I'm just shitty at getting back to people, apparently. Sorry. You live in Texas, right? Are you going to go to Rick Perry's day of prayer and fasting? Fucking dickbag, that guy. I'm trying to gather the funds to go down and report on that. Should be amazingly dumb. Great place to troll irl.
I can imagine, with a group structured (or not structured) like Anon, that someone, no matter how well-meaning, calling themselves a de facto spokesperson would catch flak. I'd not be surprised if your most fervent detractors weren't simply Feds -- 1 in 4 'hackers" are Feds, according to some meme going around the web. Regardless, I think it was cool what you did. Even if some hacker kids didn't like it, you represented the positive aspects of Anon well in the press. Aside from Greenwald, and the usual liberal suspects, there were not many Anon champions out there. So, good on ya'.
Yeah, money = speech and the poor are mute in the political process. And those who can count themselves among the poor just keeps growing. Admittedly, I received virtually no votes, but the highest Murphy turnout was in the area that read the local questionnaire you mentioned. That site did a whole series, and it was the only real chance I had to "debate" the other candidates.
I plan on keeping abreast of your work and Project PM, as it's very important and it will fit well in my forthcoming book. The working title is "Prank: Is your democracy running?" The Walker prank call is my hook, and the only reason Harper Collins is at all interested, but the larger theme is the information war -- whether it's DoD-funded companies subverting truth in Arab countries and domestically, or rich demagogues like the Kochs who spend millions lying to people about health care reform and global warming. But I'd like to interview you again as I get more into that portion of the book, so let's stay in touch. Eh?
I don't suppose you're going to Netroots. Are you? Someone talked me into it, and I'll likely hate every moment, but if I'm not mistaken there will be a panel on Wikileaks and Anonymous. Maybe next year you should try to get yourself on a panel or two, as your beat on the HBGary and the sock puppets and auto-personas is a direct threat to the type of online grassroots reporting/activism these Kos-types imagine they're engaged in.
I'm down in Galveston for a little beach vacation so my internet has been spotty.
I've been hassled almost since the very beginning by various anti-Anons as well as some Anons who either don't understand or don't care about the nature of my role, but insomuch as that I have a large number of followers both in Anon and otherwise, as well as my own infrastructure and a great degree of control over our media coverage, there's really nothing anyone could do to push me out. It just got to the point where I was working largely with my own crew, at our own venues, and I decided that I could best pursue what I'm interested in doing by leading my own organization, so I brought my people into Project PM, which I'd launched two years back but had recently neglected, and retooled it for the purposes of continuing this crowd-sourced investigation into the intelligence contracting industry as well as facilitating the creation of groups like ours. The end goal is to build a coalition made up of dozens of quality groups capable of working independently and sharing info as needed in order to fight the national security state.
As you know, the political process is broken. Someone like yourself who answers questions thoughtfully and honestly, as you did in that questionnaire provided by the local outlet, is considered "unserious." There is absolutely no way that the system is going to be capable of defending individual rights against the composite of corporations and government agencies that have consolidated their control over the republic even further in the last few years. The voting public has proven itself easily manipulated and inattentive, allowing the state apparatus to transform into something entirely incompatible with transparency and liberty. The recent addition of this intelligence-industrial complex to what already existed is providing powerful interests with unprecedented capabilities by which to control the information flow, and meanwhile those of us who are opposed to such things are being monitored and targeted. Team Themis and other firms like Endgame Systems were preparing to destroy both Anonymous and Wikileaks, and even my group Project PM was under scrutiny and still is. I've got the FBI out in California looking into me, I've confirmed, and I have no way of knowing how many other parties are now planning to destroy me just as they planned to destroy Glenn Greenwald for supporting Wikileaks. And they were compiling info on something like a dozen left-wing activist groups, their participants and even family members of participants. The more one looks into all of this, the worse it gets.
So, anyway, I'm going to be revealing details of a classified counter intelligence program called Romas/COIN (now being replaced by another one called Odyssey) which I've been studying up on through hundreds of those HBGary e-mails that never got their due attention; a long piece will be coming out in al-Jazeera in the next couple of days, followed by two more on other facets of the contracting industry. So, hopefully that will bring more attention to all of this.
The fake website is clever. If you have an idea for that, I'd be into throwing one together -- not immediately, however.
How do you quit a post you created? Were you pressured, hacked, hassled, etc.?
The campaign is depressing. I've basically just been sitting around my house snorting drugs. It was cool being able to inject a few important issues into the media coverage, but I've mostly been ignored, which was more frustrating than I'd expected. The election is Tuesday, and I can't fucking wait for it to end.
That's not a bad idea. I don't really have the voice for it, though. But with a little preparation, we could set up a website and make up company - many of these firms have almost zero web presence, just a shit main page and "contact fascistasshole@sellouteveryone.info".
I'm doing two pieces for al-Jazeera on persona management and the intelligence community's unfortunate habit of designing mass surveillance programs in order to win federal contracts. Called up John Lovegrove of TASC, a contractor that was in talks with Aaron Barr on setting up something called Romas/COIN, and he wasn't too happy that I know about it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCpyJAOxnT0