Anonymous posted this to their site anonnews.org
On April 29th a person using the twitter account “@septscelles” released a large file to Barrett Brown that purportedly contained secret US Chamber of Commerce documents. This file was later made available via File Dropper as a (strangely truecypted) torrent named "chambersecrets2". It is also reported to have been made available in an unencrypted form on the Pirate Bay.
Despite the promise of secrets and leaks, early research has thus far shown that this information is publicly available through a simple Google search. It's very possible that “@septscelles” is just an attention seeking troll. Despite this, there is a more insidious possibility. We learned from the HB Gary emails that the Chamber of Commerce was advised to “feed the fuel between the feuding groups, [creating] disinformation." Specific mention was made of "[creating] messages around actions to sabotage or discredit the opposing organization [and to] submit fake documents and then call out the error…”
The file is very large, and will therefore take some time to fully examine. Nevertheless, we would like to state that this information was provided by an unknown party and may be an attempt to discredit Anonymous through a campaign of misinformation. More information will be coming soon.
We Are Anonymous
We See Through Your Lies
We Do Not Forgive
We Do Not Forget
Expect Us.
It seems Anonymous is still examining the docs for useful info, though they're claiming they didn't release them. I deeply apologize in advance for the inconvenience if this turns out to be nothing...though I'm finding a few interesting things in the Mackinac Center files. So far looks like all publicly available info, just all conveniently packaged into one file.
Lots of court docs. A massive collection of union contracts. Screenshots of University websites that speak positively about unions.
Still looking.
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As we speak I'm sitting on a mile high pile of data released about the US Chamber of Commerce. Thousands and thousands of docs released a few hours ago. Wanna help read through the docs and see what crazy things the Chamber is up to? There's thousands of these docs. It's a 1.2 GIGABYTE download. My computer is choking on it. Looks like a lot of docs scraped from their sites.
This evening I came across a reference to a torrent on Twitter that caught my eyeball -- A "torrent" in this case is basically a document dump. Basically. The message intrigued me not only because it mentioned documents from the US Chamber of Commerce, but also....
A. It's a document dump from Anonymous
and
B. It contains documents from an organization that particularly makes my teeth curl, the Michigan based Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Those are the dudes who brought us the Overton Window. They're kind of nuts.
This document release contains content from the American Legislative
Exchange Council, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the Mackinac Center.
The Chamber of Commerce came to our attention via the HBGary email
dump. Their connections to ALEC and the Mackinac Center are not entirely
clear, but the information we provide should help clarify things.
Both files are encrypted using the http://truecrypt.com system. We
don't feel a great need to protect this content since we're distributing
it, but we do feel a need to help you improve your tradecraft.
The larger file, ALEC-Chamber-Mackinac.tc, is the content itself. The
password for this is "Barrett Brown".
The smaller file, Press-Release-2.tc, contains clarifications that may
or may not be needed, depending on how wise those who download this
data prove to be. If the need becomes apparent we will provide the
password to Barrett Brown, with the expectation that he will release it
via http://anonnews.org and other channels.
We are Anonymous.
`
We are Legion.
We do not forgive.
We do not forget.
The torrent contains information about:
- The US Chamber of Commerce
- The ultraconservative think tank the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Michigan
- The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)
All three, of course, are organizations that the Koch brothers are understood to have significant influence over, and all three HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE unions. And the middle class. And puppies. And probably popcorn.
It took a long time, but I managed to download the torrent and it's filled with thousands of documents. Mostly I'm poking through the Mackinac Center ones, which makes for filthy, nauseating reading at 3 AM.
But it could definitely use more people downloading the torrent and reviewing documents for weird, unethical, reprehensible behavior and unseemly connections and dealings.
Download the documents here:
Important: You'll also need a torrent client like utorrent or BitTorrent to receive the documents...and you'll need TrueCrypt to decode it
http://www.filedropper.com/...
To open the file you will also need something called TrueCrypt which you can download here.
Instructions:
1. Download TrueCrypt after you've finished loading the massive data dump to your computer.
2. Then open TrueCrypt (click the TrueCrypt icon)
3. Click Select File and locate the huge file from your local computer.
4. Select a directory in the top window...I used the Z directory
5. Click Dismount
6. Ignore the warning the system gives you about armageddon and system failure -- if it actually gives you a warning.
7. Enter the password Barrett Brown
8. Then...you'll get a choice of which file you want to open...and from there on out it's pretty much millions and millions of pdf files.
Happy reading! Bring a barf bag.
UPDATE x2
You can Access meta data about the files if you download FOCA. That will give you deeper info about the files here.... Here's some info in the press release...
The content from http://alec.org, http://uschamber.com, and
http://mackinac.org were collected with entirely legal means.
Go to http://www.informatica64.com/...
Download and install FOCA 2.6
Once you have FOCA you should be able to open the FOCA file
in each directory. You'll find that it contains all of
the meta-data for each file in the collection. Browse to your
heart's content.
FOCA is a marvelous, simple, powerful means to obtain and
organize information that is publicly available. Create a new
project, enter the web site of the organization you want to
explore, and let FOCA do its work. Once it has all the files
you need to first download them, then apply the meta-data
extraction process.
