Hufffington Post Anonymous Story / Fact-Check Document

The excitement of the Arab Spring held the attention of AnonOps through the winter, but in February the scope expanded after Aaron Barr made the mistake of telling a reporter that he'd infiltrated the network and identified its "leaders." TK

Barr was the CEO of a company called HBGary Federal, a new company that specialized in what he called social-media intelligence analysis -- collecting information about people from Facebook and Twitter. A former Navy cryptologist, he had entered the private sector in hope of selling his espionage abilities to the highest bidder. He says he spied on Anonymous merely to prove a point about the ease of uncovering people's secrets through social media and never intended to share his information with the authorities.

Anons didn't buy it, and a small subgroup of hackers snuck into his company's servers and stole 70,000 emails. It turned out he'd gotten most of his information wrong, so the anons went ahead and published the entire trove, along with his address, phone number, and other personal information. "We had people driving by my house taking pictures," Barr told me. "A couple people coming up to my door with cameras in their hands. I was seriously, honestly frightened for my family."

He left his job ("not in disgrace," he said) and moved his family halfway across the country. Meanwhile, Anonymous pored over his the emails and discovered what they believed was some of the most compelling evidence they'd found so far of governments and corporations conspiring to control the flow of online information. [http://wikileaks.ch/IMG/pdf/WikiLeaks_Response_v6.pdf]

Barr says they misinterpreted the facts. Either way, Anonymous once again found itself sticking up for its not-so-lulzy pal Wikileaks. In November, Julian Assange had said he planned to "take down" a major American bank. Two days later, [tk] the Bank of America lawyered up. They retained the services of Hunton & Williams, a law firm that, according to one of the emails revealed in the HBGary leak, had been referred to them by the Department of Justice. According to the email, the DOJ had also recommended hiring Barr's company and several others. In a presentation that turned up in the emails, HBGary Federal and two of its partners in the information-security industry pitched the Hunton & Williams lawyers on some thoughts about how to undermine WikiLeaks. In the most widely cited of these, they suggested intimidating journalists who support Wikileaks and singled out Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com. Without the support of people like Glenn," it said, "Wikileaks would fold."

In other emails, Barr suggested using fake social-media personas to gather information on the family members of left-leaning critics of the Chamber of Commerce. He had created a Facebook account for one such identity, a comely 27-year-old nonexistent blonde named Holly Weber. At the urging of Representative Hank Johnson of Georgia, a group Democrats in Congress called for hearings into these revelations, but the Republican heads of the relevant committees turned them away. "It appears that the reason why we're not having any investigations is that that would perhaps anger the people with the US Chamber of Commerce, and it probably is just something that nobody wants to touch," Johnson told me.

This fall, I spoke with Barrett Brown, a journalist who followed Anonymous for years before leaping off the perch of reportorial objectivity and into the story. He believes that Barr's emails offer an revelatory glimpse into the murky world of private espionage, a billion-dollar industry comprising more than 2,000 companies. [??] After the attack on Barr, he set up a website where people could search the emails and report their findings. They didnt find anything illegal, per se, but they did learn of a military effort to create an entire virtual army of Holly Webers.

I spoke to Brown on video chat. He was serious and unsmiling and sounded like a philosophy professor, dropping references to 9th-century Baghdad and Plato. He said he was outraged that the Justice Department appeared to have acted as Bank of America's in-house counsel. "The fact that that happened and won't get a lot outcry shows that the republic is already over," he said. Not that he saw this as such a bad thing, necessarily.

A couple years ago TK, in a blog on The Huffington Post, he argued that the rapid spread of the Internet was effectively erasing national boundaries and would soon usher in the dawn of a new era, one in which the people of the world would transfer their allegiances from traditional nation-states to online communities that better served their interests. He cited the emergence of Anonymous as an example of how the freedom of information on the Internet was giving more power to subversive, technically adept groups that operated outside the traditional realms of power. "Its the rise of the nerds," he said, and he wasn't alone in this appraisal. In May, NATO issued a report describing the mounting security challenges of the information age, and named Anonymous as a new actor "on the international stage," warning that Anonymous might soon develop the capability of breaking into government networks and stealing sensitive documents. Anonymous responded by breaking into NATO's network and stealing sensitive documents.