Anonops #5: Anonymous en de MO-revoluties

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Bank of America has broken silence about news reports and Internet discussions circulating all week connecting BofA to these presentation slides outlining "proactive tactics" to neutralize WikiLeaks and silence its leader, Julian Assange.

"We've never seen the presentation, never evaluated it, and have no interest in it," BofA spokesman Scott Silvestri told Technology Live late Thursday.

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Asked specifically about the slide deck, BofA spokesman Silvestri said: "Neither Bank of America, nor any of its vendors, have engaged HBGary Federal in this matter. We have not engaged in, nor do we have any plans to, the practices discussed in recent press reports involving HBGary Federal."

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LOOK HOW THEY ARE TRYING TO INVOLVED US IN THINGS THAT WE DIDNT DO

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incorrectlogin said...
If they were anonymous they are anonymous...no? If we are all anonymous then it is "us". No? Or you know who they actually are and therefore they are not anonymous?
7 February 2011 18:55

Anonymous said...
Why single out the Guardian. This story is on over a hundred newssites, including BBC, msnbc, cnet et cetera.

Also, who are "us" and for that matter who are u and htf you know that Anonymous didn't do it. U know all Anonymous?
Get a clue.
7 February 2011 19:12

Anonymous said...
who his this "we" you are talking about ?
7 February 2011 19:13

Anonymous said...
as Tonto said: "what do you mean WE white man?"
7 February 2011 19:49

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TheLibertyLamp RT @AnonymousRx: WOW, bad day for the web, I cant seem to access http://www.leader.ir/ #OpIran #Anonops #Anonymous

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No server is available to handle this request.

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The cyber world has grown out of control. State and national law enforcement mechanisms are not equipped to deal with the rapidly evolving threat. The complexity of information systems has far exceeded the ability to secure them, while reliance on these systems has only increased. HBGary has an intimate understanding of this problem; We know that understanding the attacker and his methods is the only way to defeat him. This is the core strength of HBGary and why our technology and services outperform the competition. To us, it's personal.

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Please visit HBGary at Booth #556 at the RSA Conference 2011 February 14th - 18th, 2011. HBGary CEO Greg Hoglund will be presenting at the show on Wednesday, February 16th and Friday, February 18th.

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Earlier this morning, The Tech Herald reported that Palantir Technologies severed all ties with HBGary Federal and issued an apology to reporter Glenn Greenwald. Now, Berico Technologies, the second data intelligence firm who was linked to a systematic plan of attack against WikiLeaks, has cut ties with HBGary as well.

After the tip from Crowdleaks.org, The Tech Herald learned that Palantir Technologies, HBGary Federal, and Berico Technologies, worked together with law firm Hunton and Williams to develop a proposal for Bank of America in order to deal with the “WikiLeaks Threat.”

[Original article and all updates are here.]

Hunton and Williams would act as outside counsel on retainer, while Palantir would take care of network and insider threat investigations. For their part, Berico Technologies and HBGary Federal would analyze WikiLeaks.

Some of the things mentioned as potential proactive tactics against WikiLeaks include feeding the fuel between the feuding groups, disinformation, creating messages around actions to sabotage or discredit the opposing organization, and submitting fake documents to WikiLeaks and then calling out the error.

Moreover, reporter Glenn Greenwald, who writes for Salon.com, was singled out in the proposal as a person offering a level of support to WikiLeaks that needed to be disrupted. This disruption would include making Greenwald, and others in similar situations, choose between professional preservation and cause.

On Thursday evening, Dr. Alex Karp, the Co-Founder and CEO of Palantir Technologies, The Tech Herald a statement on the events and information presented in our original story.

“As the Co-Founder and CEO of Palantir Technologies, I have directed the company to sever any and all contacts with HB Gary…I have made clear in no uncertain terms that Palantir Technologies will not be involved in such activities. Moreover, we as a company, and I as an individual, always have been deeply involved in supporting progressive values and causes. We plan to continue these efforts in the future,” the statement starts.

“The right to free speech and the right to privacy are critical to a flourishing democracy. From its inception, Palantir Technologies has supported these ideals and demonstrated a commitment to building software that protects privacy and civil liberties. Furthermore, personally and on behalf of the entire company, I want to publicly apologize to progressive organizations in general, and Mr. Greenwald in particular, for any involvement that we may have had in these matters.”

This afternoon, Berico Technologies’ Guy Filippelli, the CEO, and Nick Hallam, the COO, issued a similar statement.

“Our leadership does not condone or support any effort that proactively targets American firms, organizations or individuals. We find such actions reprehensible and are deeply committed to partnering with the best companies in our industry that share our core values. Therefore, we have discontinued all ties with HBGary Federal. We are conducting a thorough internal investigation to better understand the details of how this situation unfolded and we will take the appropriate actions within our company,” the statement reads.

“Late last year, we were asked to develop a proposal to support a law firm. Our corporate understanding was that Berico would support the firm’s efforts on behalf of American companies to help them analyze potential internal information security and public relations challenges. Consistent with industry standards for this type of work, we proposed analyzing publicly available information and identifying patterns and data flows relevant to our client’s information needs. Any subsequent discussions or proposals that attempted to extend the initial scope of work run counter to our organization’s values.”

The plot to target WikiLeaks’ organization and supporters came to light after Anonymous attacked HBGary and their affiliate HBGary Federal. The reason for the attack centers on HBGary Federal’s CEO, Aaron Barr, who went to the press claiming to have infiltrated the loosely associative group. Anonymous’ response to his claims was to hack the company and release thousands of emails to the public.

It is within these leaked emails that the plot against WikiLeaks unfolded. However, shortly after our story on WikiLeaks broke, the same three data intelligence firms were linked to a completely separate plot.

This time, the three were named in a story broken by Think Progress that said the U.S. Chamber of Commerce went to them looking for help. They wanted the three to “undermine their political opponents, including ThinkProgress, with a surreptitious sabotage campaign.”

The original Think Progress story is here. A follow-up, including plans to target families and children is here. Some of the relevant emails, which were all leaked by Anonymous, can be seen here.

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Hi
Am I the only one freaking over the fact that "genuine stuxnet copy" was in the e-mails? Man, this fallout is getting more and more serious.

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OnlyONE2TREE RT @C0d3Fr0sty: LOIC TARGET: http://www.elmouradia.dz/ (Algerian presidents website) DOWN!!! #Algeria #OpAlgeria #Feb12 #Anonymous 4 minutes ago via Seesmic Desktop

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Want to search the database? search.hbgary.anonleaks.ru
Protip: search for WikiLeaks, Anonymous, FBI, NASA, Stuxnet, etc.

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http://www.thetechherald.(...)a-war-with-Anonymous

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Sean-Paul, who has been following the attacks since they started, received two statements from Anonymous outlining a public awareness campaign and listing a series of reform proposals, which the collective claims it will negotiate, as long as communication is two-way.

“So from now on, WE set the scale. We come up with demands, feasible demands, about copyright, censorship and government influences. We present them the choice. And when they decide to ignore us still, we will fuck stuff up. We have been holding back on them too long. But no more of that. We switched IRC servers too often. But no more of that. They have taken down our websites too many times. But no more of that. If they want to get personal, they can GET it. So stop messing around.”

On the following pages are the full statements received from Anonymous. It remains to be seen if the reform proposals will gain the traction that is expected, but you can certainly see that some of the ideas make sense.

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The "hacktivist" group Anonymous claims to have access to the sophisticated computer virus reportedly developed as a joint Israeli-US cyber attack against Iran's nuclear facilities.

Anonymous says it has obtained details of the Stuxnet worm from the emails of HBGary, a US security company the loose hacker collective attacked earlier this month.

It is not yet clear whether Anonymous plans to deploy the computer virus, but last week the group signalled an intention to attack Iranian government websites in support of a planned green movement rally in Tehran.

However, security experts told the Guardian on Monday that even though Anonymous does have access to parts of Stuxnet, it does not control the crucial code enabling it to attack Iran's Bushehr nuclear plant – an attack Russia's Nato ambassador said could potentially trigger a "new Chernobyl".

Orla Cox, a security operations manager at Symantec, the cyber security firm that has been researching Stuxnet since its discovery, said it was "very difficult to tell" how dangerous Anonymous's copy of Stuxnet is.

"It would be possible [for Anonymous to use Stuxnet in an attack]," Cox said. "But it would require a lot of work, it's certainly not trivial.

"The impressive thing about Stuxnet is the knowledge its creators had about their target. So even if you have got access to it you need to understand the target – that requires a lot of research."

Iran admitted its controversial nuclear programme had been delayed by Stuxnet last year, with reports later claiming that the worm was a joint US-Israeli project intent on knocking Tehran's nuclear ambitions off course. No group has yet claimed responsibility for building Stuxnet. Experts told the Guardian last year that Stuxnet would have taken five to 10 people around six months to create and required large amounts of funding.

Computer viruses are largely uncharted territory for Anonymous, which has built its notoriety on crippling the websites of governments and multinational corporations, such as Visa and MasterCard, which it deems a threat to freedom of speech.

Late last month the Metropolitan police arrested and then released five people on bail, including three teenagers, it suspected of being involved in December attacks in support of WikiLeaks.

Snorre Fagerland, a senior threat researcher at the Norwegian internet security firm Norman, said it would be "very difficult" for Anonymous to use its version of Stuxnet in an attack. The hacker collective has obtained a "decompiled" version of the virus, rather than the critical source code which would enable an attack.

"The trouble with this [version of Stuxnet] is that you lose almost all context to its abilities," Fagerland said. "The original source code would contain all the text information about why it's built this way – that's gold if you want to use it. If you decompile it you lose all of that."

A new Symantec report released on Friday shows that Stuxnet was built to repeatedly infect five key industrial facilities in Iran over a 10-month period.

The worm, reportedly tested at Israel's nuclear development centre at Dimona, worked by sending Iran's centrifuges spinning out of control, while making it appear that everything was working as normal.

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HBGary CEO Also Suggested Tracking, Intimidating WikiLeaks’ Donors

]WikiLeaks and its inner circle of supporters may not have been the only targets of a group of security firms that offered to take on the secret-spilling site on behalf of Bank of America. In an email conversation, the head of one of those firms also suggested going after the thousands of individuals who have donated to the group.

Last week the loose hacker group Anonymous released a set of more than 40,000 emails from HBGary Federal, the security firm whose servers it hacked earlier this month. One of the files in those emails was a PowerPoint presentation that described “the WikiLeaks Threat,” created by a group of three security firms that suggested Nixonesque tactics for sabotaging the site on behalf of Bank of America, including spreading misinformation, launching cyberattacks against the site, and pressuring journalists.

Over the weekend, the loose hacker group Anonymous published another 27,000 emails from HBGary Federal’s sister company HBGary, and also created a search engine for those documents on its WikiLeaks-like site, Anonleaks.ru.

A quick search of the company’s WikiLeaks-related conversations shows that Aaron Barr, the HBGary chief executive who first caught the attention of Anonymous by boasting that he’d penetrated the group and identified its leaders, also suggested other tactics against WikiLeaks that weren’t included in that PowerPoint: namely, tracking and intimidating anyone who had given money to WikiLeaks. The security firms “need to get people to understand that if they support the organization we will come after them,” he wrote in an email. “Transaction records are easily identifiable.”

WikiLeaks has had its funding sources limited since December, when PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard all stopped accepting payments to the group. The site still solicits donations, however, via mail and bank transfer. Though governments could likely subpoena banks or wire transfer companies for information about those transactions, it’s not clear how HBGary Federal’s Barr planned to intercept that information.

The emails also show that it was Barr who suggested pressuring Salon.com journalist Glenn Greenwald, though Palantir, another firm working with HBGary Federal, quickly accepted that suggestion and added it to the PowerPoint presentation that the group was assembling.

HBGary Federal, Palantir, and a third security firm, Berico Technologies, were recruited by the law firm Hunton & Williams to prepare a proposal for Bank of America, which is rumored to be the subject of an upcoming megaleak of sensitive documents from WikiLeaks. The firms also did work on behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to research its critics that would help to “discredit” and “shame” them.

Palantir and Berico have both said in statements that they’ve cut ties with HBGary Federal and wouldn’t participate in the strong-arm tactics represented in the leaked emails. The hacked firm itself has argued on its website that the posted documents were “falsified.” The company didn’t respond to a request for comment Monday.

In a statement on the filesharing site the Pirate Bay, a representative of Anonymous responded that “Anonymous has falsified nothing; we leaked your inboxes in full with no edits. In fact, most of your emails contain S/MIME digital signatures, proving that they’re real.”

The leaked emails also reveal several comments from Barr about his attitude toward WikiLeaks and Anonymous. “O [sic] believed in what wikileaks did when they released the helicopter video. I now believe they are a menace,” he writes in one message to a HBGary colleague.

“Its all about power.” he adds in another email. “The Wikileaks and Anonymous guys think they are doing the people justice by without much investigation or education exposing information or targeting organizations? BS. Its about trying to take power from others and give it to themeselves. I follow one law. Mine.”

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Palantir, in particular, has been quite aggressive about trying to distance itself. They initially issued a strong statement denouncing the plots, then had their CEO call me vowing to investigate and terminate any employees who were involved, then issued another statement over the weekend claiming that "Palantir never has and never will condone the sort of activities that HBGary recommended" and "Palantir did not participate in the development of the recommendations that Palantir and others find offensive." Such vehemence is unsurprising: the Palo-Alto-based firm relies for its recruitment efforts on maintaining a carefully cultivated image as a progressive company devoted to civil liberties, privacy and Internet freedom -- all of which would be obviously sullied by involvement in such a scheme.

But as Salon's Justin Elliott reports, there are newly emerged facts which directly contradict Palantir's denials. On Sunday night, Anonymous released an additional 25,000 emails from HBGary, and Forbes' Andy Greenberg was the first to make this discovery:

The emails also show that it was Barr who suggested pressuring Salon.com journalist Glenn Greenwald, though Palantir, another firm working with HBGary Federal, quickly accepted that suggestion and added it to the PowerPoint presentation that the group was assembling.

Greenberg is referring to this series of emails, first from HBGary's Barr -- addressed to Palantir's Matthew Steckman and Eli Bingham along with Berico's Sam Kremin (click image to enlarge):

This was the reply from Palantir's Steckman to that email:

Roughly 15 minutes later, Steckman sent another email to Barr: "Updated with Strengths/Weaknesses and a spotlight on Glenn Greenwald...thanks Aaron!" -- indicating he had included the slide featuring this scheme. So much for Palantir's insistence that they "did not participate in the development of the recommendations." As Elliott noted, "Steckman's role in creating the slideshow -- which, it should be noted, also carries Palantir's logo -- would seem to contradict the company's" denials.

Last night, both Elliott and I sent emails to Palantir's General Counsel asking the company to reconcile this obvious contradiction. In response, they issued a statement announcing that they "have decided to place Matthew Steckman, 26 year old engineer, on leave pending a thorough review of his actions." They added that Palantir "was not retained by any party to develop such recommendations and indeed it would be contrary to Palantir’s ethics, culture and policies to do so" (Elliott has posted Palantir's full statement).

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NEW YORK - Bewegingen voor democratie en vrijheid in Iran en andere landen in het Midden-Oosten kunnen rekenen op morele en technologische ondersteuning van de Verenigde Staten.

Die boodschap hebben president Barack Obama en minister van Buitenlandse Zaken Hillary Clinton ondubbelzinnig laten klinken in Washington.

Harde hand
Obama keerde zich dinsdag tegen het Iraanse regime en andere heersers die demonstraties met harde hand neerslaan. Zonder instemming en deelname van het volk is regeren niet langer mogelijk, waarschuwde de Amerikaanse president tijdens een persconferentie. 'Zeker in deze nieuwe tijd, nu mensen direct kunnen communiceren. Ze kunnen een telefoon of twitteraccount gebruiken om honderdduizenden mensen te mobiliseren.'

Opstandelingen in Tunesië, Egypte en andere landen in de regio hebben Twitter, Facebook en YouTube gebruikt om te communiceren met elkaar en de buitenwereld, en om protesten te organiseren. De bedreigde autocratische regimes reageerden door het gebruik van internet in te perken, zoals in Egypte gebeurde.

Sociale media toegankelijk
De Amerikanen zullen er alles aan doen om de sociale media toegankelijk te houden voor dissidenten en activisten, zei minister Clinton dinsdag tijdens een toespraak over internetvrijheid. Een 'alomvattende innovatieve aanpak' zal 'diplomatie koppelen aan technologie, veilige distributienetwerken, en directe steun voor hen aan de frontlijnen'. De freedom to connect (de vrijheid om verbindingen te maken) geldt evengoed op straat als op het internet, betoogde zij. 'De VS steunen deze vrijheid voor mensen overal.'

Buitenlandse Zaken twittert sinds kort in het Arabisch en Perzisch. 'Wij willen aan jullie conversaties deelnemen', zo luidde een recente tweet. In een ander bericht riepen de VS Iran op om mensen dezelfde universele rechten als in Caïro te geven.

Maandag prees Clinton de moed van het Iraanse volk, nadat in dat land protesten waren uitgebroken. Tegelijkertijd hekelde zij de hypocrisie van de machthebbers in Teheran. Die spraken steun uit voor de opstand in Egypte. Volgens Clinton illustreren zij hun ware aard door demonstraties in eigen land neer te slaan.

Ommekeer
De eenduidige boodschap van Clinton en Obama markeert een ommekeer. Tijdens de opstand in Egypte liet de Amerikaanse regering verschillende geluiden horen. De impuls van Obama's jonge garde van adviseurs was om de vrijheidsstrijd te ondersteunen. Het ministerie van Clinton - de 'oude' gevestigde orde op internationaal gebied - leek meerdere malen op de rem te staan door 'stabiliteit' en een lager tempo van verandering te bepleiten.

Uit reconstructies in de Amerikaanse media bleek de afgelopen dagen dat er inderdaad een intern conflict broeide, wat leidde tot kritiek en verwarring onder activisten. 'Het gebrek aan een heldere boodschap illustreerde opnieuw hoe diep verdeeld Obama's buitenlandploeg nog steeds is', aldus The New York Times.

Twijfel
Vrijdag trachtte president Obama de twijfel weg te nemen. Hij prees het vertrek van Mubarak en het succes van de pro-democratiebeweging. Sindsdien zijn hoge afgezanten naar bevriende landen in het Midden-Oosten gezonden om een vinger aan de pols te houden.

De vraag is niet of het internet 'een kracht voor bevrijding of voor onderdrukking' is, zei Clinton over internetvrijheid. 'Het gaat om de principes waar we ons door laten leiden.'

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There are other tensions in the State Department’s agenda: It champions the free flow of information, except when it is in secret departmental cables made public by WikiLeaks; it wants to help Chinese citizens circumvent their government’s Internet firewall, but is leery of one of the most popular services for doing so, which is sponsored by Falun Gong, a religious group outlawed by Beijing as an evil cult.

Mrs. Clinton tried to reconcile one of those tensions. She described the WikiLeaks disclosures as “an act of theft” of sensitive government documents whose publication made it far harder, she said, for the United States to protect its security or promote human rights and democracy around the world. “WikiLeaks does not challenge our commitment to Internet freedom,” she said.

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And Facebook does not want to alter its firm policy requiring users to sign up with their real identities. The company says this requirement protects its users from fraud. However, human rights advocates like Susannah Vila, the director of content and outreach for Movements.org, which provides resources for digital activists, say it could put some people at risk from governments looking to ferret out dissent.

“People are going to be using this platform for political mobilization, which only underscores the importance of ensuring their safety,” she said.

Under those rules, Facebook shut down one of the most popular Egyptian Facebook protest pages in November because Wael Ghonim, a Google executive who emerged as a symbol of the revolt, had used a pseudonym to create a profile as one of the administrators of the page, a violation of Facebook’s terms of service.

With Egypt’s emergency law in place limiting freedom of speech, Mr. Ghonim might have put himself and the other organizers at risk if they were discovered at that time. Activists scrambled to find another administrator to get the page back up and running. And when Egyptian government authorities did figure out Mr. Ghonim’s role with the Facebook page that helped promote the Jan. 25 protest in Tahrir Square, he was imprisoned for 12 days.

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Over the last week, I've talked to some of those who participated in the HBGary hack to learn in detail how they penetrated HBGary's defenses and gave the company such a stunning black eye—and what the HBGary example means for the rest of us mere mortals who use the Internet.

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The tendency to relate past events to what is possible in the present becomes more difficult as the scope of the geopolitical environment changes. It is a useful thing, then, to ask every once in a while if the environment has recently undergone any particular severe changes, thereby expanding our options for the future.

Terminology, let alone our means of exchanging information, has changed to such a degree that many essential discussions in today's "communications age" would be entirely incomprehensible to many two decades ago.

As the social, political and technological environment has developed, some have already begun to explore new options, seizing new chances for digital activism - and more will soon join in. It is time for the rest of the world to understand why.

Service denied

When a release by WikiLeaks revealed the depravity of just how corrupt and horrid the Tunisian government really was, it prompted Tunisians to step up active dissent and take to the streets en masse for the first time.

In response, a loose network of participants within the international Anonymous protest organisation attacked non-essential government websites - those not providing direct services to Tunisians - at the prompting of our contacts.

Several such sites were replaced with a message of support to the Tunisian people, while others were pushed offline via distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, involving thousands of computer users who request large amounts of data from a website simultaneously, overwhelming it.

Other assistance programmes followed, even after the deposed Ben Ali fled the nation that reviled him, with Anonymous and other parties working with Tunisians - both in-country and abroad - to provide the nation's people with the tools and information resources they needed to begin building up new, reasonable political institutions capable of ensuring a freer civic life.

Our "Guide to Protecting the Tunisian Revolution" series - a collaboration between hundreds of veterans of traditional revolutionary movements as well as practitioners of "new activism" - were disseminated both online and in print; aside from tips on safety during confrontation and the like, these also explain how to establish secure yet accessible networks and communications for Tunisians, as well as instructions on establishing neighbourhood syndicates capable of uniting in common cause.

Already, such organisations are being established across Tunisia, just as they will be established elsewhere as the movement proceeds.

The seeds of cyber revolution

Anonymous is a means by which people across the globe can assist in the hard work being performed by the Tunisian people - who have long taken issue with their government, but first began protesting in earnest after a fruit vendor set himself ablaze in response to police cruelty.

The Anonymous movement itself grew out of message boards frequented mostly by young people with an interest in internet culture in general - and Japanese media in particular; in 2005, participants began "attacking" internet venues as a sort of sport, and in the process honed their skills in a way that proved useful in "information warfare".

In 2007, some users proposed that the Church of Scientology be exposed for its unethical and sometimes violent conduct, sparking a coordinated global protest movement that differed from anything else seen, and which still continues today.

The Australian government was later attacked for introducing new internet censorship laws, and in the meantime, those within Anonymous who see the subculture as a potential force for justice have launched other efforts while also building new strategies and recruiting individuals from across the globe - some of whom hold significant positions in media, industry, and the sciences.

For great justice

In the meantime, there are obstacles to overcome. Those within the Tunisian government who seek to deny liberty to "their" people are easy enough to deal with; the greatest threat to revolution comes not from any state but rather from those who decry such revolutions without understanding them.

In this case, the idea that a loose network of people with shared values and varying skill sets can provide substantial help to a population abroad is seen as quixotic - or even unseemly - by many of those who have failed to understand the past ten years, as well as those whose first instinct is to attack a popular revolt rather than to assist it.

Elsewhere, a number of US pundits decided to criticise the revolution as possibly destabilising the region; many of whom once demanded the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan - and greeted every Arab revolt as the work of President Bush - but now see nothing for themselves in the cause of Arab liberty.

Some have even portrayed the movement as the work of radical Islamists - yet most cannot find Tunisia on a map.

Suffice to say that the results of our efforts are already on display and will become more evident as Tunisians use our tools and resources to achieve their greatest triumph. Those who wish to assist and are competent to do so can find us easily enough; the Tunisians had little trouble in doing so.

Although we have made great progress in convincing individuals from across the world to join our efforts in Tunisia, other campaigns, such as those taking place in Algeria and Egypt - both of which have seen government websites taken down and/or replaced by Anonymous, more must be done before the movement takes the next step towards a worldwide network capable of perpetual engagement against those who are comfortable with tyranny.

The revolution will be broadcast

Whatever effort is required, such a goal is not only possible, but rather unambitious.

There is a reason, after all, that those of us who have seen the movement up close have dedicated our lives to what it stands for, and have even violated the modern Western taboo of believing in something.

I have been involved with Anonymous in some capacity or another for about six years.

Looking back at my writing over that time, I have found that my predictions, while always enthusiastic, nonetheless turned out to have been conservative; when Australia became the first state to come under attack by this remarkable force, I proposed that we would someday see such allegedly inevitable institutions begin to crumble in the face of their growing irrelevance.

Someday turned out to be this year.

Today, I predict that Anonymous and entities like it will become far more significant over the next few years than is expected by most of our similarly irrelevant pundits - and this will, no doubt, turn out to be just as much of an understatement as anything else that has been written on the subject.

The fact is that the technological infrastructure that allows these movements has been in place for well under a decade - but phenomena such as WikiLeaks and Anonymous have already appeared, expanded, and even become players within the geopolitical environment; others have come about since.

This is the future, whether one approves or not, and the failure on the part of governments and media alike to understand, and contend with the rapid change now afoot, ought to remind everyone concerned why it is that this movement is necessary in the first place.

The author identifies as part of Anonymous, a loose collective of internet hacktivists which uses the technological infrastructure on which the globalised world depends to maintain a vigilante presence online.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

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Just as HBGary was plotting to attack WikiLeaks, it was on the way to getting Defense Department security clearance

It's well known at this point that HBGary Federal was one of several technology firms recently exposed for scheming to attack WikiLeaks, Salon's Glenn Greenwald, and critics of the Chamber of Commerce. What has gotten less attention is just how much business HBGary Federal and its partner company, HBGary, do with the United States government.

Internal HBGary Federal emails reviewed by Salon show that the firm was on its way to getting security clearance at the Department of Defense late last month. HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr has bragged that the firm provides "specialized threat intelligence, incident response, and information operations capabilities to the IC [Intelligence Community], DoD, and Federal agencies." The exact nature of the services provided by HBGary Federal -- and what intelligence agencies might be involved -- is not clear.

(The plotting against WikiLeaks and Chamber of Commerce critics, by the way, was performed by HBGary Federal at the behest of Hunton and Williams, a law firm that has worked for the Chamber and Bank of America, which is reportedly a future target of WikiLeaks. This work was apparently separate from the HBGary Federal's government work.)

HBGary proper, which is based in California, is known as a provider of malware detection services. HBGary Federal, which shares offices with HBGary and 15 percent of which is owned by HBGary executives, was touted as offering "best-in-class malware analysis and incident response products and expert classified services to the Department of Defense, Intelligence Community and other U.S. government agencies," according to one November 2009 email. Another internal email describes HBGary Federal as a wholly owned subsidiary of HBGary.

HBGary itself has won $3.3 million in federal government work since 2004, contracting records show. That includes contracts for services like "protection vulnerability assessment" with the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the FBI, and the Department of Interior.

Having proper clearance is key to winning federal security contracts. So it's not surprising that the bio of HBGary Federal's chief operating officer, Ted Vera, notes that he holds "security clearances with the DoD and Intelligence Community." Barr, for his part, came to HBGary Federal after stints as a Navy cryptologist and a cybersecurity official at Northrop Grummans, the defense contracting giant. A former CEO of HBGary Federal, Jamie Butler, who left the firm in 2006, held a security clearance at the "top secret" level.

On Jan. 27 -- when the plotting against WikiLeaks had already been underway for a few months -- HBGary Federal was granted what's known as "facility clearance" at the Defense Department. That's a precursor to getting specific classified access once a contract has been granted. (See the approval document, approved by the Defense Security Service, here.) DSS spokeswoman Cindy McGovern told Salon today that HBGary Federal is still in the process of getting its clearance. She had no comment on the fact that HBGary is implicated in the WikiLeaks scandal.

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February 16, 2011, 09:39 AM —

Benjamin Spock de Vries would like the world to know he is not a cyber terrorist.

But if you read some of the 40,000+ emails that were stolen from HBGary Federal by Anonymous and posted on Pirate Bay, you might think otherwise.

It seems Aaron Barr -- the CEO of HBGary Federal who thought he’d make a big splash by outing the leadership of Anonymous and instead ended up getting ridden hard and put away wet by the very hackers he sought to expose -- decided de Vries is in fact the mysterious Commander X, alleged puppetmaster of the Anonymous collective. So he said as much in some of the thousands of private email conversations the Anons just shared with the world.

[ See also: That new Facebook friend might just be a spy ]

This did not make de Vries happy.

“I am not Anonymous,” de Vries told me during an agitated phone conversation last night. “I have never logged onto any Anonymous sites. I don’t use IRC. I couldn’t hack my way out of a paper bag.”

In fact, de Vries says he hadn’t even heard of the whole HBGary-Anonymous mishegas until Barr contacted him on February 5 via his Facebook alter ego, Julian Goodspeak (yes, really), and begged de Vries to please call off the DDOS attack on HBGary’s servers.

What attack? de Vries asked.

What followed was a weirdly elliptical conversation in which Barr chatted with the person he thought was Commander X while de Vries thought they were talking about something else entirely.

The reason Barr thought De Vries was the elusive X? Because de Vries is the founder and admin of a Facebook Group called Global Strike 2011, which appears to be popular with the Anons. That, or many of its members are just particularly enamored of Guy Fawkes masks and wicked cool handles like Anarcho Femmina and Anonomous AnonopsEsp (then again, who isn’t?).

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Thank you commander X. If
Thank you commander X. If anything, anon is responsible only for bringing this to my attention and making the evidence I need available to me. Mr. Barr has said "I wasn't going to tell anybody". Only PROVES that he is a habitual liar as well as all the other expletives that have been pointed in his direction this week. http://hbgary.anonleaks.ru/greg_hbgary_com/25982.html And yes, I fully intend to take the most aggressive legal action possible. I suppose my next step is to concoct some story about Aaron's paedophilia and operation of a child prostitution ring in DC and report that to the FBI. If he can do it and get away with it, so can I. I jest.
by Ben de Vries (not verified) on 2/16/11 at 6:17 pm | reply | Email this page | Printer-friendly version

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AMSTERDAM - De VS zijn medeverantwoordelijk voor het gemak waarmee landen als Egypte het internetverkeer kunnen afknijpen. Daarom heeft president Obama boter op zijn hoofd als hij de wereld een vrij internet belooft, vindt hoogleraar Computerveiligheid Bart Jacobs van de Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen. Als hij zijn eigen burgers niet wilde afluisteren en controleren, zou dat voor dictatoriale regimes ook een stuk moeilijker zijn.'Het goede nieuws is: ja, de Verenigde Staten kunnen het internet in het Midden-Oosten vrijer maken', zegt Jacobs. 'Maar dan moeten de Verenigde Staten wel bij zichzelf beginnen.' Dat is het slechte nieuws: Amerika is medeverantwoordelijk voor het gemak waarmee repressieve regimes hun burgers kunnen afluisteren en controleren via internet.

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It’s all very amusing, with this one tiny caveat. It’s apparent that Federal authorities in the US are entirely clueless about some basics about the operation of the internet and internet-based groups. The grand jury request for information in the current investigations of Anonymous is downright bizarre, including a reference to the “internet activist group 4chan” (yes, snarky, offensive image board as “activist group”), information on the “identification and locations of person(s) using or controlling or disseminating denial of service software” (um, your first port of call is Google, folks, because that’s the easiest way to find a version of LOIC), and the most remarkable demand of all, “any and all records, documents, and materials that relate to interactions between any computers of those who were raided and those who are untouchable.”

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Perhaps everybody around the globe who uses the Internet ought to email the FBI
with the subject “I am Anonymous”.

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Also, a major protest is planned for April 7th, on the steps of The City Hall with speakers from Anonymous, executive director of National Lawyers Guild, Gregg Housh, Barry Eisler, Glenn Greenwald, Barret Brown and other... special guests. Don't miss it!