Do you respect Glenn Greenwald for holding powerful feet to the fire on torture, civil liberties, and other issues that define our ethical worldview? Did you know that the very fighting he's done on our behalf got him targeted by a consortium of firms that work with the FBI, CIA, NSA, and other agencies, and that these firms discussed applying "pressure" to make him stop defending Wikileaks so effectively?
Did you know that the Justice Department of this republic put these covert attacks in motion by sending Bank of America to another powerful law firm that it clearly knew to be good with these sorts of amoral and undemocratic tactics? That Wikileaks was to be attacked via DOS, disrupted via lies planted by fake people, discredited? That even those who donated to it were to be subjected to similar treatment? That all of this was written down in conjunction with million-dollar deals overseen by the worst of the worst, including key conservatives?
Did you know that the same firms were targeting Code Pink, Stop the Chamber, Chamber Watch, and an array of other individuals on behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce? That a corporate instigator was even going to pose as a member of one of the anti-Chamber groups, have them receive a phony but believable document spelling out wrongdoing by Chamber, make sure they run with it, and then have Chamber point to it as a forgery? That they would then try to point to the activists as having intentionally made this up?
If you didn't, you're like most of those who've been failed by a media that doesn't care and doesn't work. That so many of the people I've known over the past few years are facing prison for revealing these things and fighting those who get away with them is among the central facts of this age. This issue will continue to gain slow strength as it has since February 2011, but you are needed right now. Send the facts about Trapwire, Cubic, Ntrepid, persona management, surveillance, and illegal attacks on journalists and activists to your favorite blogger or journalist. We've managed to generate some coverage and influence some of the rest, and other outlets have come through on their own, but the failure of The New York Times and Gawker - as well as those who didn't even touch it, which is perhaps better than making false assurances of non-story-ism - has been unbelievable even to those of us who are in the habit of complaining about media at home and abroad.
People here have a difficult job. They spend years fighting the Republicans and the broken media dynamics that allow Republicans to win elections regardless of performance (while allowing some Democrats to stray from obvious truths along with them). That's a difficult fight that will never end. Possibly those here can sympathize with another difficult fight that has claimed the youth of a mounting number of my working partners (and sometimes friends). If not, you at least need to know what dangers have presented themselves over the past two years, and how they differ from similar dangers our activist predecessors faced throughout the 20th century.
There's an election coming up. There's also a great deal that our government does in our names and with our money and on the side of powerful corporate subjects and against the rest of us. None of it comes up for a vote, and 99 percent of it is unknown to any of us outside a given classification level, or the endless secret and informal alliances between the heads of the endless corporate consortiums that have managed to silently explode in power and wealth and number since 2001.
Every time my colleagues hack them, they and many of their associates turn out to have done at least one terribly amoral and sometimes illegal project. None of them have been innocent. Few of them likely are. Even when caught, almost nothing happens to any of them, within the industry or within "our" republic.
Please spend a few minutes learning about the information that a (sometimes) friend of mine is accused of hacking from the corrupt and now-disgraced Stratfor "risk analysis" firm (Austin, TX) that's itself been shown to spy on Bhopal activists for Dow Chemical, among other "ventures" - information that a lot of people have since gone to trouble and risk of analyzing and presenting and even using in radio phone confrontations with the defense contractor executives at Cubic who had an article deleted - not corrected, but deleted, and with no explanation to countless online readers - from several major Australian newspapers and other news outlets.
Listen: (and please excuse language, as we did this on a very niche radio program made by and catering to Anonymous and Telecomix, Radio Anonops, and we use certain terminology regularly and in our little shared linguistics/memes despite (in small part because of) a quite unusually large percentage of active participants being gay)
Keep in mind that Ntrepid - the firm Cubic is lying about not owning in the following conversation from two days ago (and successfully hid its connections and ownership over Ntrepid last year when several very good journalists first tried to determine those things) - is not just involved in the "fake online people" technology via work it rents to CENTCOM and god knows who else. It also recently created a report tracking "violent anarchist instructors" that included my old friends Allison Kilkenny and Jamie Kilstein and their program Citizen Radio as being among them. This is a serious problem and more people, particular the activists that come up in reports that in the recent past have generally preceded active surveillance and even targeting by these firms as well as law enforcement, who can ruin the lives of anyone it chooses to do so, often on what they believe to be real evidence in addition to whatever else they spin or purposely overlook, as with the FBI and Metropolitan Police of London's dropped charges against those arrested for charges carrying 15 years. Others raided and/or charged based on incompetence of informants, firms, and agencies have spoken about the danger and how common such things have gotten again in the last two years.
This is your issue, not just ours. Consider helping us fight the powers that threaten us all.
Finally, I posted this on my own blog, which is mostly viewed by other information activists, and which happens to be very relevant to what I think that more people here should consider learning about for their own safety (and those of their loved ones, as we saw with the disgraced contractor Aaron Barr of HBGary); something I typed out earlier on an Anonymous IRC:
[02:06] Also, if anyone here doesn't yet know why Cubic is perfect enemy on all counts, please see: http://wiki.echelon2.org/...
[02:06] <+Egg> Title: Cubic Corporation - Project PM (at wiki.echelon2.org)
[02:06] * watcunt_2 (dafuq@AN-ioq.sdd.vkv4oj.IP) has joined #anonops
[02:06] timed out :3
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[02:07] * watcunt_2 eyes out The-Pizza-Man
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[02:10] * watcunt_2 (dafuq@AN-ioq.sdd.vkv4oj.IP) has left #anonops (Leaving)
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[02:15] * Juzzy2 (Juzzy@AN-6ij.8c6.0e7cr0.IP) has joined #anonops
[02:15] And also see one of the little-known capabilities they're top of the game in, by virtue of winning 2010 CENTCOM bid
[02:16] http://wiki.echelon2.org/...
[02:16] <+Egg> Title: Persona Management - Project PM (at wiki.echelon2.org)
[02:16] * Juzzy2 is now known as Juzzy
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[02:17] These are the "fake virtual armies" now in use by US and CENTCOM (unspecified "multinational forces" as spokesman noted after revelation)
[02:17] If you don't know about it, you need to. This is not just a capability that's been deployed against activists including Anonymous and planned against Wikileaks and conventional groups in U.S...
[02:18] * anserpent (goaway@AN-6d0.rmn.16ilik.IP) Quit ( Ping timeout: 121 seconds )
[02:18] are we not considered a virtual army?
[02:18] it's very much symptomatic of one direction that is new, which is being followed by at least a dozen notable contracting firms
[02:18] I mean fake people
[02:18] they were described in press with that term last year, when a couple outlets paid attention
[02:19] it's what Topiary and I worked on for a month, straight through, March 2011
[02:19] everyone who's taken the time to see what we've found on it solid, including patents and contracts and commentary stolen from those involved like Aaron Barr, knows it's key
[02:19] as will be information operations in general
[02:20] "Romney Has Zero Percent Support From African Americans In New NBC/WSJ Poll"
[02:20] people who are involved in conventional brick-and-mortar activist groups have at least some excuse not to know about this one specific methodology, which is getting refined and improved upon
[02:20] ^ ROFL
[02:20] No one here, or in online activism in general, has any excuse not to know about it.
[02:21] <+News> 1 new tweet(s): AnonOps_Tx Nearly 100 Followers #Popular !!!, 2 minutes ago via web. (238898553488019456)
[02:21] Please take a moment to look through the short summary we have as well as perhaps the military-connected patent via IBM's own IP law firm
Join Project PM at irc.voxanon.net #ProjectPM, or follow our doings at @BarrettBrownLOL or @Asher_Wolf and @subverzo and others and help spread the word about corporate/state offensive online intelligence.
Don't bitch. Fight.