Re: TrapFire, WikiLeaks, Anonymous and all that

On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 1:51 PM, Paul Wagenseil
<pwagenseil@techmedianetwork.com> wrote:

Mr. Brown --

I'm writing up a piece about TrapWire and the various reactions to it online, and figured you might be a good person to ask about it.

As far as I can tell, TrapWire aggregates and analyzes surveillance-camera footage from various cities across the U.S. and looks for signs that potential terrorists are "casing" public facilities like transit systems so on.

The company behind it hasn't been secret about what it does, even if it tried not to make too much of a splash.

But I'm seeing reports that TrapWire incorporates facial-recognition technology, even as the company that makes the system denies it.  Would you have any evidence that it does?


The best evidence on this comes from the execs themselves:

"In an interview from 2005 with the Northern Virginia Technology
Council, the CEO of Abraxas Corporation Richard Hollis Helms says
the goal of TrapWire is to collect information about people and
vehicles that is more accurate than facial recognition, draw patterns,
and do threat assessments of areas that may be under observation from
terrorists."

So, to the extent that they're claiming it's not facial recognition,
they may be technically not lying - it seems to be something even
better, quite likely proprietary.


Also, it seems that TrapWire's biggest clients are the NY Metropolitan Transit Authority and the cities of Las Vegas (which installed it in casinos), Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.


(The NYPD has its own system which frankly sounds even more intrusive/sophisticated: http://www.ny1.com/content/news_beats/political_news/166477/new-crime-analyzing-system-expected-to-aid-nypd-sleuthing)

Would you have information on where else TrapWire might be deployed?


Yes, the Texas Department of Public Safety bought the software in
2010. As a Texan who has written on state abuse of power, particularly
as pertains to police work, this concerns me quite a bit. It's also
been used in London for a while.


Next, a lot of people are pinning the current DDoS attack on Wikileaks on people who want to keep the Stratfor emails referencing TrapWire a secret. But the DDoS attack started more than a week ago, Saturday, Aug. 4, and WikiLeaks didn't start putting up the TrapWire stuff until several days later, on Wednesday, Aug. 8.

Do you think the DDoS attack is nonetheless related to TrapWire?



With things like this, it's often impossible to say. To give you an
example, when Endgame Systems learned that it was about to get major
press scrutiny from an outlet I'd been feeding info - something they
figured out when the journalists called for comment - they took down
their website. But around the same time, some people thought Lulzsec
was going to hack them, or had tried to do so; either way, they posted
on their popular Twitter feed a file that had been created listing the
personal information of Endgame's executives and their family members.
In such a case, observers might have concluded that the site was taken
down due to Lulzsec, without knowing of this other factor with the
upcoming feature article. I've seen many such examples. At any rate,
it's possible that Abraxas et al got word that Wikileaks was to be
publishing info on Trapwire - it's impossible for anyone to say what
methods of surveillance or even HUMINT Wikileaks and its people are
subjected to. But I'll remain agnostic on the issue until I see any
evidence of this, as coincidence is always possible.


Finally, there's an Anonymous press release [http://www.peoplesliberationfront.net/anonpaste/?85154060e1fbbee4#3Xmwdn68V/La/W2PEk+sje8EltjYqOnRH847YoXrIow=] that's calling for "Smash a Cam Saturday" (it doesn't say which Saturday) to disable the TrapWire system.



Yes, the middle portion of that release consists of several paragraphs
I put up over the weekend weekend, although I wasn't involved in the
rest of it. Having spoken to those who proposed these responses, I
gather that they intend for every Saturday to be sort of
camera-smashing holiday.


But wouldn't taking out surveillance cameras have the corollary effect of aiding criminal activity?


Everything that prevents the state from having omnipotence over its
subjects can be said to aid criminal activity. People like me tend to
worry more about the criminal activity that emanates from states,
which killed hundreds of millions in the last century. That the U.S.
is not the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany does not mean it is immune
from certain shared attributes, such as the mass criminalizing of 30
percent of its citizens through such things as drug laws. Were the
laws of the U.S. totally enforced, at least 50 or 60 million of us
would either be in prison or on probation. A state that conducts
itself in such a way tends to dwarf other concerns among people such
as myself.  Regardless of whether or not one thinks that sophisticated
mass surveillance and data-mining operations are appropriate, it is
very hard to make the case that this republic has shown itself to be
capable of using such things without abusing them. A good recent
example is the NSA/ATT debacle, followed by retroactive immunity from
the "criminal activity" that goes on in board rooms and intelligence
agencies, away from the cameras to which the rest of us are subject.

And then there's the company itself, Abraxas, that spun-off Abraxas
Applications to create this one product. Take a look at what else the
main firm does, and why Cubic Corporation bought it a few years ago.
Short answer is "persona management."


Anyway, if you have the time to answer some of those questions, or add any information of your own, it'd be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Paul Wagenseil
Managing editor, SecurityNewsDaily | | www.SecurityNewsDaily.com
150 Fifth Avenue, 9th Floor | New York, NY 10011
pwagenseil@techmedianetwork.com
(212) 703-5818




-- 
Regards,

Barrett Brown
512-560-2302