In February, a team of Anonymous hackers revealed a massive conspiracy on the part of Bank of America, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Hunton & Williams law firm, and three intelligence contracting companies to harass, monitor, and discredit left-wing groups, the journalist Glenn Greenwald, Wikileaks, and other targets. Beyond the plot itself, these revelations signaled a growing and dangerous dynamic whereby powerful institutions have sought to develop and implement the most comprehensive disinformation apparatus in history - one that, as in the past, will be pointed directly at those who seek a change in the status quo.
I have an op-ed in The Guardian today in which I revisit this topic on the occasion of the U.S.'s failure to protect its drones from a keylogging virus. It's a subject I have written about dozens of times, and which I'll continue to harp on for years to come; next year in particular, I'll be highlighting the industry and its capabilities in a book I'm writing with activist Gregg Housh about the Anonymous movement.
A year ago, I had never heard of this industry, and would probably have ignored it further had one of the firms that were targeting Greenwald, Wikileaks, and Anonymous not monitored my conversations and jotted down my name, along with those of many others involved with Anon, on a document that was to be provided to the FBI. Today, I talk about little else, and the reason is that what I and others have dug up on this industry over the past seven months has frightened us more than anything else in the world. It should frighten you, too. And you should be fighting back against it.
As I note today:
This familiar tendency on the part of the US government to spend money it doesn't have on things it doesn't get is now directed at developing procedures it shouldn't use. The intelligence contracting industry, which includes firms that provide security applications to the entire US government and military, has been encouraged lately to direct more of its collective time and capabilities to the task of monitoring, misinforming and sometimes outright attacking American citizens and others abroad – and benefit from the protection of the state and the incompetence of the media in order to make such attacks with impunity.
Congress, after all, had a chance to investigate the firms that went after so many of its citizens in such dishonest ways and with capabilities that are allegedly supposed to be used against foreign threats rather than domestic activists. But that investigation was shot down by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), who claimed that the Justice Department should decide if a crime had been committed. But it was the Justice Department that referred Bank of America to Hunton & Williams when the financial firm sought to go after Wikileaks by clandestine means. No investigation was forthcoming.
As such, several dozen of us have been carrying out our own investigation into a threat that concerns everyone who prefers the internet to be a tool of truth and liberty rather than a marketplace of deception. We have shown how such firms as Apple and Google are assisting in comprehensive disinformation and surveillance programs pursued by some of the same people who have already re-purposed such things for use against Americans. We have talked endlessly of the danger that persona management presents to mankind's collective ability to discern what is being said by real people and what is being concocted by governments and corporations, particularly now that more companies are competing to build the best and most effective means by which to manufacture not just consent, but events. And we have made recorded calls to the executives of Booz Allen Hamilton and other major, semi-government enterprises known to be involved in new and even more destructive programs in an effort to draw further attention to the things that we continue to discover each day.
The problem is that, in the long run, we will lose this battle. The media at large cannot be bothered to pursue such a story unless we produce some novelty tie-in, such as a hack. Worse, we've gotten little traction among the new media strongholds that one might think would be interested, many having already been targeted by such methods. Meanwhile, the old dictate that "information wants to be free" applies to dangerous information as much as it does anything else; too many entities are developing too many capabilities that are designed to be undetectable for us to stop the inevitable march towards deception that is traveled by all powerful men at every point in human history.
I will simply say this, then. Many of us are working to alert the public about this issue and to disrupt these dynamics that the state will not only fail to prevent, but has encouraged from the beginning. We compile our info at this wiki and we discuss our research at an IRC server called irc.project-pm.org. Those who consider it their duty to assist may do so on their own or in cooperation with Project PM. I may be reached at barriticus@gmail.com.
Thank you.