Re: psyber ops?

On 20 April 2012 09:12, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:

Yep, will get back to you with it soon, how many words can it be? More the better.
On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 8:11 AM, Matt Seaton <matt.seaton@guardiannews.com> wrote:
Hey. Barrett

That's great -- half done already.

Another couple of pars, a few links, and we're good to go. Please peg it to this USA Today story because that's trending.

Usual fee applies (actually it's gone up! $143).

Can you do this morning?

Thanks, Matt
On 20 April 2012 09:07, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
This is going to be a growing problem for journalists and activists who are deemed to be threats to any aspect of the intelligence contracting industry because of two things: it's almost impossible to trace if the perpetrators know what they're doing, which they absolutely do; and even on those rare occasions when intelligence contractors are caught, there are zero consequences.

You probably recall the Team Themis scandal I wrote about early last year, which was only exposed via chance. Glenn Greenwald was to be "pushed" in such a way as to "choose professional preservation over cause," as the planning documents put it, so as to weaken support for Wikileaks. Obviously this would have been done in such a way as to hide the source.

So what happened when this draft proposal was discovered? Palantir broke off ties to HBGary - even though their own employees were just as complicit - and released a vague apology about how this and other things proposed didn't reflect their values. And then they put one of their employees, Matthew Steckman, on a leave of absence - and afterwards quietly brought him back on. Nothing even so bad as that happened to Eli Bingham, another of their employees who was heavily involved, and who had earlier summed up the industry mentality in an e-mail to his Themis partners with the old rap lyric, "Damn it feels good to be a gangster."

Did Palantir lose any face among the people that really matter to them? No. A few months back, Michael Chertoff served as the keynote speaker of their annual conference. Another firm that served as Team Themis' "silent partner," Endgame Systems, didn't have to say a word about it.

So we have a situation in which some unknown number of talented but amoral people are being encouraged to incubate disinformation capabilities and methodology by the U.S. government, and who are clearly willing to use such things at the behest of private buyers, or in such cases as a journalist starts asking around. This is only going to get easier for them as they continue to develop protocols like persona management - which is to say it's going to get a lot harder for anyone to catch them. And it's all going to get worse when PR firms like Qorvis, which is based in D.C. and which represents the government of Bahrain, start making strategic alliances with those firms in order to better serve their state "clients."

So, yes, I would like to write about this.
On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 6:44 AM, Matt Seaton <matt.seaton@guardiannews.com> wrote:
Hi Barrett

I bet you have some ideas about this story: http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/2012/04/gannett-fake-websites-target-reporter-editor-covering-pentagon-041912/

Do you know enough about it to mount an op-ed commentary?

be glad to commission that.

Best, Matt

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