Secret Plan To Kill Wikileaks With FUD Leaked 246
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."
Possibly from the HBGary Federal Hack? (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Gandhi (Score:5, Insightful)
“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.
Dear Wikileaks, (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Dear Wikileaks, (Score:5, Insightful)
I apologize if this doesn't fit with the Boy Scouts' Patriotic History of America; but the US has been accumulating dubiously-accountable spook shops like its a hobby at least since the cold war, if not earlier.
Re:For further information (Score:5, Insightful)
Didn't take a genius to know (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [slashdot.org] a discrediting campaign was coming down back before Assange even met his "rape victims" or faced a schism.
Sales Pitch... (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh boy, that PDF is nothing more than a sales pitch written by someone who probably believes the hype of "cyber-warfare" as portrayed in movies, and is trying to excite some clueless bank executives into getting involved in the action as portrayed.
It does sound exciting with talk of "global networks, movement between countries", although in reality such movement would just be scp -r /var/www/wikileaks user@server-in-foreign-country:/var/www/.
Of course, as a sales presentation it's well done, I could imagine the bank executive getting excited that he could initiate a "cyber-hunt" to kill the organization.
Just because disgruntled volunteers broke away... (Score:3, Insightful)
Does not mean they were following some sinister plan.
Julian Assange has already proven he is hard to get along with and has his own agenda which may not prove compatible
with other people who want a wikileaks without Assange's anti-us agenda.
Re:Gandhi (Score:5, Insightful)
At its root, though, Gandhi's fight was a fight over ideas (Indian sovereignty and all that that encompasses vs. British imperialism). He also was not the only leader of the Indian revolution, there were others and not always with fully-compatible goals in mind (which, in some cases, eventually led to the creations of Burma and Pakistan). So his quote may be more on the mark regarding Anonymous and Wikileaks vs. the established powers than you might be giving credit for.
Damn that sucks for those guys (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Sales Pitch... (Score:4, Insightful)
that PDF is nothing more than a sales pitch written for someone who probably believes the hype of "cyber-warfare" as portrayed in movies
FTFY
Re:Dear Wikileaks, (Score:3, Insightful)
And if Congress passed a law saying "You can't do that" and the President signed it, they would have to stop. The money they use for black ops comes from Congress. They could probably self fund for a little while using dirty tricks, but without Congressional backing they'd be in the same boat as the rest of the government. That won't happen though, becasue Congress, like the majority of people they represent, believe that having our own little secret "dirty tricks" division is a worthwhile risk. There's noting unrepresentative about the CIA. Their mandate and funding came from and continue to come from our representatives. Most of whom are doing exactly what the majority of their constituents would want in continuing that mandate and funding.
The fact that you don't think those types of organizations should exist, or be as secretive as they are, is immaterial to the general question of representative democracy. I often disagree with what the government does. So I try to vote different people into office. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but in all cases the guy in Congress represents the majority of people in his district's choice. Everything he does will almost certainly *not* represent the views and priorities of any one particular individual in his district.
Pfft. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Secret Plan? (Score:5, Insightful)
unlike journalism in the US and well known US propaganda, wikileaks actually validates information before they put it up.
Sympathy for the Devil (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Dear Wikileaks, (Score:1, Insightful)
So I try to vote different people into office. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't [...]
Maybe it would work more often if you knew exactly what is going on?
If you're OK with a system where the government can act behind your back, that's your right. But please don't call that system a Democracy.
If you don't know what I mean by that, I'll explain:
Secrets can be used to control how people vote. Even when secrets are not used that way on purpose, people will still vote in a way that won't have the consequences they expect because they don't see all the pieces of the puzzle (some are kept secret). In effect, secrecy bypasses the purpose of Democracy and we're left with only the illusion of Democracy.
Also, you'll find that most supporters of Wikileaks and critics of government secrecy are OK with a bit of secrecy. The real problem is how secrecy is abused: things are kept secret longer than necessary or things that don't need/should not be kept secret are kept secret. And in some cases the need for secrecy is the own fault of the secret holder.
Re:Secret Plan? (Score:5, Insightful)
Credibility with who? College Sophomore, standing at a lit table in the Student Center? Certainly!
Anybody else? Possibly.
Credibility with major newspapers across the world, who (re)publish content from wikileaks, and their readership.
Re:Secret Plan? (Score:5, Insightful)
Obvious to some perhaps, but an absurd conspiracy theory to others. However, these documents provide hard evidence of mafia-like activities by corporations.
The documents are the definitive proof that private companies engage in the shadiest and most scurrilous of activities in an effort to further their own goals. It is the definitive proof that even in our age, private interests abuse their privileges and powers. The proof that a corporate underworld exists, that it attacks and abuses citizens, and that the law does not protect us from it.
Our society is based on several things, among them free speech and the rule of law. If private companies actively undermine these principles in the ways that this document proves, then why should we tolerate their continued state of existence?
There are those who say that we should not tolerate communists or islamists because they actively seek to undermine our way of life. I wonder where those people are right now?
Re:Trusting (Dis?)information about disinformation (Score:4, Insightful)
So these Evil Consultants are running a propaganda campaign about Wikileaks, and Anonymous leaks their "secret plans", including the plan to try to sell a disinformation plan to BofA... But can we trust all the incriminating pages in the leaked secret plans? Could Anonymous have planted a bit of extra content in the leaked material? Could the Evil Consultants themselves planted bogus material in the leak, and leaked it to Anonymous themselves?
I would like to subscribe to your news letter, but only if it dramatically goes, "Dunt dunt DUUUUNNNT!", and tells me what happened in previous episodes when I open it.
Re:Secret Plan? (Score:4, Insightful)
wikileaks has been around for years. They were pretty roundly ignored up until they allegedly got the windfall from Manning.
They were ignored by the US public.
Wikileaks was releasing information about other countries for years before Manning's datadump.
"I didn't hear about it, so it never happened" is a poor way to make a point.