Re: here we go... many thanks

On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 1:40 PM, Matt Seaton <matt.seaton@guardian.co.uk> wrote:

can't make that wiki work for me, but may be because we have a weird network that pipes our web access back through servers in the UK

anyway, here you are and thanks: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jun/22/hacking-anonymous
On 22 June 2011 19:36, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
I've put it up here as well: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/06/22/987679/-The-Nature-of-Romas-COIN?via=blog_481394. But the wiki seems to be working fine for me.
On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 1:29 PM, Matt Seaton <matt.seaton@guardian.co.uk> wrote:
just saw that -- great that you're getting this coverage
On 22 June 2011 19:26, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/06/22/u-s-conducting-mass-surveillance-against-arab-world-report/
On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 1:23 PM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
Or if you prefer, I can put it up on Daily Kos and you can link it to that.
On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 1:10 PM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
It seems to be working now; check again and see if it works for you.
On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 1:08 PM, Matt Seaton <matt.seaton@guardian.co.uk> wrote:
Tell you want: let me post your original version now, and then I can update with the Google/Apple stuff when due diligence done

so what shall we do about the wiki link which is not working?

best, Matt
On 22 June 2011 19:04, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
Also, a couple tech pubs and I believe The Nation will be hosting the piece later but for now I guess I'll put it up on Daily Kos so that there'll be a steady place to link to from The Guardian piece until our wiki is no longer under attack. Does that work?
On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 1:01 PM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
The username is actually as it is because the contents are Aaron Barr's e-mails; we also have accounts named Ted.Vera, Greg.Hoglund, etc for other HBGary employees for organizational purposes.
On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 12:55 PM, Matt Seaton <matt.seaton@guardian.co.uk> wrote:
OK, cool -- thanks

like the username: v funny
On 22 June 2011 18:25, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
They'll have to log in in to a Gmail account to see them. We've set this up to make them easily searchable as the public platforms don't allow for more than one keyword.

Login: Aaron.Barr

Password: HBGemail

just search Apple COIN and Google COIN.
On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 12:18 PM, Matt Seaton <matt.seaton@guardian.co.uk> wrote:
On Apple/Google, I will have to pass it past our lawyers, so please can you point me towards the specific emails that substantiate what we're saying... cheers, M
On 22 June 2011 18:07, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
Yep, one sec.
On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 7:31 AM, Matt Seaton <matt.seaton@guardian.co.uk> wrote:
Hi Barrett
That is excellent. Just thinking that it would be good to explain - in this restrained, legally safe way - also the consortium team appears to have included representatives of Apple and Google. Also, can we make mention of Arabic references, as this suggests monitoring and data-collecting of Middle East citizens' personal communications and social media use?
Can you add and I'll post today?
Best, Matt

From: Barrett Brown [mailto:barriticus@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 22, 2011 05:11 AM
To: Matt Seaton <matt.seaton@guardian.co.uk>
Subject: Re: here we go... many thanks
Here you go. Let me know about when you'll be putting it up so that I can add the report to the link a bit beforehand.

When President Eisenhower left office in 1960, he provided the American people with a warning. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. 60 years later, the military-industrial complex has been joined by another unprecedented center of what has increasingly proven to be misplaced power: the dozens of secretive firms known collectively as the intelligence contracting industry.

Last February, three of these firms - HBGary Federal, Palantir, and Berico, known collectively as Team Themis - were discovered to have conspired to hire out their information war capabilities to corporations which hoped to strike back at perceived enemies, including U.S. activist groups, Wikileaks, and journalist Glenn Greenwald. That such a dangerous new dynamic was now in play was only revealed due to a raid by hackers associated with the Anonymous collective, resulting in the dissemination of more than 70,000 e-mails to and from executives at HBGary Federal and its parent company HBGary.

After having spent several months studying the those e-mails and otherwise investigating the industry depicted therein, I have today revealed my summary of a classified U.S. intelligence program known as Romas/COIN as well as its upcoming replacement, known as Odyssey. The program appears to allow for the large-scale monitoring of social networks by way of such things as natural language processing, semantic analysis, latent semantic indexing, and IT intrusion; at the same time, it also entails the dissemination of some unknown degree of information to a given population through a variety of means and without any hint that the actual source is U.S. intelligence.

Despite the details I have provided in the document - which is also now in the possession of several major news outlets and which may be published in whole or in part by any party which cares to do so - there remains a great deal that is unclear about Romas/COIN and the capabilities of which it is comprised. The information with which Ive worked consists almost entirely of e-mail correspondence between executives of several firms that together sought to win the contract to provide the programs technical requirements, and because many of the discussions occurred in meetings and phone conversations, the information remaining deals largely with prospective partners, the utility of one capability over another, and other clues spread out over hundreds of e-mail exchanges between a large number of participants.

The significance of this program to the public is not limited to its potential for abuse by facets of the U.S. intelligence community, which has long been proverbial for misusing other of its capabilities. Perhaps the most astonishing aspect is the fact that the partnership of contracting firms and other corporate entities which worked to obtain the contract was put into motion in large part by Aaron Barr, the disgraced former CEO of HBGary Federal who was at the center of Team Themis conspiracy to put high-end intelligence capabilities at the disposal of private institutions. As I explain further in the linked report, this fact alone should prompt increased investigation into the manner in which this industry operates and the threats it represents to democratic institutions.

Altogether, the existence and nature of Romas/COIN should confirm what many had already come to realize over the past few years in particular: the various states have no intention of allowing populations to conduct their affairs without scrutiny. Such states ought not complain when they find themselves subjected to similar scrutiny, as will increasingly become the case over the next several years.
On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 1:11 PM, Matt Seaton <matt.seaton@guardian.co.uk> wrote:
great stuff; thanks

you've got the deep story on Project PM, so keep it clean and simple for dummies like me pls!
On 21 June 2011 19:09, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
That sounds perfect; I'll try to have it in to you later today.
On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 1:08 PM, Matt Seaton <matt.seaton@guardian.co.uk> wrote:
Hi Barrett

Thanks for that briefing. I appreciate your rush with this now, so I'll leave the news reporting issues to Ed.

When you release this on your site then, why not write a succinct op-ed for me that points towards your site: I think it should be a basic primer on what you believe you have uncovered here and the big questions it raises. Does that work for you?

Best, Matt
On 21 June 2011 18:57, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi, Matt (and Ed),

1. It definitely involves that from what's shown in the e-mails over the year during which Barr and other companies were putting it together.
2. The fact that Arab translators are discussed quite a bit, combined with Lovegrove's intention to refer to their version of the capability with an Arabic term, combined with the stated intention to bring on SocialEyez, which monitors Middle Eastern social networking, leads me to that conclusion.
3. I have collaborated that these programs exist and are secret by calling TASC execs John Lovegrove and Chris Clair and recording the conversations; Lovegrove himself told me "no comment," "I can't talk about that," and then actually tried to strike those non-responses "off the record;" I caught Clair half-asleep and got him to confirm a bit more. I can provide you with both.
4. The HBGary e-mails show meetings with both Apple and Google and an agreement to pursue the project; their Apple contact even helps to bring in contacts from Pixar/Disney, as noted in the article. AT&T is merely sought after; as noted, there is no evidence that they actually got involved.
5. The "client" that operates COIN is never specified. I would note that the persona management contract which HBGary bid on and which Cubic Corporation won through its subsidiary Ntrepid is operated by multinational forces, as CENTCOM itself verified after discovery. Echelon, likewise, is run by "The Five Eyes," and so there's reason to believe that any other sophisticated SIGINTEL capabilities are likewise run under the same intel-sharing agreement.

As for the rest, I understand that you can't print this without a great deal of processing and whatnot, but insomuch as that I'm personally comfortable with what's asserted on the strength of the e-mail contents and my calls to two of the execs involved (as well as my earlier conversation with Aaron Barr and several months of investigation into the industry), my primary intent is to get the information out quickly without having to go through any editorial process, and at any rate I've already announced that I'll be putting it out. I'll be publishing it in full on Project PM's wiki at some point in the next 36 hours, at which point I'll send you a link. Since I am making the assertion from my own venue, you may report on whatever aspects of this that you see fit at whatever point is comfortable to you.

If you'd like, I can provide you another piece that I've been working on which covers the extent to which persona management is now being pursued, or perhaps something else on the contracting industry, which I now know more about than I would have preferred.
On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 8:55 AM, Matt Seaton <matt.seaton@guardian.co.uk> wrote:
Hi Barrett

Thanks for coming to us with this. Still getting my head around it, but it seems potentially a very important story: can I clarify some things about the planned design and scope of the surveillance and data-mining operation:

1. Was this designed to involve monitoring essentially social media use (via PCs and mobile phone apps)?
2. Where's the reference that makes it clear that Arab/Middle Eastern populations were the target? Is there any evidence of domestic monitoring also?
3. Is all your evidence based on what was in the HBGary emails, or do you have other corroboration?
4. The involvement of Google, Apple and AT&T is potentially the top line here, explosive actually -- but what do we know and what can we prove about the extent to which they were 'with the program'?
5. Who commissions COIN: is it out of the state department or the Pentagon or what?

I've got a dozen other questions, because the technicalities of the operation are a stretch for me. But here's what I think right now. We could potentially do a very great deal with this, but to do so, I think we would have to spend some time doing due diligence on the reporting, including getting stuff legalled (if we're going to accuse big corporations of abetting an intel operation of dubious legality against the interests of their own customers/users, that's a potentially defamatory position). That means you would have to postpone release/launch of the story, to give us time to do our work, with due consultation with you. I appreciate you've already been frustrated by al-Jazeera's vacillation, but the complexity of this information means that it really needs filtering and packaging carefully in order to tell clean punchy stories that really make waves.

I've copied in my colleague Ed Pilkington here (I think you've spoken before); as he's been reporting similar stuff. Can I suggest we all three meet soon and discuss where to go with this?

Best, Matt
On 21 June 2011 07:07, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
Matt-

You may recall the piece I sent you late last month; unfortunately, al-Jazeera has still not published it despite having told me several times that they would, so I have retracted it and announced to several of the journalists that have been covering my work with Anonymous and the like over the past few months that I will be revealing the classified surveillance program within the next 48 hours. I just provided Michael Isikoff at NBC (the fellow who interviewed me when I was featured on their Nightline program in March) as well as my contact at NYT with advance copies in case they'd like to vet it (everything I present comes from the HBGary e-mails, which I've continued to analyze over the last few months along with several of my colleagues), and am currently planning to simply send it out to my press list on Wednesday evening. First, though, I wanted to check and see if The Guardian would be interested in hosting it, as I want the information to be accessible as possible. Otherwise, you are free to simply report on the release or excerpt it as you see fit. If you do choose to run it, let me know and I will tell the various journalists with whom I'm corresponding that The Guardian will be running the document. I understand this is a somewhat unusual case, but I've been waiting for a month and a half for this to be run and I'm simply tired of dealing with the editors at al-Jaz (one of them didn't seem to understand the contents and asked me to "humanize" the piece after two other editors told me it was ready to go, etc; it was the worst experience I've had in ten years of writing professionally).

Here's the piece; if for some reason The Guardian chooses not to run it, let me know if you'd be interested in a piece on the persona management issue some time soon; I've discovered that several contractors (including at least two named here) are involved in producing that capability, the nature of which was also discovered via the HBGary e-mails (if you'd like a primer on what this is, let me know; it got a bit of press in early March and I mentioned it in passing in my last column for you but it's still not widely known).

Thanks,

Barrett

***

For at least two years, the U.S. has been conducting a secretive and immensely sophisticated campaign of mass surveillance and data mining against the Arab world, allowing the intelligence community to monitor the habits, conversations, and activity of millions of individuals at once. And with an upgrade scheduled for later this year, the top contender to win the federal contract and thus take over the program is a team of about a dozen companies which were brought together in large part by Aaron Barr - the same disgraced CEO who resigned from his own firm earlier this year after he was discovered to have planned a full-scale information war against political activists at the behest of corporate clients. The new revelation provides for 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 American public and which in some cases are used against that very same public. Their products are developed on demand for an intelligence community that is not subject to Congressional oversight and which has been repeatedly shown to have misused its existing powers in ways that violate U.S. law as well as American ideals. And with expanded intelligence capabilities by which to monitor Arab populations in ways that would have previously been impossible, those same intelligence agencies now have improved means by which to provide information on dissidents to those regional dictators viewed by the U.S. as strategic allies.

The nature and extent of the operation, which was known as Romas/COIN and which is scheduled for replacement sometime 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 in February from the contracting firm HBGary Federal and its parent company HBGary. Other details may be gleaned by an examination of the various other firms and individuals that are discussed as being potential partners.

Of course, there are many in the U.S. that would prefer that such details not be revealed at all; such people tend to cite the amorphous and much-abused concept of national security as sufficient reason for the citizenry to stand idly by as an ever-expanding coalition of government agencies and semi-private corporations gain greater influence over U.S. foreign policy. That the last decade of foreign policy as practiced by such individuals has been an absolute disaster even by the admission of many of those who put it into place will not phase those who nonetheless believe that the citizenry should be prevented from knowing what is being done in its name and with its tax dollars.

To the extent that the actions of a government are divorced from the informed consent of those who pay for such actions, such a government is illegitimate. To the extent that power is concentrated in the hands of small groups of men who wield such power behind the scenes and without being accountable to the citizenry, there is no assurance that such power will be used in a manner that is compatible with the actual interests of that citizenry, or populations elsewhere. The known history of the U.S. intelligence community is comprised in large part of murder, assassinations, disinformation, the topping of democratic governments, the abuse of the rights of U.S. citizens, and a great number of other things that cannot even be defended on national security grounds insomuch as that many such actions have quite correctly turned entire populations against the U.S. government. This is not only my opinion, but also the opinion of countless individuals who once served in the intelligence community and have since come to criticize it and even unveil many of its secrets in an effort to alert the citizenry to what has been unleashed against the world in the name of security.

Likewise, I will here provide as much information as I can on Romas/COIN and its upcoming replacement.

***

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, HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr wrote the following e-mail to Al Pisani, an executive at the much larger federal contractor TASC, a company which until recently had been owned by Northrop and which was now looking to compete with it for lucrative contracts:

"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 18^th 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 3^rd 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 for 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 Ameerican 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, who are 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. 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.

Barrett Brown

Project PM
On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 7:35 PM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi, Matt-

Nevermind, al-Jazeera gave in and took the piece as-is. Thanks anyway for considering it.
On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 3:25 PM, Matt Seaton <matt.seaton@guardian.co.uk> wrote:
thanks for the opportuntiy, Barrett -- will read and get back to you soon as
On 27 May 2011 15:20, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
Matt-

You may recall the 70,000 HBGary e-mails that Anon leaked in early February, and I've probably noted that I've been conducting a sort of crowd-sourced investigation into the intelligence industry called OpMetalGear. Over the past two weeks I've been going through them again as there's clearly a great deal left to be discovered, and meanwhile another team headed by a colleague of mine noticed something called Romas/COIN being discussed. Having analyzed a couple hundred relevant e-mails, made some calls, and done some more research, I've been able to get a picture of what it is: a massive intelligence apparatus that monitors some large portion of the Arab world by way of a large set of advanced capabilities including natural language processing, data mining, custom social networks and websites, and mobile phone applications. What's more, it's being replaced this year by another program called Odyssey.

I've just finished an article revealing all this and it was set to appear yesterday on al-Jazeera's website but then some other editor, an American with a background in radio, jumped in at the last minute and asked me to "humanize" it and make it more "punchy," which is something I absolutely do not do, so I cancelled the series on OpMetalGear I had been asked to do by the other editors and pulled the piece. I thought I'd check with you to see if The Guardian might be interested. Here's the piece:

***

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 18^th 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 3^rd 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.
On Mon, May 9, 2011 at 8:48 AM, Matt Seaton <matt.seaton@guardian.co.uk> wrote:
sounds promising; pls keep me posted

will try to come up with a paying commission for you soon

best, Matt
On 9 May 2011 04:03, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
Great. I'm going to start writing more on the subject of effective online activism, why it's going to serve as an increasing counterpoint to corrupt institutions, and how anyone may start a small cohesive group by which to fight what's beginning to amount to an information war. Will get back to you in a few weeks.
On Sat, May 7, 2011 at 1:32 PM, Matt Seaton <matt.seaton@guardian.co.uk> wrote:
piece did well yesterday -- 20k hits
On 6 May 2011 13:51, Matt Seaton <matt.seaton@guardian.co.uk> wrote:
ace-- thanks
On 6 May 2011 18:49, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
Great, thanks. Have sent off to the various journalists who have been asking me about all this.
On Fri, May 6, 2011 at 12:20 PM, Matt Seaton <matt.seaton@guardian.co.uk> wrote:
sorry for delay -- lawyers just wanted to fudge a couple of things

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/may/06/anonymous-sony

all best, Matt

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Editor, Comment is free America
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