To: Gabriella Lahti <gabriella.lahti@nyheter24.se>
1. Project PM started as something very different back in 2009, as a sort of experimental media/activism project, and then became "entangled" with Anon in late 2010 when the Wikileaks conflicts began to occur. In early 2011, I re-purposed it to focus almost entirely on what's now being referred to as the "cyber-industrial complex," or public/private intelligence community. Our general purpose, as described here (
http://barrettbrown.blogspot.com/2012/05/purpose-of-project-pm.html), is to prompt greater attention to the dangers that are quietly emerging as powerful institutions develop new tools and procedures by which to use the internet for purposes that may not align with the interests of the public - specifically, anything involving surveillance, data-mining, and especially sophisticated forms of propaganda.
2. A number of disturbing discoveries were made in February 2011 after the HBGary e-mails were released by Anonymous, and some of those things - such as the proposed attacks on U.S. journalists and activists, as well as Wikileaks - received considerable media attention. There was even supposed to be a Congressional investigation into the firms involved. That investigation was shot down by Rep. Lamar Smith, who claimed that the Department of Justice should be the one to launch any investigation. But the DoJ was itself linked to this scandal, having helped Bank of America get in touch with these firms in the first place. And the media attention died down after a few weeks, as always happens. Meanwhile, some of the things that had just been discovered, like persona management, seemed to be very important, and worthy of further attention - especially because they were being utilized and pursued by some of the same companies that had already been caught planning an array of conspiracies against journalists and activists. And other matters that we had come across ourselves just didn't look like they were going to get any real attention at all. It seemed as if the most important thing we could do at that point, in terms of activism, would be to try to organize further investigations into these issues.
3. Our goal is to prompt more opposition to those institutions that we ourselves oppose, as of course any solution to the problems we see on the horizon will only be possible if others come to recognize those same problems. To this end, we spend a lot of time explaining some of the lesser-known aspects of this to journalists. We maintain a wiki, Echelon2.org, on which we've detailed what's known about certain "intelligence contracting firms" like Endgame Systems and Palantir, and certain capabilities, like persona management and "misattributable marketing." Some of the info there comes from things we've discovered or researched; some is compiled from various articles that have appeared elsewhere. When such articles do appear, we also try to promote them via our own media contacts and other means, so that they'll have a chance to reach more people.
4. Those who honesty wish to see the internet develop into a positive force by which a person may get a more accurate picture of the world around them, or as a force for liberty and representative government, need to keep in mind that the information age isn't just an opportunity for them - it's also an opportunity for states and other powerful institutions to pursue their own agendas. But of course, states don't actually have agendas - individuals do. And when an entity such as the United States creates a more amorphous and secretive entity like the CIA, it puts an array of individuals in such a position as to conduct significant portions of the U.S.'s policy in secret. In the process, "U.S. policy" starts to become whatever policy that is chosen by those individuals, rather than by the citizenry. And so in 1952 we see the CIA helping to engineer the overthrow of Iran's struggling republic - or, rather, we get to learn about this decades later, just as we eventually get to learn that the CIA also ran a program by which they influenced what was printed in a wide range of U.S. media outlets. Now that we have entered an era in which the internet is coming to constitute a major component of social and political life, then, we have to ask the question, "In what ways will intelligence agencies harness this new medium to carry out their ends, and to what extent will they be successful?" To get the answer, we have to look at the few facts we now have regarding what techniques are being used, and what technologies are being pursued, not just by the states themselves, but also by this vast number of private firms that sell those states new capabilities and services. We also have to ask what other parties might get their hands on these same new tools, and how they are likely to use them, and who they will use them against. After having studied the issue for 16 months, my own opinion is necessarily complicated, but I would put it this way: the average person has no conception of what is currently possible in terms of propaganda techniques, and those techniques will become more advanced such that the average person will be unlikely to believe that they are possible, much less in frequent use. This is an opinion I share with Lt. Col. Anthony Shafer, who said pretty much the same thing after I released a report on a program called Romas/COIN (as seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQLS619oRTY).
5. I don't know much about the practices of Swedish government agencies in terms of surveillance, data-mining, propaganda, but I would imagine that at least a handful of its telecom and information technology firms have been involved in commercial projects that involve data-mining and surveillance at the very least. Firms throughout Europe are known to be doing such things, sometimes even in partnership with dictatorships in the Arab world or elsewhere. Many of them are listed and described by the group Telecomix on its Blue Cabinet wiki (http://werebuild.telecomix.org/wiki/Blue_cabinet). Telecomix itself, incidentally, has done a great deal of important work on these issues, and happens to include a relatively large number of Swedish participants.
6. The biggest threat comes from U.S. law enforcement; the FBI searched my apartment and took all of my laptops, notes, and other items on March 6th of this year, the same day on which they also arrested several of the Lulzsec hackers. It looks to be likely that they'll try to indict me at some point. As shown on the search warrant (http://www.buzzfeed.com/mhastings/exclusive-fbi-escalates-war-on-anonymous), they're particularly interested in Project PM's wiki, as well as information regarding the firms Endgame Systems and HBGary, and my past connections to various hackers within Anonymous. The second biggest threat comes from individuals and firms that would prefer that Project PM not bring further attention to their own work, or to certain U.S. government programs, or who generally oppose things like Wikileaks and have a sort of ideological need to strike out at those who support it. Our wiki has been attacked a number of times via DOS and other techniques, as have servers we use to discuss our research; several people who help out with technical matters had to take a number of measures to keep the wiki up in the face of attacks we're rarely able to trace. At this time, Echelon2.org has been down for about four days, as is our IRC channel, due to a particularly massive and ongoing attack on the servers of Voxanon, an Anonymous-oriented network which now hosts our stuff. In this case, though, it's possible that we aren't the target.
7. The majority of my time is spent drinking coffee at my desk and "processing" information - either reading it or trying to bring it to the attention of others who are in a position to ensure that it gets spread, either via the press or social networking or a combination of the two. Right now, I'm spending a lot of time thinking about the last couple of years. Like a lot of people who have been involved with things like Anonymous, I've had some rare opportunities to see and participate in some very unusual things, some of which will soon become less unusual. I'm trying to determine what all of this means for the future of activism, information, the relationship between voting populations and their governments, and the manner by which information spreads.
Not long ago, when people gave thought to how populations would understand issues and act on them through their votes and civic participation, they thought largely in terms of the media - television, newspapers, etc. Now that the flow of information is more contingent upon a highly complex series of dynamics that have emerged out of the internet, understanding these processes is much more difficult. Among other things, that means that those parties which understand the processes better than others will be in a similarly better position to manipulate that information flow, for better or worse. And as always, information will indeed be manipulated. And the techniques by which to manipulate it will continue to improve - and almost by definition, those techniques will be developed and deployed by those who have some desire to manipulate information. My concern, and the reason that Project PM continues to do what we do, is that those people seem to be winning, and will inevitably win unless there is some major reaction against them. Such a reaction is impossible unless more well-meaning people come to understand what is now possible, both for the enemy and for ourselves.
Here are some questions for the article about Project PM. As far as I can see, no swedish media has spoken about it yet.
I think Operation MetalGear would be of particurlar interest for Swedes since there's been some talk about astrotufring/fake personalities here and I think people can connect to that.
1) Describe Project PM
2) What made you start the project
3) What are the aims with PM
4) How important is internet in this project, (would problems such as persona management software even exist without the internet, in other forms)
5) Do you know if Sweden is involved in any development of any propaganda methodologies
6) What or who are your biggest threaths while working with Project PM
7) Describe a normal day for you, in what way do you work with this... and why are you interested in these issues, perhaps some personal reflection here.