Howdy-

1. Project PM doesn't have or need any funding. The server on which
our wiki and IRC channel is kept, the Voxanon servers, is paid for by
one of the admins there. Previously, we were on another server paid
for by one of our active participants.

2. If we were to get an indication that any firm was using advanced
persona management of the sort being provided by the infosec
contractors and used by CENTCOM, we would absolutely investigate and
seek to bring attention to the firm. As of now, we tend not to look
into "astroturfing," which is already a household word and thus not
something that needs to be advanced into the consciousness by a group
like ours.

Will look into these other suggestions and ideas, and agree with you
about the conversation about ethics, particularly what the duty of the
citizen is towards a wildly powerful and ubiquitous government entity
operating officially on his behalf.

On Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 2:56 AM, Thomas Pynchon
<octogenarihexation@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks again for your time.  A few more questions/thoughts, whenever you
have a chance:

- Project PM's funding: where does it come from?  Who pays for server space?
If you can say, that is.  Just curious.

- Is Project PM looking at US anti-union, anti-EPA corporate lobbying and PR
firms that do astroturfing and sockpuppeting?  Berman and Company, for
example.  It'd be interesting to know if these firms overlap with certain
defense contractors in terms of technical capabilities and practices -- and
possibly some of their clients -- for monitoring and manipulating internet
use and users.

- If you or someone sympathetic to your aims can throw several thousand
dollars at this kind of research, you (or someone who shares your aims and
is better positioned to do this) might consider attending one or two
upcoming defense industry conferences, like the Cyber Defense Forum that
Gamma and others are sponsoring in Prague at the end of October, as a
participant or as a journalist.  The agendas of these events are on their
websites, and look interesting, to put it mildly.  For that particular
conference, registration is open but an institutional affiliation of some
kind seems to be required.  (Also, there seem to be a ton of online
resources for the compleat Web2.0 defense industry professional careerist
douche -- see DefenseIQ.com.  Might help to trace networking that way, too.)

- In thinking about ethics, security, and transparency, a useful book might
be Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation (Sissela Bok, 1983).

- I don't think that the crucial public conversation in the US about ethics
that needed to happen in the late 1960s/early 1970s (in the wake of
LBJ/Nixon, COINTELPRO, Watergate and so forth) has ever actually occurred;
if it had, perhaps we would not have witnessed the severe depredations of
the Bush administration (and furthered by the current one) against
civilians' privacy and freedom.  This dominant militarized, ethically
vacuous culture must be seen as itself aberrational, a neocon insurgency
against commonly held and understood foundational values, and the efforts to
dismantle it must be seen as a rational and just counterinsurgency.  This is
my understanding, anyway.

Again, will let you know if I run across anything useful, and if and when
something I've written about this is published.  (I may start blogging too,
for whatever that's worth.)

Pynchon

-- 
Regards,

Barrett Brown
512-560-2302