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."

You misunderstood.

[bigtallmofo]

You're right that Aaron Barr was hoping to profit from this, but he didn't write the quote you attributed to him. His coder wrote that, making fun of him because he thought of no way to profit from the dumb information that Aaron was making his coder collect. What is written before the quote you provided is:

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:

December 3rd?

[kevinNCSU]

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 Amazon and EveryDNS already had withdrawn services so I think it's a stretch to try to insinuate that Paypal doing the same on the 4th is somehow related to a proposal submitted to a separate financial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.

Spurious relationship - chronology

[tmk]

Since the plan was hatched, disgruntled volunteers mentioned in the PDF broke away from Wikileaks, financial institutions withdrew services, Apelbaum was harassed by the US Government and Amazon denied service to Wikileaks' website."

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.

Word salad

[wcrowe]

"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."

Re:Secret Plan?

[Anonymous Coward]

"...someone posted that the events in Egypt weren't getting covered [in Cuba]."

O Rly?
Granma [granma.cu] seems [granma.cu] to [granma.cu] be [granma.cu] covering [granma.cu] Egypt fairly extensively. Mind you, Granma's only the official state newspaper - it's not like it has any official status or anything...

Re:Pfft.

[will_die]

Summary is just bad. The 3 companies have/had contracts with the Department of Defense but they were tring to get business with the Bank of America.
This was not something done by the DoD or any US intelligence agency.
Frankly it would be hard to find many business that do not do some type of business with the US government, the DoD or some intelligence agency. Looking at just one of the companies it looks like it was setup as a 8(a)(female or minority owned) so can smaller contracts or small portions of larger contracts.

Re:Dear Wikileaks,

[thehostiles]

I doubt the major issue is that it's different than you were told as a child. It's that a vast majority of the citizens in the country _still_ believe actively that "their party" will represent them because that's what they're consistantly told.

George Carlin put it well enough:

"You don't need a formal conspiracy when interests converge. The owners of this country went to the same universities and fraternities, there on the same boards of directors, they belong to the same country clubs, they have like interests, they don't need to call a meeting because they know what is good for them...and they are getting it. There used to be seven oil companies, there are now three...it will soon be two. The things that matter in this country have been reduced in choice, there are two political parties, there are a handful insurance companies, there are six or seven information centers...but if you want a bagel there are 23 flavors because you have the illusion of choice. You don't get the real important choices, you have no freedom of choice."
- George Carlin on Politically Incorrect

Re:Dear Wikileaks,

[jbengt]

Using tactics that are most likely illegal in the US is not a legitmate thing to do in the US, regardless of the target. Now if Congress were to issue a declaration of war on Wikileaks, that might make it legitimate, although still not right, since Wikileaks has not really broken any US laws.