100 Years Worth of Federal Prison Charges for Alleged 'Hactivist'?

The federal government is on a rampage to punish Anonymous-style hackers.

Alleged hacktivist Barrett Brown, the 31-year old mislabeled spokesman for the shado wy hacker collective known as Anonymous, faces federal charges that could put hi m away for over a hundred years. Did he engage in a spree of murders? Run a chil d-sex ring? Not quite. His crime: making leaked e-mails accessible to the public d ocuments that shine a light on the shadowy world of intelligence contracting in the post-9/11 era. A critically acclaimed author and provocative journalist, Brown cannot be too ea sily dismissed as some unruly malcontent typing away in the back of a gritty esp resso lounge. He is eccentric. And he was clearly high on something, if only his own hubris, when he made a threatening video that put him in the feds crosshairs . But that s not the real reason for the government s overreaction. Evidence indicat es it has a lot more to do with sending a message to the community he comes from , which the government sees correctly as a threat. The Barrett Brown case is simply the latest in a string of prosecutions in which the government pursues anyone involved in making information liberated from gover nmental or corporate entities easily accessible to the public. Those targeted ar e not necessarily accused of the illegal entry itself (the hack ) or violating cont racts (as in the case of a leak ). These are people performing a function analogous to that of a newspaper yet they can face prison sentences longer than those presc ribed for murderers, rapists, and terrorists. The Obama administration s assault on accountability is dual-pronged: attack the m essenger (as in the case of Brown, WikiLeaks, even New York Times reporters) and attack the source (Bradley Manning, John Kiriakou, Thomas Drake, etc.). In fact , seven of those sources have been indicted as traitors under the 1917 Espionage Act during the Obama years alone more than double the espionage charges against whi stleblowers by all previous presidential administrations combined. The Espionage Act is a draconian relic from World War I designed to prevent infi ltration by foreign agents, like those of the Kaiser s Germany. It has a sordid hi story as an instrument against American dissenters who leak to the media, includ ing Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, but has been used sparingly h itherto until Barack Obama s administration. The government s position is that revealing this information to the media enables e nemies to see it. Thus, whoever blows the whistle is aiding the enemy. But in these cases, the enemy is the American people. *** Brown, in federal custody since September 2012, has been jousting with the feds for quite some time. Round one of his travails began on March 6, 2012, when FBI agents raided his Dal las apartment, looking for evidence related to the 2011 hack of e-mails belongin g to Stratfor a private firm with substantial links to the American intelligence c ommunity. Brown sought refuge at his mother s, but Special Agents arrived there as well, later in the evening. Although the feds found no incriminating evidence, they continued to harass Brown and his family, threatening to file obstruction o f justice charges against Brown s mother for hosting her son during the raid. This prompted Brown to record an ominous YouTube video threatening the Special Agent in charge of the investigation. He was arrested that evening and held for weeks

without indictment, under the claim he was an imminent threat to the agent s safe ty. In early October 2012, he was finally charged on a number of counts related to harassment of a federal officer. In December of that year, while still in custody, he was indicted on an addition al charge: trafficking in stolen material. Had he been shipping purloined goods ac ross state lines? Hardly. His trafficking, according to the government, consisted of posting a link in a chat room. On January 23 of this year came the coup de grce. Brown was hit with a third roun d of federal charges this time for allegedly concealing evidence during that initi al March 2012 raid on his apartment Officially unrelated to these charges is the real nut of the government s dispute with Brown: his personal initiative known as ProjectPM. Barrett s Baby ProjectPM is a crowd-sourced research effort with several aims. First, to study 75,000+ e-mails pilfered by Anonymous from military and intelligence contract or, HBGary Federal, and its parent company HBGary. Second, to post these raw, pr imary-source documents to a website where readers can edit and contribute furthe r information. Third, to use these documents to map out the relationships betwee n private contractors and the federal government that form our current national security state. Brown s work is a potential bonanza for journalists, as one of the few efforts to come to grips with the explosive growth of the private intelligence industry in the last decade. From February 2011 until Barrett s arrest in September 2012, ProjectPM had publicl y identified the following revelations within the hacked e-mails: A conspiracy by lobbying and cybersecurity firms to engage in a disinfor mation and sabotage campaign against critics of the Chamber of Commerce and Bank of America. An operational mass surveillance and data-mining program targeting the A rab world. An unnamed project to utilize online Persona Management with the intent o f manipulating information or perception, conducting data mining, [and] infiltra ting social organizations. The employment of American PR firms to discredit and sabotage dissidents from Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain.

*** It isn t hard to see the parallel with the case of free-information activist Aaron Swartz.On January 17, WhoWhatWhy wrote about the U.S. Attorney for Massachusett s, Carmen Ortiz, whose avid prosecution of Swartz preceded his suicide, and focu sed attention on federal tactics and objectives. At the time he took his life Sw artz was facing a potential sentence exceeding 50 years for attempting to release scholarly articles to the public. We laid out a number of other non-hacker relat ed instances of prosecutorial overreach by Ms. Ortiz. The article concluded that Swartz s treatment wasn t anomalous, but a symptom of the entire disease that underli es America s singular status as the world s jailer of those who anger formidable inter ests, and those without friends in the right places. Brown s case is even more egr egious: As even the government itself concedes, ProjectPM comes under the defini

tion of the legitimate practice of journalism. Brown simply harnessed informatio n gathered from someone else s criminal hack. Then he used it to expose the foul and potentially illegal activities of some of the world s leading corporations in partn ership with secretive sectors of the government. Brown punctured a wall of secrecy, constructed over the past decade, that shield s the state from accountability to its citizens. For that, he is threatened with a century behind bars. His tale deserves to be told, not just because of the injustice involved. It als o shows the awesome power of the Internet in adjusting the balance sheet between the big guys and the small ones. And the lengths the insiders will go to keep t heir advantage. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind In a YouTube confession on September 12, 2012, Barrett Brown begins by explaining why he is angry at the FBI. A wiry redhead, Brown speaks in a sonorous baritone w ith a hint of Southern twang. After nervously admitting that he has a case of the giggles and is a recovering heroin addict, he composes himself and chronicles th e story of ProjectPM and his assorted run-ins with the FBI. Brown describes a March 2012 FBI raid on his residence in connection with allege d activities of the Internet hacker group Anonymous. With visible anger, he grou ses that the criminal investigation now extends beyond him to an uninvolved memb er of his family. Having received a vague warning the day prior, Brown sought haven at his mother s house while government agents raided his apartment. Once the FBI realized the l aptop they were seeking was not at Brown s flat, they headed to Mrs. Brown s place, confronted her son, and according to Brown asked if he had any laptops he wanted to g ive them. When he responded in the negative, they left in a huff, only to return later with another search warrant this time confiscating the sought-after laptop. As the investigation continued over the next few months, the feds could find no evidence on that laptop or anywhere else that related to criminal activity. That s when they initiated a charge of obstruction of justice against his mother. In his video, Brown lashed out, announcing unquestionably ominous sounding plans . I know what s legal, I know what s been done to me And if it s legal when it s done to me, it s going to be legal when it s done to FBI Agent Robert Smith who is a criminal. That s why [FBI special agent] Robert Smith s life is over. And when I say his life i s over, I m not saying I m going to kill him, but I am going to ruin his life and lo ok into his fucking kids How do you like them apples? The FBI didn t. Later that evening, special agents, interrupting a video-chat sess ion he was having, took Brown away in handcuffs. He was held without charge for several weeks until the Justice Department unveiled the first of three indictmen ts against him. Thus began his ordeal, and his time in custody, now approaching half a year. In the YouTube recording, Brown does not explicitly advocate violen ce against FBI Agent Smith, although his menacing fury does seem at the very lea st cause for investigation. But for purposes of comparison, it is worth noting t hat not long ago a Houston man received just 42 months for threatening to blow u p FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. And a Pennsylvania man was recently sente nced to just a year and a half for threatening to kill an FBI agent. Aside from t hreatening a federal officer, the most serious charges against Brown were laid do wn in the second indictment, handed up by a grand jury in December 2012. These c harges related to the Stratfor hack.

The name Stratfor will be familiar to our readers. It has been in the news in th e past. WhoWhatWhy recently produced an exclusive investigation with new revelat ions on General David Petraeus s career-ending affair based on documents obtained by the whistle-blowing group WikiLeaks from the same Stratfor e-mail reserve to wh ich Brown linked. Brown was never indicted for the infiltration, per se. Instead, he was charged w ith trafficking in stolen material and access device fraud as mentioned, for posting, in a chat room, a link to the e-mail cache. Apparently, buried in the thousands of e-mails was the private credit card information of a number of Stratfor emplo yees. It was not clear how Brown s act was singular. That same link had been previously posted innumerable times across the Internet. All of this raises suspicions about some larger agenda in the government s Javertlike pursuit of this young man. To understand that, we might well start by looki ng at how Brown came to be on the government s radar in the first place. Humble Beginnings As an Internet muckraker, Brown had a penchant for pulling the string wherever it might lead. He was quick to take on established interests and orthodoxies, picki ng apart cherished truths if just to see their adherents scowl. Eventually this predilection led him to become bound up with a group that made Time Magazine s lis t of 100 Most Influential People of 2012: the hackers collective known as Anonymous . The media, in referring to Anonymous, usually suggest that it is far more concre te an entity than it actually is, with members and a chain of command. In fact, An onymous has no more organization than a group of strangers with shared interests i n, say, a Harry Potter chat room. As a result, responsibility for any action att ributed to Anonymous is, by its very nature, diffuse and untraceable. What originally united members was immersion in a Net-centric subculture that priz es personal liberty and anonymity, if simply to exercise the right to prank people online. From this amorphous origin evolved a network of rebellious scofflaws an d bored teenagers, along with a share of idealistic activists. The potential to mobilize these individuals to act in concert for a commonly defined goal is wha t gives Anonymous its power. Over time, a few of these digital rapscallions came to share a belief that this power can and should be used as a democratizing force . Some trace the group s beginning back to 2003 on the imageboard 4chan.org a forum for discussing Japanese comics. These were just kids interested in arcane Japanese we b culture and, of course, pictures of boobs, says Tim Rogers author of a D Magazine cover story on Brown s Anonymous links. They harassed people in online role-playin g games and indulged in other forms of online pranking. Then, as now, users (now often known as Anons ) would communicate using Internet Re lay Chats (IRCs), a now ubiquitous staple of the Internet. For laymen, an IRC ca n best be understood like any other chat room (among other things, enabling live text messaging, privately or within groups, as well as data transfer capabiliti es.) Whether for digital pranking, discussing the Japanese anime craze, or coord inating resistance to repressive regimes, the ability to communicate and organiz e via IRCs has been apparent since the chats first appeared in the late 1980s. F or example, during the 1991 August Putsch by Communist hardliners against Soviet p resident Mikhail Gorbachev, IRCs were used to disseminate information during an internal media blackout.

What eventually became Anonymous s IRCs didn t begin as places to plan hacktivism. y were simply digital hangouts where computer geeks could gather to discuss mode s of pranking in online gaming communities. And as anyone who s ever surveyed a co mment forum can attest, anonymity gives users the nerve to say things that, for fear of reputational damage or social stigma, they otherwise never would. This a dmittedly mean-spirited ethos was a staple of the culture in IRCs.

The

One of the things that Anonymous was at that time was an outlet [for Anons] to ve nt a little, explains Gregg Housh a once-active member of Anonymous and confidant of Brown s. Sociopaths seem to fit naturally into that world, Housh says. [It] wasn t ab out activism. As an aficionado of such activities in the online role-playing game Second Life allegedly creating swarms of digital dildos with which to barrage othe r people s online houses until their computers crashed Barrett Brown was able to par lay his way into the often-sophomoric Anonymous fraternity. Not So Anonymous As a freelance writer by day, and online prankster by night, Barrett Brown found himself at home among his new cohorts in the Anonymous IRCs. Although Brown is routinely referred to as a self-proclaimed Anonymous spokesman, he conceded in an interview with NBCNewsonMarch 8, 2011 that he was no such thin g: I can t speak on behalf of Anonymous, because there s no one who can authorize me to do that. Brown was dubbed a spokesman for the collective because he was one of a few willin g to speak on record, using his real name, about Anonymous activities to the med ia. Brown is what some Anons refer to, almost admiringly, as a namefag. As Tim Rog ers explains: The term is not intrinsically derogatory. It just means that one ha s publicly identified oneself with Anonymous, using the name on one s birth certif icate. I liken him more to an embedded journalist or media liaison, explains a close frie nd of Brown s, Kevin Gallagher. The two met in New York City during the summer of 2012 at the HOPE9 Conference (HOPE stands for Hackers on Planet Earth), and have remained close. Since his arrest in September, Gallagher says, [Brown] calls me on average once every two weeks. According to Gallagher, Brown wasn t much of a hacker. He was unabashedly lacking [ the] skills to access protected databases or participate in the big activities co ordinated through certain Anonymous IRCs. Brown simply acted as a go-to source f or media when big Anonymous operations were conducted. It was a dangerous positi on to put oneself into, and few did. Ironically, Anonymous itself had security issues. Toward the end of his freedom h e seemed to be growing disappointed with the people in Anonymous, Gallagher told WhoWhatWhy. [Brown had] seen Anonymous become infiltrated [and] co-opted, and peo ple choosing to become informants. Indeed, FBI infiltration and cooptation were able to sow discord within the rank s of Anonymous. This can be seen in the case of Sabu an alleged ringleader of LulzSe c (a highly active subgroup of Anonymous that coordinated many of the larger, il legal actions) turned government informant. In August of 2011 he pled guilty to 12 criminal charges, and began working with the FBI to trace other LulzSec membe rs. After the Sabu matter exploded publicly, many members of LulzSec were arrested i n the following months, and the inner circle of hackers comprising Anonymous beg an to fragment. But that disruption did little to lessen the underlying esprit a s

trong sense of individual empowerment that came from an ability to act collectiv ely and yet still maintain personal privacy. That diffusion of power and knowled ge hindered many attempts at infiltration by law enforcement. Simply put, few Anons actually know anything about one another, so there are few opportunities to rat each other out. It s a setup that the Mafia would appreciate . With this inherently hard-to-dismantle structure, Anonymous continues to make it s presence felt: on February 11 of this year, the state of Alabama s website was h acked in retaliation for allegedly racist state immigration legislation. Personal information that was being stored by the state on 46,000 citizens was collected and supposedly deleted. From Dennis the Menace to Robin Hood In the latter half of the past decade, Brown, a University of Texas-Austin dropo ut, worked as a freelance columnist producing copy for the likes of New York Pre ss, Vanity Fair, Huffington Post and The Onion. Channeling H.L. Mencken, Brown c o-authored a 2007 book titled Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism, Intelli gent Design, and the Easter Bunny. Matt Taibbi, known for his stinging critiques of the financial industry in Rolling Stone, had this to say about it: With their painstaking attention to historical detail and amusingly violent writing style, Brown and [his co-author] Alston have given the religious right exactly the rig hteous, merciless fragging it deserves. Brown s commentary had always been attuned to civil liberties, the erosion of Cons titutional rights, what he saw as an inept or complicit media structure and the i mpact of the Internet on all of these issues. As one might expect from this pedigree, Brown began writing quite favorably abou t WikiLeaks and other pro-public-accountability forms of digital protest. Brown claimed to have been in contact with a number of the activists who, in 2008, lau nched the first coordinated action associated with Anonymous: Operation Chanolog y. It began with a bizarre interview that appeared on YouTube, showing actor Tom Cruise extolling Scientology, that was leaked by a disaffected former church me mber. The Church claimed copyright violation, asserting the video was solely int ended for internal distribution to church members and threatened YouTube with li tigation. When YouTube removed the video, Anonymous posted a video of their own decrying c ensorship. Then Anonymous launched a sustained campaign of (the now familiar) de nial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against Scientology websites, together with prank calls to Scientology offices worldwide and barrages of black faxes that tie up re ceiving machines and deplete their ink reserves. Anonymous s brand of mischievous activism was born. The Church of Scientology fought back by publicly naming one of the publishers o f Anonymous s response video in a civil suit. That publisher was Gregg Housh. Sinc e he had already been outed, Housh was then willing to assume the role of a go-t o spokesperson (or namefag ) for those seeking answers about the hacker collective. I remember when we first started [targeting Scientology], recalls Housh. I got to t his weird point only a few weeks into [the operation], where some of the teenage ex-scientologists had started convincing me of just how evil this organization was We started thinking about this as an actual cause. From then on it just kept going. Housh is describing his transformation into a moralfag, jargon for Anons who see A nonymous as a tool for doing good and for holding powerful people and organizati ons accountable to the people.

I was told very clearly that we needed to stop ruining [Anonymous s] bad name, Housh c laims, referring to the immature, joker ethos that pervaded the collective at th at time. I was staring at my screen, and just thought, God damn it. This is wrong. All this took place before Housh and Brown met. What happened next, though, woul d thrust Brown into the spotlight, where he would eventually find himself in the crosshairs of the federal government. Operation Payback In 2010, WikiLeaks began publishing a cache of hundreds of thousands of leaked u nclassified yet sensitive State Department memos. Rattled, the U.S. government w ent into damage-control mode. It launched a high-stakes media campaign, aiming t o set WikiLeaks apart from traditional media entities (like magazines and newspa pers who published the same material) in order to criminalize its actions. U.S. lawmakers and government-friendly pundits accused the website and its founder, J ulian Assange, of everything from treason (despite his not being an American citiz en) to acting as a high-tech terrorist. Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) used the power of his office to pressure PayPal to freeze WikiLeaks s account, to persuade Amazon to boot the site off its servers, a nd to get Visa and MasterCard to stop processing donations. All this despite Fir st Amendment free-speech protections and though neither WikiLeaks nor anyone assoc iated with the group had been charged with, much less convicted of, a crime. In response, Anonymous began to organize Operation Payback. As with the campaign against the Church of Scientology, Anonymous employed what is called a Low Orbi t Ion Cannon (LOIC). That s a piece of installed software which connects your comp uter to a botnet a network of computers that can be linked to obey instructions fr om one central authority. As Tim Rogers describes it: Until Anonymous came along, botnets were generally assembled by bad guys, organi zations like the Russian mafia, Chinese hackers. They build botnets on the sly, installing malware on computers that turns them into zombies without their owner s knowledge. Each zombie can fire thousands of requests per second at a target we bsite. So while you re working on that cover sheet for your TPS report, your compu ter is part of a joint effort to overwhelm a company s server and crash its websit e. That effort to crash a site is called a Distributed Denial of Service attack, or DDoS. The bad guys use DDoS attacks to extort money, but they can also use t heir botnets to send spam and steal people s identities. In 2009, the antivirus so ftware firm Symantec said it had detected nearly 7 million botnets on the intern et [sic]. Anonymous was the first group to build an operational voluntary botnet. By runni ng the LOIC on your computer, you are, essentially, declaring your allegiance to Anonymous. You donate part of your computer s processing power to the cause. That cause or, if you prefer, the target is determined by rough consensus among Anons. On December 8, 2010, Anonymous s LOIC targeted the websites of MasterCard and Visa , crashing both within minutes. Although it s impossible to pinpoint how many peop le were in on Operation Payback, sources familiar with the attack say the LOIC w as downloaded tens of thousands of times. With the media clamoring for answers, and Gregg Housh s name already in the public domain, he did just short of 40 inter views within two days. Housh had become familiar with Brown earlier in February of 2010, after Brown pu blished a piece on the Huffington Post defending the actions of Anonymous member s against the government of Australia during so-called Operation Titstorm. The Aus

tralian government had been attempting to ban certain forms of Internet pornogra phy and to institute a filtering regime with which all web-hosting and search se rvices would have to comply. In addition to the banned material, a leaked versio n of the proposed blacklist showed sites that had no relation to adult content. Web titans like Yahoo! and Google were against the measure. And Anonymous saw it as threatening to free speech. While clearly supportive of the work of Anonymous, Brown s piece was the most accu rate media account of the group s structure, aims and methods at the time: Ten years ago it would have been infeasible for tens of thousands of individuals with no physical connection or central leadership to conceive, announce, and im plement a massive act of civil disobedience against a significant Western power, crippling a portion of its online infrastructure in the process and to do all o f this in a matter of days, and without anyone involved having to contend with t he tear-gas-and-horseback response with which states have traditionally been in the habit of contending with mass action. But such a thing as this is happening today, and having been done once will almost certainly be done again repeatedly, increasingly, and with potentially significant consequences for the nation-stat e and implications regarding that which will perhaps someday come to replace it. Anonymous current campaign is the second of its kind; the first, in 2008, targete d the Church of Scientology with DDOS attacks, a series of in-the-flesh protests outside Scientology centers worldwide, the theft and dissemination of sensitive documents, and a variety of other steps all coordinated, or not, in a decentral ized fashion that provides for no names, ranks, or central direction. Housh was impressed with Brown s assessment of Anonymous and called him up. Before then, [Brown] wasn t on any of our IRC s, he wasn t hanging out with Anons, he wasn t of us, Housh notes. But still, Barrett Brown got it. Brown was able to take the h eat off Housh, and eventually assumed Housh s position as a media spokesman for Anon ymous. In some ways, I blame myself for [the current position of] Barrett, s. Housh confesse one

The danger was greater still. As namefags, Housh and Brown began feeling the heat now from both sides. Some Anons resented the work they were doing. Housh claims that certain Anons even handed over fake chat logs to the FBI in an effort to pro ve that he in fact ran Anonymous. Arab E-Spring The Arab Spring uprisings of early 2011 gave many of the idealists in Anonymous an opportunity to assert control of the brand and usher in a whole new understan ding of their work. Already namefags, Housh and Brown continued their rise in prom inence as moralfags. Brown was reportedly on the frontlines of Anonymous s work in N orth Africa and the Middle East: taking control of and defacing the websites of oppressive governments, as well as authoring manuals on street fighting and firs t aid. During that initial stuff in Tunisia, the one thing we figured out sitting there talking to Tunisians on the ground was that a lot of the people in the streets d idn t know what they were doing, says Housh. We had the ability to do some quick research and figure out what you re supposed to be doing [such as] wearing thin cotton garments that would tear easily when grabb ed by police, or make for quick first-aid material they would put [the information ] together in PDF s. Barrett was the driving force in making these.

It was that new guiding ethos of doing good exemplified by Anonymous s actions during the Arab Spring that motivated Operation Payback. Anonymous saw financial companie s that were willing to process payments to the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), America s oldes t domestic terrorist organization, but not to a group ostensibly publishing gove rnment material for the public good. In the minds of participating Anons, the decision by Joe Lieberman s office to ext ra-judicially pressure those companies (and for them to comply) was fundamentall y unconstitutional, insofar as donating money to organizations of one s choice is considered free speech an interpretation that still holds in American jurisprudenc e. Following Operation Payback, in January 2011 the FBI issued more than 40 sear ch warrants in a probe of the attacks; these yielded no arrests. But the drama was far from over. Anonymous s stature was rising; it was increasing ly seen as a group that, through its mastery of the Internet, could operate beyo nd the reach of government and Washington s cyber security experts. Stirring The Hornet s Nest It was at this point that the Financial Times published an article quoting Aaron Barr, CEO of a company called HBGary Federal and a private security researcher, i n which he claimed to have identified three top members of Anonymous. When he an nounced plans to out them at an upcoming conference that month, it seemed that Ano nymous had met its match. However, Brown and Housh claimed that HBGary merely had pseudonyms, and that pub licizing them would only result in people with similar names being wrongly targe ted for FBI raids. Regardless, Anonymous sent out a press release (reportedly in conjunction with Brown) that acknowledged its downfall. The press release was cl early written with a sly grin befitting Guy Fawkes s visage and a tongue firmly pl anted in the author s cheek. One day after the FT piece was published, the internal servers and websites of H BGary Federal and its parent company, HBGary, were hacked, defaced, and destroye d. Upwards of 75,000 e-mails were compromised and put up for public scrutiny. On e terabyte of data(1,000 GB) from HBGary s backup servers was wiped, as well as th e contents of its CEO Aaron Barr s iPad, while all of his personal information was put on the Internet. HBGary Federal s website was replaced with a message from th e hackers: Now the Anonymous hand is bitch-slapping you in the face. Later that mo nth, Barr resigned. Although this was an operation taken purely out of revenge against a smug oppone nt, important data emerged from the leaked e-mails, including evidence that a nu mber of corporate actors, identified in the e-mails as Team Themis, were conspirin g to commit a range of crimes.. This cabal involved three cyber security firms HBGary Federal, Palantir Technologi es, and Berico Technologies all of whom are federal contractors for military and i ntelligence work. The e-mails document a coordinated plan to pitch a disinformation campaign against critics of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce a campaign with serious implications fo r the exercise of free speech. The obvious news here was that federal contractors were concocting such unethica l and possibly illegal plans to smear and discredit Americans. But more importan tly, they had been solicited to do so by some of America s most powerful entities who were engaged in an information war against their critics (and, by extension, the public).

The Chamber is the primary DC lobbying arm of America s largest corporate interest s, such as Goldman Sachs, Chevron and Texaco. It lobbies politicians for pro-busi ness trade and industrial policy, and spends more money on a yearly basis than an y other lobbying organization in the country. *** HBGary s chief Aaron Barr may have been vanquished, but since a cursory examinatio n had yielded information as incriminating as the Team Themis conspiracy, who kn ew what else was in there? The HBGary hack made clear that Anonymous needed mind s like Brown s to parse the vast resulting trove. We brought Barrett in after that, H oush recollects. And, according to Housh, Brown then created ProjectPM. While Pr ojectPM had conceptually been around since 2009 as a method of improving problems of information flow in various contexts, it then became what it is now a repositor y for studying the revealing communiques of HBGary and its associates. The hackers and ProjectPM researchers soon hit additional paydirt. They discover ed that the corporate security cowboys were also pitching a plan of disinformati on and sabotage against WikiLeaks, which had publicly claimed it was in possessi on of a similar document cache from Bank of America (BoA). And these revelations hinted at more to come. But because there was no formal mechanism for searching through the HBGary e-mai ls, most of the leaked documents remained unviewed and uncategorized. Brown saw this as the perfect opportunity to continue his work as a journalistic moralfag digg ing deeper into the shadowy world of HBGary and the government s legion of private contractors. It s worth noting that the seemingly reckless security firms weren t just wild-eyed freelancers. They had in each case been recruited by a formidable middle-man. It was the classic cut-out: create deniability for the brand name corporations when the dirty work gets done. In both cases, these three companies were recruited by the law firm and lobbying giant Hunton & Williams (H&W), which counts both the Chamber of Commerce and Ba nk of America among its clientele. H&W also legally represents entities such as Wells Fargo, Altria (formerly Philip Morris), Cingular, and weapons-maker Genera l Dynamics. It lobbies on behalf of Koch Industries, Americans for Affordable Cl imate Policy (a coal industry front group), Gas Processors Association, Entergy (a nuclear power conglomerate), and U.S. Sugar Corp, among others. So Anonymous and Brown were exposing the nefarious, if not clearly illegal, deed s of some of the world s most powerful interests outfits not known to turn the other cheek. It is this kind of challenge that may begin to explain why the full wrat h of the federal government would be turned against the likes of Barrett Brown a nd his phalanx of idealistic hackers. A Private Government In a nation operating under the rule of law, one might presume that exposure of the Team Themis conspiracy would prompt official investigations of some sort, even if the proposed activities were in the planning stages. But the e-mails reveal a different role for the Department of Justice (DOJ). At issue was the cache of documents from Bank of America that WikiLeaks was alle gedly sitting on. BoA was understandably desperate to prevent their release, or at least mitigate the fallout from any revelations they contained. The big bank had a lot at stake: as of 2010, when these events were unfolding, Forbes ranked BoA as the world s third-biggest corporation. It was also one of the Big Four pub licly-insured too big to fail banking monoliths that dominate American finance (an

d politics). As recipients of over $45 billion in the 2009 bank bailout via TARP (the Trouble d Asset Relief Program) and given a federal insurance guarantee for nearly $120 billion, BoA was already facing a PR nightmare. It s unclear what was in the cache of documents obtained by WikiLeaks, but it was enough to rattle BoA s legal depar tment, who approached the Justice Department on what to do next. DOJ, under the supervision of Attorney General Eric Holder, recommended that BoA solicit the services of, you guessed it, Hunton & Williams. The discussions between Team Themis and H&W involved some sordid and possibly il legal pursuits. One proposed method of undermining WikiLeaks was to submit fake d ocuments and then call out the error, seemingly a plan to commit forgery and frau d both felonies under the US code. Similar tactics to destroy WikiLeaks credibility were delineated in a 2008 Pentagon memo, which labeled the whistleblowing websi te an enemy of the state. A ProjectPM researcher,Lauren Pespisa, told WhoWhatWhy in correspondence, Team Th emis was a collection of government intelligence contractors hired by private clie nts to go after WikiLeaks, as well as labor unions who opposed the U.S. Chamber of Commerce using offensive cyberwar techniques. They targeted many journalists an d supporters of Wikileaks in order to discredit the organization, using methods most Americans would find reprehensible, and threatening to individual privacy. Indeed, in an e-mail from Aaron Barr of HBGary Federal to Matthew Steckman of Pa lantir Technologies, Barr makes the case for subverting WikiLeaks and its suppor ters in the liberal media and discusses plans to attack then-Salon columnist Glenn Gre enwald. Other tactics discussed in the e-mails include cyber attacks against the [WikiLea ks] infrastructure to get data on document submitters, noting that it would kill t he project. Thus, the corporate representatives were advocating precisely the beh avior the federal government has been on a crusade to prosecute when others are do ing it. The conspiracy also called for sustained pressure through a media campaign to create concern and doubt amongst moderates, while discouraging whistleblowers by generat ing concern over the security of the infrastructure, and creating exposure stories. Coordinating a propaganda campaign on behalf of clients is what firms like Hunto n & Williams get paid for. But H&W explicitly solicited companies that have the technological means to violate the privacy of their targets, and quite possibly the law. The ability to discredit a journalist, as proposed, presumably hinges in part on blackmail material just the type one can find in a substantive hack. The Team Themis firms solicited by H&W all do sensitive military and intelligenc e contracting work for the government, and in many cases are creations of the go vernment sectors for which they work. Berico Technologies, founded in 2006 by mi litary veterans, lists among its products the Biometric Automated Toolset (BAT), the Army s flagship product for biometrics. Another Palantir Technologies was founded in 2004 with funds from the venture capita l firm, In-Q-Tel, to develop software for fraud detection. In-Q-Tel is a non-pro fit investment firm chartered in 1999 at the request of the CIA director. In-Q-T el s investment is run through In-Q-Tel Interface Center (QIC), an office within t he CIA. Trustees from In-Q-Tel hold executive level positions at companies such as Netscape, Sun Microsystems, Time Warner, Federal Express, ATT Wireless, and N ew Enterprise Associates. Most of its current investments are in the biotechnolo gy and IT/communications industries.

HBGary Federal was the offshoot of HBGary that did direct work for the governmen t. While privately formed by Greg Hoglund in 2003, a computer security specialis t, HBGary was then acquired by ManTech International in early 2012. As one of th e leading software contractors for the Departments of State, Justice, Homeland S ecurity, and Defense, as well as the nation s 16 spy agencies, ManTech Internation al has seen its yearly revenue rise by more than 600% between 2001-2010. ManTech is so embedded with the national security state that its employees are often pl aced inside the military units they support. Flipping the COIN The growth and ambition of the US military over the past decade has required a c ongruent growth in information operations against enemy populations. In this vein, the HBGary e-mails also discuss a project known as Romas/COIN. Renamed Odyssey in 2011, Romas/COIN was a contract originally held by defense giant Northrup Grumm an. The program was a military initiative to mine and store massive amounts of data from all across the Arab world: phone calls, social media interactions, Internet searches, among other data streams. The e-mails discuss collaboration by over a dozen firms all with their own niche skills to displace Northrup and win a re-compet e for the contract. The e-mails even identify household names like Google and App le as collaborators in the scheme. Although the re-compete was eventually cancelled, and replaced with a new contra ct for the program known as Odyssey, there s no reason to suspect the project has be en discontinued. Two days prior to the HBGary hack, on February 3, 2011, key mem bers of the firm consortium met with the contracting officer for Odyssey at a lo cation known as HQ. The trail runs dry after the e-mail hack, which clearly derail ed their potential (or at least HBGary s) to bid on the contract. As history shows us, the employment of technologies in theaters of war always precedes their dom estic importation: from the telegraph and telephone in colonial Philippines to d rones in Pakistan and Yemen. So it should come as no surprise that this type of data mining is hardly novel or confined to a particular government agency. National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower William Binney has gone on record s tating that NSA is actively creating dossiers on every single American citizen. Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, a former officer in the Defense Intelligence Agency (D IA, the Pentagon s spy agency), has noted that when he served in the late-1990s hi s agency was actively utilizing such data-mining technology: What we did then wou ld take a year, you can do that in a minute [or] a matter of seconds now. Digital Puppeteers In an age of online organization and activism, how do governments discourage pri vate citizens from such uses of the Internet? Well, a tyrant can use the mailed fist and just shut off access to it. But the more refined autocrat would simply exploit the medium to create perception of public support for their position. En ter: Project Metal Gear. Metal Gear is the term given by ProjectPM s editors to describe any methodology or apparatus [used] with the intent of manipulating information or perception, conduc ting data mining, or infiltrating social organizations. Crucially, it involves th e ability to deploy fake online personas controlled en masse by a human operator a phalanx of Facebook marionettes to sway public opinion. This tactic of sockpuppeting is hardly new. PR firms are known to routinely employ fake personas to sell products or influence viewers in online forums. But the l atest software developments here are astounding, allowing for a single operator

to control up to fifty online personas (at least in the case of the United State s Air Force s [USAF] contract for the technology). As detailed in this 2007 patent , communications between the persona and its human targets can be regulated by s oftware-based filters that assist in maintaining situational integrity the puppeteer need not even move his fingers! And these initiatives appear to be just the tip of the iceberg. Other evidence p oints to American PR firms using digital sabotage techniques against dissidents from Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, whose U.S.-friendly monarchies happened to be the ir clients. Through ProjectPM, Brown was starting to map out the web of links and business a rrangements among all these private cybersecurity contractors, not to mention th e non-stop revolving door for key personnel between firms and the government for which they contract. But all that spadework ended when FBI agents stormed his r esidence on September 12, 2012. The Mission, Not The Man Perhaps the greatest irony in this case is the charge against Barrett Brown for c oncealing evidence. As his saga demonstrates, his real crime seems to have been r evealing evidence. Brown has been a point man in the ongoing effort to inform the American people a bout the consequences of the massive growth in the intelligence and military-ind ustrial complexes since 9/11 and of the secret government at the heart of our weak ened democracy. Brown comprehended that the few avenues available to ordinary citizens for holdi ng state actors accountable can be easily circumvented through a kind of decepti ve privatization. He understood the importance of highlighting the inherently co rrupt relationship between the state and the corporation. This included non-stat e entities handling dirty official business on a deniable basis, and the state ser ving as an enforcement arm for big capital. With much ado in recent days about Chinese cyber espionage, the government is us ing this new Yellow Peril as an opportunity to mount a full court press against th e ability of any group to maneuver on the Internet in ways that might threaten c orporate and state interests. The White House just announced a new administratio n-wide strategy to identify and prevent the theft of trade secrets, labeling Wik iLeaks, LulzSec, and associated hacktivist groups as dangerous in this regard. Disgruntled insiders [may leak] information about corporate trade secrets or crit ical U.S. technology to hacktivist groups, the document warns. The language is inst ructive; it makes no distinction between groups that may be receiving such leake d information to sell to the highest bidder and groups that want to release the information to the American people in order to blow the whistle on insider waste, fraud, abuse, or illegality. Brown, and those close to him, also understand what the government was truly aft er when they stumbled into his life in March of 2012. The charges against Brown for harassing a government official, obstructing justice and concealing evidence may seem unrelated to his journalistic work, but the initial search warrant iss ued for his home on March 6, 2012, cast an ominously wide net. The entities liste d [there] are all things ProjectPM was looking into, Gallagher confirms. ProjectPM is [now] mostly defunct without [him]. Citing the extraordinary charges and the zeal with which the feds are operating, Brown s supporters have set up a website to collect donations and fund a proper l egal defense for him. With Brown in custody, much of his work has stalled. [Proje

ctPM] was Barrett s baby, Lauren Pespisa laments. Although other websites such as T elecomix Blue Cabinet Wiki are attempting to pick up and expand on ProjectPM s work , that IRC has been suffering massive DDoS [attacks] and is very quiet. I fear Pr ojectPM may have been something special, I haven t seen anything replace it yet. At our publication deadline, ProjectPM s site was down for unknown reasons