Slashdot Mirror
Secret Plan To Kill Wikileaks With FUD Leaked
An anonymous reader writes "Three information security consultancies with links to US spy agencies cooked up a dirty tricks campaign late last year to destroy Wikileaks by exploiting its perceived weaknesses, reads a presentation released by the whistleblowers' (pdf) organization that it claimed to be from the conspirators. Consultants at US defense contractors Palantir Technologies, Berico Technologies and HBGary proposed to lawyers for a desperate Bank of America an alliance that would work to discredit the whistleblowers' website using a divide and conquer approach. Since the plan was hatched, disgruntled volunteers mentioned in the PDF broke away from Wikileaks, financial institutions withdrew services, [Jacob ] Appelbaum was harassed by the US government, and Amazon denied service to Wikileaks' website."
Of course the motivation for infiltrating Anonymous was profit as Arron Barr said in an e-mail:
Step 1 : Gather all the data
Step 2 : ???
Step 3 : Profit
Sort of an amusing story and very easy to see where Mr. Barr made the error of becoming part of this event (demonstration or debacle depending on your views) and seeking media attention. Pretty clear he was in over his head and doing his own thing thinking he was dealing with three individuals who were two bit morons. It almost deserves the cheesy "hunters have become the hunted" movie tag line. Well, the soft hack of HBGary Federal appears to be providing more than enough material for this to be a focus of media attention, congratulations are in order for Mr. Barr and let's all wish him the best of luck with step three. He's gonna need it!
My work here is dung.
Oh so this was a secret plan was it?
Was it commissioned by the ministry for the bloody obvious?
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
Mahatma Gandhi
Looks like were at part 3 now.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
It would appear that a variety of groups, representing a de-facto merger of state and corporate power, are allied to destroy you.
On a scale from "1" to "highly ironic" how would you describe this confirmation of your assertion that the "representative" goverments actually pend a lot of time doing dirty deeds in the shadows?
Palantir Technologies? Really?
Was "Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall Inc" already taken?
http://www.thetechherald.com/article.php/201106/6798/Data-intelligence-firms-proposed-a-systematic-attack-against-WikiLeaks
Can't say I'm surprised but the tactics and manipulation they discuss but I find it outrageous all the same.
However, the fact that they felt the need to present such a teach-yourself-how-to-destroy-wikileaks-in-21-days presentation in such a dumb manner is somewhat encouraging.
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
The sudden appearance of rape charges, schisms and turmoil within the organization, etc. were pretty obviously concerted efforts to discredit the organization and Assange. Didn't take a genius to see it all coming after his big leaks started, or to know who was behind it. I knew a discrediting campaign was coming down back before Assange even met his "rape victims" or faced a schism.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
If this document is genuine, this company "Palantir" has suggested and supports activities that are not only criminal in Europa but also in the US. We're talking about libel and slander, "cyber-terrorist" attacks on foreign it business and infrastructure (servers hosted in Sweden, France), and so on.
I don't know whether the document itself gives enough grounds for a lawsuits, probably not, but if these guys do anything of what they suggest or even aid in it, and it can be traced back to them, I feel a lawsuit coming in 3...2...1...
By the way, how are the investigations of the DoS attacks against Wikileaks server going? Any news on that?
Talk about a role-reversal...the discreditors become the discredited. Alas, this is a great blow to the future of the Wikileaks conversation. Now all critics legitimate and otherwise can be lumped together as part of a coordinated effort against Wikileaks. It's now easier than ever to accuse someone who demands more self-scrutiny from WL and its supporters as a "shill" or "operative". And this time we have these 3 companies to blame.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
His programmer had doubts, saying that the scraping and linking work he was doing was of limited value and had no commercial prospects. As he wrote in an e-mail:
I'm a big tall mofo.
The plan was pitched to Bank of America on the 3rd. Amazon and EveryDNS already had withdrawn services so I think it's a stretch to try to insinuate that Paypal doing the same on the 4th is somehow related to a proposal submitted to a separate financial institution on the 3rd. It's also not entirely surprising that people pointed out to be weak links and ready to leave Wikileaks turned out to be weak leaks and decided to leave Wikileaks. This sounds like a case of some defense companies ever looking to scrape up some profits pointing out the blindingly obvious and now when a couple of the obvious things happen on their own people trying to attribute it to a successful implementation of said plot.
It's always nice to have a good conspiracy - but chronology is a bitch. Even before the plan was hatched, Paypal has canceled Wikileaks accounts twice, disgruntled volunteers were gruntling very publicly, Wikileaks had to change providers several times and Julian Assange reported harrassment from every government he had to deal with.
I'll say it again.
If US intelligence agencies and their actions, security, political connections and control of information are *REALLY* this bad, the US has a much bigger problem than a website.
If this is how a genuine intelligence agency acts and gets caught doing so by the equivalent of a back-bedroom UFO hunter, then the first ever *real* cyberwar will see them wiped off the planet.
The UK, in the middle of a war, infiltrated by spies, managed to capture, analyse, decrypt, monitor and intercept German communications for YEARS, to the extent that they could literally direct the enemy to move their defences to cover false "threats" while watching them do that. And most of exactly what happened took 50+ years to come out and we still don't know *all* of it.
The US, in peacetime (so no major distractions, counter-incentive, etc.), can't stop their own soldiers putting documents into the public domain, with HUGE fanfare, then "rubber-stamp" those documents as official by "hunting down" a civilian not really related to the leak, when the guy handed himself into a police station in an allied country and told the newspapers about it. If the US "anti-cyber-warfare" campaign is anywhere near as ineffective, you better hope nobody tech-savvy *bothers* to go to war with the US.
"Consultants at US defense contractors Palantir Technologies, Berico Technologies and HBGary proposed to lawyers for a desperate Bank of America an alliance that would work to discredit the whistleblowers' website using a divide and conquer approach."
I had to read this sentence several times before it made any sense. The first few times it sounded like the defense contractor consultants asked some lawyers to marry them in order to obtain the Bank of America, who was inexplicably desperate -- all of which would discredit Wikileaks.
I think what was attempting to be conveyed was the following:
"Consultants at US defense contractors Palantir Technologies, Berico Technologies and HBGary proposed an alliance with a desperate Bank of America which would work to discredit the whistleblowers' website using a divide and conquer approach."
Proverbs 21:19
Wait a minute. Isn't Wikileaks reporting a leaked report that there was a conspiracy against them a little bit like saying God exists, because the Bible says so?
It's hardly surprising that there is a market for plans in how to manipulate public perception. There's a whole industry that exists specifically for this. People who find themselves in that industry have to set aside their conscience to do the job and put food on the table. They rationalize it as a game or a competition or just business. Some are probably reading slashdot right now.
It's the sad nature of civilization that we are a huge crowd of people just trying to put one foot in front of the other. It's hard to imagine that our small push forward on the person in front of us is really contributing to the squeeze that is crushing people to death somewhere else in the crowd.
Don't forget that they made Julian Assange a pompous douchebag by drugging his food. A side effect, perhaps intended, is the paranoia that makes him think he'll be imprisoned at Guantanamo. They also slipped a defective condom into his wallet so they could trump up rape charges.