More on the hacker war in the Internet

Here is some more background on the Internet war being battled around WikiLeaks. This is an Internet story with good guys, bad guys and no end of confusion regarding who is which.

Aaron burr of the security firm HBGary Federal has paid a high price for trying to expose the individuals behind Anonymous. so has HBGary Federal. I wrote last Friday about the The secret cyberwar being carried on by government and businesses to destroy Wikileaks. Aaron burr is the individual who named names behind Anonymous. This story shows what he was trying to do. The fact that he listed Glenn Greenwald as one of the Anonymous individuals certainly brings his methods and information into question.

Aaron Barr believed he had penetrated Anonymous. The loose hacker collective had been responsible for everything from anti-Scientology protests to pro-Wikileaks attacks on MasterCard and Visa, and the FBI was now after them. But matching their online identities to real-world names and locations proved daunting. Barr found a way to crack the code.

[...]

"At any given time there are probably no more than 20-40 people active, accept during hightened points of activity like Egypt and Tunisia where the numbers swell but mostly by trolls," he wrote in an internal e-mail. (All e-mails in this investigative report are provided verbatim, typos and all.) "Most of the people in the IRC channel are zombies to inflate the numbers."

The show was run by a couple of admins he identified as "Q," "Owen," and "CommanderX"—and Barr had used social media data and subterfuge to map those names to three real people, two in California and one in New York.

Near the end of January, Barr began publicizing his information, though without divulging the names of the Anonymous admins. When the Financial Times picked up the story and ran a piece on it on February 4, it wasn't long before Barr got what he wanted—contacts from the FBI, the Director of National Intelligence, and the US military. The FBI had been after Anonymous for some time, recently kicking in doors while executing 40 search warrants against group members.

[...]

When the liberal blog Daily Kos ran a story on Barr's work later that day, some Anonymous users commented on it. Barr sent out an e-mail to colleagues, and he was getting worked up: "They think all I know is their irc names!!!!! I know their real fing names. Karen [HBGary Federal's public relations head] I need u to help moderate me because I am getting angry. I am planning on releasing a few names of folks that were already arrested. This battle between us will help spur publicity anyway."

[...]

But within a day, Anonymous had managed to infiltrate HBGary Federal's website and take it down, replacing it with a pro-Anonymous message ("now the Anonymous hand is bitch-slapping you in the face.") Anonymous got into HBGary Federal's e-mail server, for which Barr was the admin, and compromised it, extracting over 40,000 e-mails and putting them up on The Pirate Bay, all after watching his communications for 30 hours, undetected. In an after-action IRC chat, Anonymous members bragged about how they had gone even further, deleting 1TB of HBGary backup data.

They even claimed to have wiped Barr's iPad remotely.

[...]

Were Barr's vaunted names even correct? Anonymous insisted repeatedly that they were not. As one admin put it in the IRC chat with Leavy, "Did you also know that aaron was peddling fake/wrong/false information leading to the potential arrest of innocent people?" The group then made that information public, claiming that it was all ridiculous.

Thanks to the leaked e-mails, we now have the full story of how Barr infiltrated Anonymous, used social media to compile his lists, and even resorted to attacks on the codebase of the Low Orbit Ion Cannon—and how others at his own company warned him about the pitfalls of his research.

This is a very modern story and it looks like it is not over yet.

The secret cyberwar being carried on by government and businesses to destroy Wikileaks.

I wasn't too sure what to make of the recent reports that Wikileaks has a bunch of documents about a major American bank that will demonstrate its corrupt activities. Apparently Bank of America is quite certain that the threat is real and that they are the target. It seems that there is a cyberwar going on right now. Glenn Greenwald, the human rights lawyer/blogger has written an interesting article at Salon that pulls together a lot of the story.

The story, first reported by The Tech Herald, has been been written about in numerous places (see Marcy Wheeler, Forbes, The Huffington Post, BoingBoing, Matt Yglesias, Reason, Tech Dirt, and others), so I'll provide just the summary.

Last week, Aaron Barr, a top executive at computer security firm HB Gary, boasted to the Financial Times that his firm had infiltrated and begun to expose Anonymous, the group of pro-WikiLeaks hackers that had launched cyber attacks on companies terminating services to the whistleblowing site (such as Paypal, MasterCard, Visa, Amazon and others). In retaliation, Anonymous hacked into the email accounts of HB Gary, published 50,000 of their emails online, and also hacked Barr's Twitter and other online accounts.

• Continue reading

Among the emails that were published was a report prepared by HB Gary -- in conjunction with several other top online security firms, including Palantir Technologies -- on how to destroy WikiLeaks. The emails indicated the report was part of a proposal to be submitted to Bank of America through its outside law firm, Hunton & Williams. News reports have indicated that WikiLeaks is planning to publish highly incriminating documents showing possible corruption and fraud at that bank, and The New York Times detailed last month how seriously top bank officials are taking that threat. The NYT article described that the bank's "counterespionage work" against WikiLeaks entailed constant briefings for top executives on the whistle-blower site, along with the hiring of "several top law firms" and Booz Allen (the long-time firm of former Bush DNI Adm. Michael McConnell and numerous other top intelligence and defense officials). The report prepared by these firms was designed to be part of the Bank of America's highly funded anti-WikiLeaks campaign.

The leaked report suggested numerous ways to destroy WikiLeaks, some of them likely illegal -- including planting fake documents with the group and then attacking them when published; "creat[ing] concern over the security" of the site; "cyber attacks against the infrastructure to get data on document submitters"; and a "media campaign to push the radical and reckless nature of wikileaks activities." Many of those proposals were also featured prongs of a secret 2008 Pentagon plan to destroy WikiLeaks.

One section of the leaked report focused on attacking WikiLeaks' supporters and it featured a discussion of me. A graph purporting to be an "organizational chart" identified several other targets, including former New York Times reporter Jennifer 8 Lee, Guardian reporter James Ball, and Manning supporter David House. The report claimed I was "critical" to WikiLeaks' public support after its website was removed by Amazon and that "it is this level of support that needs to be disrupted"; absurdly speculated that "without the support of people like Glenn, WikiLeaks would fold"; and darkly suggested that "these are established professionals that have a liberal bent, but ultimately most of them if pushed will choose professional preservation over cause." As The Tech Herald noted, "earlier drafts of the proposal and an email from Aaron Barr used the word 'attacked' over 'disrupted' when discussing the level of support."

Then there is this interesting report from Think Progress.

ThinkProgress has learned that a law firm representing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the big business trade association representing ExxonMobil, AIG, and other major international corporations, is working with set of “private security” companies and lobbying firms to undermine their political opponents, including ThinkProgress, with a surreptitious sabotage campaign.

According to e-mails obtained by ThinkProgress, the Chamber hired the lobbying firm Hunton and Williams. Hunton And Williams’ attorney Richard Wyatt, who once represented Food Lion in its infamous lawsuit against ABC News, was hired by the Chamber in October of last year. To assist the Chamber, Wyatt and his associates, John Woods and Bob Quackenboss, solicited a set of private security firms — HB Gary Federal, Palantir, and Berico Technologies (collectively called Team Themis) — to develop tactics for damaging progressive groups and labor unions, in particular ThinkProgress, the labor coalition called Change to Win, the SEIU, US Chamber Watch, and StopTheChamber.com.

According to one document prepared by Team Themis, the campaign included an entrapment project. The proposal called for first creating a “false document, perhaps highlighting periodical financial information,” to give to a progressive group opposing the Chamber, and then to subsequently expose the document as a fake to undermine the credibility of the Chamber’s opponents. In addition, the group proposed creating a “fake insider persona” to “generate communications” with Change to Win.

Digby has weighed in with her take on the story. She focuses on Aaron Barr, an executive at the private security firm HB Gary, who obtained and published detailed information about political opponents’ children, spouses, and personal lives. When Anonymous, in defending WikiLeaks, learned what he had done they hacked into his accounts and published some 40,000 documents on his activities and on his family. After having done the same thing to other, Barr was very upset that someone might have named his family on line.

This is stuff that is not going away. We are going to see more of organizations like banks, governments and criminal organizations going after other people on the Internet. Think not? Here is more from Glenn Greenwald:

...it turns out that the firms involved here are large, legitimate and serious, and do substantial amounts of work for both the U.S. Government and the nation's largest private corporations (as but one example, see this email from a Stanford computer science student about Palantir). Moreover, these kinds of smear campaigns are far from unusual; in other leaked HB Gary emails, ThinkProgress discovered that similar proposals were prepared for the Chamber of Commerce to attack progressive groups and other activists (including ThinkProgress). And perhaps most disturbing of all, Hunton & Williams was recommended to Bank of America's General Counsel by the Justice Department -- meaning the U.S. Government is aiding Bank of America in its defense against/attacks on WikiLeaks.

That's why this should be taken seriously, despite how ignorant, trite and laughably shallow is the specific leaked anti-WikiLeaks proposal. As creepy and odious as this is, there's nothing unusual about these kinds of smear campaigns. The only unusual aspect here is that we happened to learn about it this time because of Anonymous' hacking. That a similar scheme was quickly discovered by ThinkProgress demonstrates how common this behavior is. The very idea of trying to threaten the careers of journalists and activists to punish and deter their advocacy is self-evidently pernicious; that it's being so freely and casually proposed to groups as powerful as the Bank of America, the Chamber of Commerce, and the DOJ-recommended Hunton & Williams demonstrates how common this is. These highly experienced firms included such proposals because they assumed those deep-pocket organizations would approve and it would make their hiring more likely.

But the real issue highlighted by this episode is just how lawless and unrestrained is the unified axis of government and corporate power. I've written many times about this issue -- the full-scale merger between public and private spheres -- because it's easily one of the most critical yet under-discussed political topics. Especially (though by no means only) in the worlds of the Surveillance and National Security State, the powers of the state have become largely privatized. There is very little separation between government power and corporate power. Those who wield the latter intrinsically wield the former. The revolving door between the highest levels of government and corporate offices rotates so fast and continuously that it has basically flown off its track and no longer provides even the minimal barrier it once did. It's not merely that corporate power is unrestrained; it's worse than that: corporations actively exploit the power of the state to further entrench and enhance their power.

That's what this anti-WikiLeaks campaign is generally: it's a concerted, unified effort between government and the most powerful entities in the private sector (Bank of America is the largest bank in the nation). The firms the Bank has hired (such as Booz Allen) are suffused with the highest level former defense and intelligence officials, while these other outside firms (including Hunton & Williams and Palantir) are extremely well-connected to the U.S. Government. The U.S. Government's obsession with destroying WikiLeaks has been well-documented. And because the U.S. Government is free to break the law without any constraints, oversight or accountability, so, too, are its "private partners" able to act lawlessly. That was the lesson of the Congressional vesting of full retroactive immunity on lawbreaking telecoms, of the refusal to prosecute any of the important Wall Street criminals who caused the 2008 financial crisis, and of the instinctive efforts of the political class to protect defrauding mortgage banks.

The exemption from the rule of law has been fully transferred from the highest level political elites to their counterparts in the private sector. "Law" is something used to restrain ordinary Americans and especially those who oppose this consortium of government and corporate power, but it manifestly does not apply to restrain these elites.

Great reporting by the Main Stream Media experts

Here (from Glenn Greenwald) are a few of the significant things that have been happening in the world very recently:

This week, the Bush administration sought vastly increased powers to spy on the telephone conversations of Americans, and then threatened to begin spying again illegally and without warrants. It was revealed that Condoleezza Rice would meet with Syrian officials, a significant shift in Middle East policy.

Yesterday, it was disclosed that Iraq's government is actually purging itself of anyone who seeks to impede lawless Shiite militias. And one of the right-wing's most influential academicians published an article on The Wall St. Journal Op-Ed page explicitly advocating "one-man rule" in America whereby the President can ignore the "rule of law" in order to fight The Terrorists.

Then we get the big story from the new online political reporting agency, the Politico.

This is also from Glenn greenwald:

None of that -- or virtually anything else of even marginal significance -- was reported by The Politico, an online political magazine founded by some of the nation's most prestigious and admired (in Beltway terms) political journalists. But yesterday, The Politico's so-called "chief political columnist," Roger Simon (Bio), published a 674-word article -- prominently touted on The Politico's front page -- exclusively about John Edwards' haircuts, cleverly headlined "Hair today, gone tomorrow."

OK. My question is, where is Mr. Simon's sense of priorities? Is this really the best story he could find to write? The "Edward's haircut" is purely a story made up by reporters. Surely Mr. Simon could have used his time, talents, and access to media space to tell the public something significant about some of the many, many politicians who are presently working hard to get government jobs.

Professor Mansfield - President is above the Law.

Harvard Government Professor Harvey Mansfield has published a treatise that explains why Republicans believe "The Case for the Strong Executive -- Under some circumstances, the Rule of Law must yield to the need for Energy."

Glenn Greenwald explains what Professor Mansfield is trying to say.

Read the Greenwald article, then go look at my article Rule of Law vs. Arbitrary Command. Then ask yourself which society you want to live in.

Glenn Greenwald dissects the Bill Moyers PBS report

Glenn Greewald does a really good job of telling us what we saw when we watched last night's Bill Moyers PBS special "Buying the War." I'll admit that I have been sitting here thinking "Yeah, I knew it was bad, but this bad?"

Greenwald takes the next step, which should have been obvious to me but wasn't until I read what he wrote:

Moyers' documentary is a superb piece of journalism and makes inescapably clear how profoundly corrupt our dominant political and media institutions were prior to the invasion. But most national "journalists" will simply ignore the whole program (as Digby notes, The New York Times, one of the principal culprits, did not even review it). [Editor - highlighting is mine.]

Has America become so corrupt that it now subordinates the goals of building a better nation, better people and providing an environment of Freedom has become subordinate to greater money-making and building worldwide power? What has happened to the two century experiment in democracy on the North American continent?

Instead of a nation of the people, by the people, and for the people have we succumbed to the disease of Imperialist wars in support of an ever wealthier elite who gather all power to themselves? We have let them centralize control of the broadcast media and the daily and weekly print media. This gives the elite the wealth to rob the rest of us of any control of our nation.

So the wealthy American elite buy an all-volunteer military and send them on a fool's errand to occupy Iraq for the primary purpose of overawing the major oil supplying nations in the world. Control of the the flow of energy supplies allows those wealthy elite to gain greater power and wealth without spreading more than a minimum of that wealth to the mass of the people who actually create it.

Bush may have overreached himself when he has decided to ignore Congress and the American people in their desire to get out of the fighting in the Middle East. But why should he listen to the American People? He has the major media and the pundits on his side?

Is this what it means to say that our democratic institutions have become corrupted? Sure looks like it to me, when Bush can steal elections without having the media tattle on him, ignore Congress with signing statements and eliminate habeas corpus by Presidential decree.

The Romans didn't really recognize that the Republic had been destroyed and replaced by the empire until generations later. We may recognize the change here sooner, but can we then prevent it? What is happening to the two century experiment in democracy? Is it over now?

Bush admin seems to have repeated trouble finding documents

Obviously the Bush administration really, really needs to hire a good file clerk. You'd think the repeated failure to find documents they are asked for would embarrass them into spending the money the way most private organizations do.

If the reference escapes you then you need to go read Glenn Greenwald article at Salon entitled "The Bush administration's terrible luck with finding documents."

Why the media failed in the run-up to the war in Iraq

The major American media institutions bought into the lies and deceptions that the White House was peddling to take America to war in Iraq in 2003. Then they spread those lies and deceptions far, wide and deep so that any effort to question them became something only a fool or a traitor to America would try.

The result was the Cheney/Bush/Rumsfeld preemptive(?) invasion of Iraq leading to the quagmire that we are now told we cannot leave, because leaving Iraq means that America has lost the war there. For personal reasons of their own, admitting that the war is lost is anathema to George W. Bush and John McCain. Those personal reasons are never stated. They are cloaked in patriotism with the idea that "America" cannot lose the war in Iraq.

We also know that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11, that he considered bin Laden and al Qaeda his enemies, and that he had no nuclear weapons program, chemical weapons program or biological weapons program in active or potentially active status. The UN inspection teams had it right in their reports.

Once those lies were recognized generally there have developed several new reasons for why we invaded Iraq and remain there.

• First is that we had to remove a nasty dictator. Saddam was bad, but Mugabe in Zambia is worse, as are the leaders of Sudan who are conducting genocide on the natives of Darfur - but we don't have carrier groups off either coast nor do we have troops on the ground sending back a steady stream of bodybags from either of those countries.
  
• Then there is the idea that we should be there to bring democracy to Iraq. Besides being highly paternalistic, it is something now universally recognized by thinking people that we cannot do that with armed troops. Our very presence caused too much animosity, for one thing. For another, the sectarian strife we unleashed and with the help of al Qaeda sharply increased has made democracy a dream unlikely to be achieved until far in the future if at all. Certainly it will not happen while we have troops in Iraq.
  
• Another reason now given is that if we leave abruptly things will obviously get much worse rapidly. No one bothers to explain how or why they will get worse, but somehow the conditions now must not be as bad as it can get. Again, this his a highly paternalistic view of the Iraqi people. Somehow they won't be able to sort out governing themselves unless we have our Army and Marine Corps on hand to protect their politicians. Clearly they can't make the Iraqi government we foisted on them work. How can they create one of their own? They're just Arab Wogs, right? [The insult, WOGs, apparently is an acronym developed by the British army when they were attempting the idiotic occupation Iraq after WW I. It supposedly stands for "Old Wiley Gentlemen." Looked at that way, is seems more of a compliment than an insult.]
• The other reason for not getting our troops out of Iraq seems to be that Dick Cheney and the NeoCons think that if we admit that we have already lost the occupation we will appear weak to our enemies, such as Iran and North Korea. This is what I wrote on the subject last May 30th:

  This pessimistic view is one that leaves the U.S. in a real bind. As we remain in Iraq we are being bled like a Bull in a bullfight by the picadors before the main bull fight begins. There appears no way to actually change things there in a manner that would result in real peace. But if we leave, our pullout will set off the attempted genocide of the Sunnis by the Shiites, followed by the entry of Sunni Arabs from Syria, Saudi Arabia, etc.
  
  Bush seems to have decided that Iraq can establish a national government that will be able to pacify the situation. The five months it has taken to establish a government after the last election and the fact that no decision has been made on the security positions in that government, plus the fact that the government has no real power outside the Greed Zone of Baghdad makes that an unlikely long shot.
  
  Does the term "No win situation" occur to anyone besides me?

  Nothing has changed since then except to get worse.

So now for these weak reasons our purpose in keeping our nearly depleted Army and Marine troops in Iraq has been reduced to fear of admitting that we have lost the war there, and maybe that we are afraid the Iraqis have to have use there to shoot at so they won't focus even more on each other.

How did we get to this point? The incompetence of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld has been widely discussed in great detail. The failures of the major media have been decried, but with a lot less specificity. Until now. Now Gary Kamiya has written an excellent indictment of the media and published it in Salon. [Sit through the Day-Pass. It is short, and the article is worth the trouble!]

Then follow that up by reading Glenn Greenwald's discussion of the really bad lies that ABC News told America - repeatedly - about the Anthrax attacks on Americans and the (nonexistent) connection to Iraq and Saddam Hussein. This is the second of his discussions. It includes ABC's defense of its' indefensible actions in misdirecting the American public.

One reason for Bush Admin secrecy

Arizona U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton was fired at least in part because he wanted to establish a policy requiring the FBI to record confessions to use in Court. Charlot complained that because the FBI had a policy of not recording confessions that he had lost convictions or had been forced to plea bargain an otherwise strong case down. So why doesn't the FBI want to record confessions?

Glenn Greenwald points out that the only reason for not recording confessions has to be that the FBI does not want the jury to know what the normal procedures they use for interrogating suspect looks like.

He makes a good case. Go read his excellent post.

Why are Americans so uninformed? Is it that Geraldo can't get off the Nicole Smith story?

If you have seen the truly excellent stories on how the wounded are being treated at Walter Reed Hospital and you have any heart at all, you will be sick. (Here is one and here is the other. For some odd reason, I'm sure it is just concidence, Walter Reed has just announced a program to improve the older facilities like Building #18.) I'm certain it was in the works already, and it is only coincidence that they start the day after the second of Dana Priest's articles appeared on the front page of the Washington Post.

Especially since Jonah Goldberg at "National Review's The Corner" has real doubt about the source. Dana Priest, Johan says, is unreliable because she has "an agenda." He offers no facts to back this up, but he is certain that she cannot be trusted. He suggests that FOX news put Geraldo on the case.

Glenn Greenwald tells the story of Jonah's doubt from his new digs at Salon.