americans as that would be illegal. The fact is that such laws have been
routinely broken by the military and intelligence community in the past and
that they have now been joined in this practice by segments of the federal
contracting industry.
It is inevitable, then, that such capabilities as form the backbone of
Romas/COIN and its replacement Odyssey will be deployed against a growing
segment of the world's population for a variety of reasons. The powerful
institutions that wield them will grow all the more powerful as they are
provided better and better methods by which to monitor, deceive, and
manipulate. The informed electorate upon which liberty depends will be
increasingly misinformed. No tactical advantage conferred by the use of
these programs can outweigh the damage that will be done to mankind in the
process of creating them.
--
Regards,
Barrett Brown
512-560-2302
