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Wikileaks and Anonymous Join Forces Against US Intelligence Community
pigrabbitbear writes "The most recent bombshell of confidential documents dropped by infamous watchdog organization Wikileaks is already looking to have an enormous impact on our understanding of government security practices. Specifically, intimate details on the long-suspected fact that the U.S. has been paying a whole lot of money to have private corporations spy on citizens, activists and other groups and individuals on their ever-expanding, McCarthy-style naughty list. But perhaps more importantly, the docs demonstrate something very interesting about the nature of U.S. government intelligence: They haven't really got much of it."
I don't know about you, but I trust them more than our politicians - truthfully. Says enough.
I used to think of doctors as nearly infallible. Then I graduated college and realized that they, and every other human being on this planet, are just human beings. It amazes me that anything we, as a society, builds actually works. The problem with someone believing there are all these agencies out to get them is that they credit your fellow human beings too much. These agencies are not nearly as organized or capable as we give them credit for. You want to know how Rlatko Mladic, the Serbian war criminal, was caught? Some woman in the CIA asked one of his former associates, "so uh, you don't happen to know where he is, do you? I know your child is ill, and I could help get them into the States for medical treatment." That's not particularly high-tech, nor does it take much coordination, discipline, or creativity.
Wikileaks doesn't go after any targets. People leak stuff which wikileaks then publishes. If they haven't published anything sensitive enough for you, then that means that people haven't leaked that information to them, not that they "go after soft targets".
You, sir, are correct. That is why the US has "classified by aggregation" status for documents. The individual documents would not be classified individually, but when you combine them with others they end up becoming classified.
The three companies that made up 'Team Themis', the team planned to help Bank of America respond to a never-completed wikileaks dump of BoA data, by character-assassinating journalists and 'activists', were all govt contractors.
Berico Technologies - owned by ex-military, run by ex-military, major customer = us government.
Palantir Technologies - makes software to help aggregate data about people, us govt contractor
HB Gary - this is the one that Anonymous hacked and dumped the data on. they were a us govt contractor, and they routinely spied on all kinds of groups.
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does that prove that the govt is paying companies to spy on citizens? no. its just that dozens of companies whose main purpose and expertise is to spy on people, and who are staffed by people who spent their entire military career spying on people, just so happen to be receiving billions and billions of dollars from the government to do various jobs that we are not allowed to know about, because of 'national security'.
now, then, of course, there is the long relationship between the US govt and private companies, and spying, going back to World War I, and then later on the ITT corporation, Western Union, and so forth. Then there was AT&T in more recent years, as well as the major phone network companies, who agreed to cooperate with NSA without caring about the law, except for QWest.
then there are the 'fusion centers'. should i go on?