Uncle Sam's hackers: A new theory of the death of Michael Hastings

(Yes, this is a long and discursive post. Bear with me. At the end, I'm going to introduce a new theory of the death of Michael Hastings.)
 
Barack Obama falsely called Ed Snowden a "hacker," even though Snowden's whistleblowing has nothing to do with hacking. If our beloved President really wants to meet a hacker, he should visit CIA headquarters. Policymic has the story:

In a detailed account on Foreign Policy, the Central intelligence Agency, in concert with the National Security Agency, has been demonstrated to conduct what is referred to as "black bag" operations, or the manual hacking of a target's computer by uploading spyware onto anything ranging from personal laptops to large-scale servers. When a specific target is out of the NSA's reach, it calls on the CIA to do, in its own parlance, a "surreptitious entry."

In such an operation, a crack CIA team breaks into the place of interest and does one of the following, depending on the situation: install spy-ware, bug phones, hack data switching centers, and copy backup files and disks. It is a procedure often used when hacking remotely is not possible.

Having already conducted over 100 such operations, it is a rate that, according to Matthew Aid, has not been seen since the Cold War. And the targets are not as narrow as one might think; in addition to foreign governments and militaries, multinational corporations and individuals with terrorist ties have been hacked as well.

Uploading spyware? Hm. I'm thinking Stuxnet and Flame. Remember those two ultra-fun pieces of malware? They may be on your computer right now. Or how about Magenta, a new-generation malware brought into this world by HBGary?

At any rate, I think the CIA's hacking capabilities go way beyond the sort of stuff indicated in the article referenced above. By the time you finish reading this post, you may agree.

In short and in sum: I think that Michael Hastings may have been killed because he had discovered a network of hackers lurking within the American intelligence community.

As noted in an earlier post, Hastings was looking into a mysterious spooked-up company called Endgame. The same company was also on the radar of Hastings' friend Barrett Brown, an expert in the realm of hacking. Brown was tossed into the pokey on charges that, to my nostrils, reek of bullshit.

Endgame is run by one Nathaniel Fick, a former Marine whose story formed the basis for the HBO series Generation Kill. My earlier piece on Endgame quoted from an excellent article by Patrick Maguire.

Brown began looking into Endgame Systems, an information security firm that seemed particularly concerned about staying in the shadows. “Please let HBGary know we don’t ever want to see our name in a press release,” one leaked e-mail read. One of its products, available for a $2.5 million annual subscription, gave customers access to “zero-day exploits”—security vulnerabilities unknown to software companies—for computer systems all over the world. Business Week published a story on Endgame in 2011, reporting that “Endgame executives will bring up maps of airports, parliament buildings, and corporate offices. The executives then create a list of the computers running inside the facilities, including what software the computers run, and a menu of attacks that could work against those particular systems.” For Brown, this raised the question of whether Endgame was selling these exploits to foreign actors and whether they would be used against computer systems in the United States. Shortly thereafter, the hammer came down.

HBGary? Oh-ho. Why was Endgame in communication with HBGary?

In case you've forgotten, HBGary is yet another mysterious cyber company. Nowadays, it's run by a "former" CIA guy.

In fact, it's fair to say that HBGary is spookier than the Winchester Mystery House. The company is now owned by ManTech, an intel-linked firm with ties to MZM. Remember MZM? It was run by Mitchell Wade, who made a plea bargain arrangement in 2006 after he was caught bribing congressman Duke Cunningham. I had Wade pegged as a spook early on.

ManTech employs Amit Yoran, the former Director of National Cyber Security (part of Homeland Security); he also ran In-Q-Tel, the CIA's investment firm. The Yoran connection should give you a pretty clear idea of just what kind of company we're dealing with.

Not long ago, HBGary was run by Aaron Barr. Remember him? He was the target of the Anonymous hackers collective.

Odd thing about Aaron: The Breitbart crowd always loved the guy. For more on the HBGary/Breitbart connection, see here.

The Breitbart bloggers also despise Barrett Brown.

The Economic Policy Journal has published an interesting piece on Hastings, Endgame, and HBGary. I want to fixate on one interesting detail in that article.

Just before he died, Hastings offered this tweet:

@ronbryn @BarrettBrownLOL working on it. there was an election, and still a few wars going on. but get ready for your mind to be blown.
— Michael Hastings (@mmhastings) January 24, 2013

The tag "ronbryn" refers to former Raw Story editor Ron Brynaert, who used to contribute the occasional friendly comment to this very blog. He was a very good journalist. Then he got involved with the Anthony Weiner story and...

Well. How to put it? He kind of went off the deep end -- as did a number of other people.

Long after the rest of the world stopped caring about Anthony Weiner and his famous peepee, a small group of right-wingers and left-wingers remained fixated on certain unsolved aspects of that scandal. We've talked about this group in previous posts. The die-hard "Weinergaters" engaged in a very weird twilight war, forever accusing each other of hacking and identity theft and impersonation and sockpuppetry and worse sins. They often claimed that the FBI was going to arrest their enemies any day now -- on God-only-knows what charge.

Ron Brynaert took part in that twilight war. He was deep into the Weinergate subculture -- and yes, I think "subculture" is the appropriate word. Brynaert seemed convinced that one could find a much more important story lurking just below the surface of the (ultimately rather silly) Weinergate scandal.

This earlier Cannonfire post tells the long, strange tale of my own unhappy interactions with Ron Brynaert. Those interactions occurred months after Weiner left office. Here are a couple of samples from that earlier piece:

But a couple of weeks ago, I had my own unsettling run-in with this Ron Brynaert character, who fancies himself to be the expert on Weinergate. He also loves to make wild, paranoid claims about everyone who ever had more than ten words to say about the matter. Brynaert has gone beyond left and right; he's off the map and zooming through the fourth dimension.

Brynaert's obvious psychological pain helped me to keep my composure. I politely told him that I couldn't really follow what he was going on about, but that he might do better if he stepped back and took some time off. The message was simple: "Time to chill, dude." Sweartagod, that was all.

That was enough.

Ron Brynaert became convinced that I was part of the Great Conspiracy Against Ron Brynaert. This, despite the fact that he originally wrote me; I had wanted nothing to do with the guy or with any of the "twilight warriors." According to Brynaert, other members of the Great Conspiracy Against Ron include the Breitbart crew, Neal Rauhauser, blogger Brad Friedman, Brett Kimberlin, maybe Glinda the Good Witch -- and, oh, hell, just everyone.

Brynaert sent me an email warning that "You're definitely going to be contacted by NYPD detectives and lawyers." Needless to say, I have not heard from anyone connected with law enforcement or the legal profession.

Naturally, I walked away from this odd email exchange convinced that Ron Brynaert was something of a...well, "kook" is such a strong word, so let's not use it. But you take my point.

And yet. And yet...

Months later, Michael Hastings had latched onto what he claimed was the big story of his career. It seems to have involved Endgame and HBGary. And who were his ultimate confidantes? Barrett Brown and Ron Brynaert.

Frankly, I was surprised to learn that a heavy hitter like Hastings took Brynaert seriously.

And now I'm thinking: Maybe Brynaert was really on to something. True, the guy had acted pretty wacky during our email exchange -- but once upon a time, he had been a good writer. The Breitbarters seemed to consider him a genuine threat. Maybe he had retained enough of his old journalistic skills to dredge up something truly important.

But if so, what did he find?

At this point, I can only engage in surmise. As I've said on many previous occasions, I don't mind the occasional bit of speculation, as long as it comes clearly labeled as such. And now that I've posted that label where everyone can see it, let me jot down a few scattered thoughts -- thoughts which may congeal into a full-fledged theory:

1. I presume that Brynaert is still completely obsessed with Weinergate and all of its ramifications.

2. Although the right scoffs at my quaint belief that Weiner's Twitter and Facebook accounts really were hacked (yes, I still hold to that theory, for reasons we can get to in another post), the "twilight warriors" all lived in Hackerland. That is to say: They seemed to know a lot about the subject, and they were forever accusing each other of being "black hat" hackers. Some of you may recall that Mike Stack (one of the guys who went after Weiner) bragged that he was an expert "cyber detective" who had the ability to "find out anything about anyone." Moreover, he said that he was working with other experts -- and with unnamed tech firms.

3. The Breitbart-related bloggers who went after Weiner so zealously -- and who created a sockpuppet army to whip up hysteria all across blogland -- were also staunch defenders of Aaron Barr and HBGary. I never understood why HBGary mattered to those guys so much. They also hate-hate-hate Barrett Brown.

4. HBGary and Endgame worked together. Both firms are strongly linked to the intelligence community. These companies know a thing or two about sockpuppetry.

5. Ed Snowden has repeatedly said it is easier than you might think for lower-level NSA guys to access private emails, chats and other data -- even if the target is a politician. Russ Tice (another NSA whistleblower) has said that, back in 2004, he did that kind of cyber-spying on an up-and-comer named Barack Obama.

6. To repeat a point made in previous Cannonfire posts: If Snowden is right, the NSA now has the ability to gather blackmail information on the very congressfolk who supposedly oversee the intel community.

Hm. Yes. A theory does indeed begin to congeal.

Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?

Here are a few more clues. Then I'll spell it all out.

We know that Breitbart got the Anthony Weiner "dick photos" long before the scandal broke. We know that Breitbart's accomplices only pretended to be shocked when one of those photos showed up in Weiner's Twitterstream, which broadcast the image to the world. (And yes, Weiner did know how the system worked; he had never made such a mistake before.) And we know that, as part of the "Get Weiner" project, there was a very sophisticated deception operation directed against Tommy Christopher of Mediaite. I refer, of course, to the ultra-bizarre "Betty and Veronica" affair. That elaborate imposture is one of the main reasons why I continue to believe that Weiner really was hacked.

Now let's put it all together. Again: What I'm about to say is speculative. But what if....what if...

What if someone at the NSA got Weiner's passwords? What if this same "someone" found out about the guy's naughty online activities?

(After Tice revealed what he revealed, the notion doesn't seem as outlandish as it once might have.)

And what if that same NSA guy gave the incriminating data to Breitbart (or to folks around Breitbart) in order to set a sting into motion?

What if Barrett Brown, Ron Brynaert and Michael Hastings got wind of what really happened to Anthony Weiner? (In this context, you may want to scan the comment from Starroute here.)

Only one of those three men had credibility: Barrett Brown is in jail, and Ron Brynaert is -- well, he's Ron Brynaert. But Hastings was dangerous. He had a killer resume, he wrote well, and he looked good on teevee.

What if that same unknown NSA guy knew how easy it is to take over the controls of a modern car?

Maybe the person who got the goods on Weiner was not precisely an "NSA guy." HBGary does contract work for NSA. And HBGary keeps showing up in this story.

Am I saying that this is all about Weiner? No. If I'm right, then Weinergate was simply a proof-of-concept operation. I am suggesting that ideologues working within the intelligence community have come up with a new way to control the American government.

I am convinced that every human being -- and certainly every politician -- has a secret weakness. The intelligence community has developed new ways of discovering those secrets. Once the dirt is found, the intelligence community (in order to maintain deniability) must work through cut-outs in order to make the secrets public. That's where the right-wing's "alternative" media infrastructure comes into play.

HBGary: Now run by a "former" CIA guy

The HBGary/Anonymous scandal -- a bizarre tale of cyberspying and counterspying -- became public early last year. Remember? HBGary, a tony computer security company run by a guy named Aaron Barr, used underhanded means to gather info on left-wing critics of the Chamber of Commerce. In response, hackers from Anonymous broke into the firm's systems, filched a whole bunch of emails and unleashed unholy hell. The company has since been sold -- to a very interesting firm, as we shall see.

Although that brouhaha broke out two Februarys ago, the past (as they say) is never truly past. In recent days, a number of stories have refocused attention on the great HBGary cyber-intrusion -- which, though not the world's most important hack, was certainly the wittiest. One could only smile at the spectacle of a high-priced computer security firm being invaded, undermined and kicked into the corner by a gaggle of goofball anarchists.

You simply must read this excerpt from Parmy Olsen's new book on Anonymous. Even if you're a technophobe, you'll be hooked.

Lately, the Breitbarters have been writing about the affair, always defending the honor and integrity of HBGary's Aaron Barr. In the conservative blogosphere, these defenses tend to intertwine with diatribes against Evil Brett Kimberlin, the right-wing bogeyman du jour. Why have the two topics have become conflated in the right-wing mind? I dunno. Read this and this; maybe you can explain it to me.

This much is certain: Olsen's version of events establishes that "security guru" Barr was hacked and hacked easily. Yet HBGary charges a very hefty fee for their services.

If you go to the HBGary website now, you'll see their malware-fighting products but not their prices. When I first visited the place in 2011, prices were posted -- and they were steep. (Five figures, if I recall correctly.) At the time, I asked myself: "What's the difference between HBGary's expensive security suite and the free stuff you get from a vendor like AVG or Avira? How good can anti-malware really be?"

And now here comes the punchline....

HBGary uses AVG !

Yes it's true I've been ploughing through some of the released emails and that's what they use. Make what you will of that, but i'm more than surprised, to say the least

Hmmm.

Theoretically speaking -- just theoretically, mind you -- is it possible for a company to repackage already-extant computer security software and sell it to corporate/government clients for oodles of cash? There are well-heeled people out there who simply don't feel comfortable purchasing anything unless they've paid top dollar.

And while you ponder that, ponder this...

Personas non grata. The right claims that HBGary was viciously maltreated by Anonymous, the famous/infamous hacker collective. Yet HBGary itself was (is?) in the business of malware and hacking -- and they targeted the left. In February of 2011, I posted an article on the company's dirty dealings which offered some juicy quotes (from here):

Indeed, malware hacking appears to be a key service sold by HBGary Federal. Describing a “spear phishing” strategy (an illegal form of hacking), Barr advised his colleague Greg Hoglund that “We should have a capability to do this to our adversaries.” In another e-mail chain, HBGary Federal executives discuss using a fake “patriotic video of our soldiers overseas” to induce military officials to open malicious data extraction viruses. In September, HBGary Federal executives again contemplate their success of a dummy “evite” e-mail used to maliciously hack target computers.

Nothing Anonymous has ever done (that we know of) rises to that level of malevolence.

HBGary wanted two million bucks a month to spy on the enemies of the Chamber of Commerce. One of the targets was Brad Friedman, who responded thus:

In addition to Barr's email offering personal information on me and my family, the H&W scheme by Team Themis, created for the U.S. Chamber, also included a Power Point presentation in which I am personally highlighted, with photograph, along with my wife "Martha" and "2 boys, James and John Friedman" at our "home at 1055 Raywood Ln, Silver Springs, MD".

Of course, I'm not married and have no children and don't live in MD...

As noted in a previous post, no-one named Brad Friedman lives at that address -- in fact, the address doesn't exist. As I said last year: "Looks like HBGary just made shit up. Then they said: 'Two million dollars, please.' Nice work if you can get it!"

More ominously, they also mounted a dirty tricks campaign against Glenn Greenwald.

Even more ominous is this tidbit from Wikipedia:

HBGary had made numerous threats of cyber-attacks against Wikileaks. The dossier of recently exposed emails revealed HBGary Inc. was working on the development of a new type of Windows rootkit, code named Magenta, that would be "undetectable" and "almost impossible to remove."

In October 2010, Greg Hoglund proposed to Barr creating "a large set of unlicensed Windows 7 themes for video games and movies appropriate for middle east & asia" (sic) which "would contain back doors" as part of an ongoing campaign to attack support for Wikileaks.

For more on Magenta, go here and here. Let's not minimize the dangers: The Stuxnet scandal -- about which we may soon have much to say -- tells us that malware attacks have a bad habit of getting out of hand.

(Side note: A theme can contain malware? News to me! I was under the impression that a theme is little more than a jpg image for your desktop and a few icons.)

Perhaps the most important revelation to come out of the HBGary scandal concerned the creation of "personas" to flood blogs with manufactured opinion. One manipulator in one location can create the appearance of a mass movement.

Revealed: Air Force ordered software to manage army of fake virtual people

Though many questions remain about how the military would apply such technology, the reasonable fear should be perfectly clear. "Persona management software" can be used to manipulate public opinion on key information, such as news reports. An unlimited number of virtual "people" could be marshaled by only a few real individuals, empowering them to create the illusion of consensus.

I remain convinced that Obama got into office via a similar tactic.

A year ago, HBGary unconvincingly tried to deny the importance of these revelations. Today, the right-wing bloggers still pooh-pooh the significance of the Air Force contract, since it was never fulfilled. Rest easy, folks: The AF didn't actually do it -- they simply tried to do it. I'm reminded of that episode of The Simpsons in which Sideshow Bob decries the unfairness of being jailed for attempted murder: "Do they give Nobel Prizes for attempted chemistry?"

Some of you may be wondering why the Air Force would want to manipulate public opinion in this way. There's a long tradition, going back to the '50s, of the Air Force functioning as a cut-out for the CIA -- which is barred by statute from operating domestically. On the other hand, see here.

ManTech and the spook connection. Barr is out, and HBGary has been purchased by a firm called ManTech. We have mentioned this company in connection with the Cunningham bribery scandal, and in connection with a now-forgotten scandal involving an Arizona congressman named Rick Renzi. Basically, ManTech provides technical services to the government, to law enforcement, and to the intelligence community.

How does the disgraced former congressman Duke Cunningham figure into this? He wrote a remarkable letter from prison in which he admitted that he particularly regretted taking money from a spooky guy named Mitchell Wade. (Remember him?) Wade had a very close relationship with a defense contractor named Gray Hawk Systems, which pretty much is ManTech.

Congressman Renzi got into trouble when he pushed legislation favorable to Man Tech, the employer of the congressman's father.

At about the same time ManTech purchased HBGary, the company made an interesting hire...

ManTech International Corp. has hired Dean May, Ph.D., as vice president of intelligence solutions for its Mission, Cyber and Intelligence Solutions (MCIS) group.

He spent most of his career in CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology, leading research and development efforts across directorates in an effort to enhance our nation’s intelligence capabilities.

In other words, May is sorta like "Q" in the James Bond movies. There are those who say that one never really leaves the Agency...

Lo and behold, we find that HBGary is now under the aegis of MCIS. Now pay attention, 007: This means that CIA guy Dean May runs HBGary. Yes, "Q" now controls the very same HBGary which masterminded attacks on left-wing writers, and which is now staunchly defended by the Breitbart crew.

And so we are left with two conundrums...

Conundrum 1: With ManTech running HBGary, do you think that they're no longer spying on progs or using "personas" to manipulate opinion? Do you think that Magenta is non-operational?

Conundrum 2: Just what is the link between last year's HBGary scandal and this year's ginned-up Kimberlin affair? Why do the Breitbarters conflate the two? What the hell is going on there? 

(Bonus conundrum: Why would a high-priced security firm like HBGary rely on AVG, a free antivirus system?)

Endgame: The death of Michael Hastings

A couple of posts down, I showed you video of a DARPA expert explaining one way to engineer an automotive accident like that which took the life of journalist Michael Hastings. Beyond that, I've avoided writing anything about him that might carry that familiar conspiratorial reek, since all of those recent NSA pieces have probably left many of you feeling reeked out.

But now...

Well, let's just say that things have happened, and I don't see how we can avoid this mysterious morass any longer. So once more into the reek, dear friends...

From Business Insider:

About 15 hours before dying in a fiery car crash at about 4:30 a.m. in L.A. on June 17, journalist Michael Hastings sent an email to several colleagues that said the FBI was investigating him and he was "onto a big story."

The subject line of the email, obtained by Los Angeles news station KTLA, was "FBI investigation, re: NSA."

Here's the full text:

Hey [words blurred out] — the Feds are interviewing my "close friends and associates." Perhaps if the authorities arrive "BuzzFeed GQ", er HQ, may be wise to immediately request legal counsel before any conversations or interviews about our news-gathering practices or related journalism issues.

Also: I'm onto a big story, and need to go off the [radar] for a bit.

All the best, and hope to see you all soon.

Staff Sgt. Joseph Biggs, who met Hastings when he was embedded in Biggs' unit in Afghanistan, described the email as "very panicked."

"It alarmed me very much," Biggs told KTLA. "I just said it doesn’t seem like him. I don’t know, I just had this gut feeling and it just really bothered me."

It's not clear what "big story" Hastings was referring to in his email, but he reportedly had been talking to his boss, BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith, about a story on Barrett Brown.

Brown, a journalist affiliated with the amorphous hacker collective Anonymous, was arrested for threatening an FBI officer and sharing a link to stolen credit card information taken from Stratfor. The 31-year-old, who faces up to 100 years in prison, is in jail awaiting a September trial.

The LA Times notes that Hastings was also researching a story about a privacy lawsuit brought by Florida socialite Jill Kelley against the Defense Department and the FBI.

And the subject line mentions the NSA, which has been in the news all month.

That gives us three possibilities (Brown, the NSA and Kelley), although the three may not be mutually exclusive.

It occurs to me that Hastings is precisely the kind of journalist that Ed Snowden might have contacted. Hastings and Greenwald may not have been as close as peas in a pod, but they were certainly peas of adjacent pods. We should note that Greenwald has written in defense of Barrett Brown.

The "Young Turks" segment above shows Hastings expressing his concerns about the surveillance state. At the end of the clip, Hastings reveals that people in the special forces community told him that he himself had long been the subject of surveillance.

Barrett Brown and Hastings were quite close, as this piece by Brown -- published in Vanity Fair three years ago -- testifies. Like Hastings, Brown (author of Flock of Dodos) has focused his investigative efforts on this country's increasingly oppressive cyber-surveillance systems.

For a good look at Brown's legal troubles, see the Greenwald piece above and this profile by Patrick Mcguire. Mcguire is especially good:

It’s obvious by looking at the most recent posts on Barrett Brown’s blog that while he is highly interested in Stratfor, it wasn’t the credit card information that motivated him. When those five million emails leaked, a product called TrapWire, which was created by a company called Abraxas, was revealed to the public at large. And it caused a media shitstorm. In 2005, the founder of Abraxas and former head of the CIA’s European division, Richard Helms, described TrapWire as software that is installed inside of surveillance camera systems that is, “more accurate than facial recognition” with the ability to “draw patterns, and do threat assessments of areas that may be under observation from terrorists.” As Russia Today reported, one of the leaked emails, allegedly written by Stratfor’s VP of Intelligence, Fred Burton, stated that TrapWire was at “high-value targets” in “the UK, Canada, Vegas, Los Angeles, NYC.”

Barrett Brown was doing some very serious investigating into a company called Cubic from San Diego, that was alleged to own TrapWire as a subsidiary of their firm. This is an allegation that they officially denied. However, these tax filings from 2010 that Barrett uncovered clearly state that Cubic had in fact merged with Abraxas Corporation. If you click through and take a look, you can see that Richard Helms’s name is right there on the top of the first page.

Helms, of course, was the quasi-legendary former CIA Director who played important -- and sadly under-recognized -- roles in MKULTRA, Watergate, and the Iranian hostage crisis. One of these days, if you promise to behave, I'll tell you a fun story about Helms and Lee Harvey Oswald.

Right now, though, let's bring it all home -- and by "home," I mean this very blog:

Alongside Abraxas and Cubic on those tax filings is another company called Ntrepid. According to Florida State’s records of corporations, Richard Helms is the director of that company. In 2011, Barrett’s work helped lead the Guardian to their report that Ntrepid won a $2.76 million-dollar contract from Centcom (U.S. Central Command), to create “online persona management” software, also known as “sockpuppetry.” To break it down in plain English, online persona management was created to populate social networks with a bunch of fake and believable social media personas to “influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.”

Oh ho.

We saw a lot of sock puppetry (in these pages and on many other websites) throughout 2008. We also saw a fair amount of the stuff during the Weiner scandal. Hell, I suspect that much of the Breitbart empire was built on sockpuppetry. How else can you explain the fact that some Breitbart-related bloggers -- with audiences notably smaller than that of a C-list blog like Cannonfire -- can nevertheless attract dozens or hundreds of comments on any given post?

Sockpuppets are important. They can help drive the national conversation. They can make a fast-spreading rumor seem to have the solidity of fact. They can transform a not-terribly-popular view -- or presidential candidate -- into the mainstream choice. And if you insist on saying things that the Powers That Be don't want you to say (such as "Hillary for President in 2008!"), sockpuppets will work tirelessly to make your life miserable. They will do their damnedest to drive you off the internet.

Incidentally, many of the responses to my piece on Progressive Insurance's "Snapshot" device have been obvious examples of sockpuppetry in action. See for yourself.

Brown also wrote about another Ntrepid product called Tartan, designed to uncover the true identity of anyone who posts online under an assumed name. Call it the anti-whistleblower app.

If you're an Occupy Wall Street admirer, you'll appreciate another service provided by Tartan:

In another document on Ntrepid letterhead, titled “Tartan Influence Model: Anarchist Groups,” Tartan is positioned as a software tool that can help combat domestic protestors who operate in “an amorphous network of anarchist and protest groups” and suggests that these groups are prone to violence. They name Occupy Wall Street and Occupy D.C. as part of the problem, and have “built Occupy networks through online communication with anarchists.” By identifying the threat of anarchistic, supposedly violent protestors, Tartan sells its services by saying their software “identifies the hidden relationships among organizers of seemingly unrelated movements… To mitigate the ability of anarchists to incite violence… Law enforcement must identify the complex network of relationships among anarchist leaders.” So, beyond taking apart movements that exist solely online, Tartan is looking to come out and crush real world protest movements as well.

Besides a few journalists, not many people have been looking into this information. The one other group that does is called Telecomix, the guys who are famous for supplying dial-up internet lines to areas of the world with oppressive dictatorships, and who I interviewed about the Gaza conflict here. They operate the Bluecabinet Wiki, and they worked very closely with Barrett Brown to uncover more information about the network of cybersecurity firms.

I talked to one of the volunteers at Telecomix, who strongly believes in the work that Barrett did to connect all of these very confusing dots: “I haven't seen reporters really taking a hard look at what Barrett Brown, the investigative journalist, was researching and where it leads to. His discovery that TrapWire = Abraxas and that there is CIA involvement is very important. Do you know in Berlin right now a game was started to destroy surveillance cameras in public places? Barrett apparently was reading through the emails of HBGary and Stratfor, linking the data to the specific surveillance companies and contractors… It is an extremely time consuming task.”

Some of you will recall Brown's involvement with the HBGary hack, as summarized in The Nation:

In February 2011, a year after Brown penned his defense of Anonymous, and against the background of its actions during the Arab Spring, Aaron Barr, CEO of the private intelligence company HBGary, claimed to have identified the leadership of the hacktivist collective. (In fact, he only had screen names of a few members).

I should interrupt here to note that alleged computer security "genius" Aaron Barr seems to be an incredible blowhard. In previous posts, we noted that his much-touted background information on fellow blogger Brad Friedman was hilariously, ludicrously wrong. Barr also sold an ultra-expensive anti-virus system to big corporations, even though his own company relied on AVG, which is free.

(Rich people often don't feel comfortable with a purchase unless they overpay. That mentality has transformed the art market into what it is today.)

HBGary is now run by a "former" CIA guy named Dean May. That has been the case ever since the company was purchased by ManTech, which has ties to Mitchell Wade, best known for his part in the Duke Cunningham bribery scandal. (You may recall Cunningham's letter from prison, which spoke of Wade as though he were Darth Vader.)

Let's get back to McGuire's piece:

Barr’s boasting provoked a brutal hack of HBGary by a related group called Internet Feds (it would soon change its name to “LulzSec”). Splashy enough to attract the attention of The Colbert Report, the hack defaced and destroyed servers and websites belonging to HBGary. Some 70,000 company e-mails were downloaded and posted online. As a final insult to injury, even the contents of Aaron Barr’s iPad were remotely wiped.

The HBGary hack may have been designed to humiliate the company, but it had the collateral effect of dropping a gold mine of information into Brown’s lap. One of the first things he discovered was a plan to neutralize Glenn Greenwald’s defense of Wikileaks by undermining them both. (“Without the support of people like Glenn, wikileaks would fold,” read one slide.) The plan called for “disinformation,” exploiting strife within the organization and fomenting external rivalries—“creating messages around actions to sabotage or discredit the opposing organization,” as well as a plan to submit fake documents and then call out the error.” Greenwald, it was argued, “if pushed,” would “choose professional preservation over cause.”

Although I remain a (cautious) supporter of Ed Snowden, one can't help but wonder if the recent Snowden controversy has any relationship to this alleged plan to lure Greenwald into a disinfo trap. We shall see.

Other plans targeted social organizations and advocacy groups. Separate from the plan to target Greenwald and WikiLeaks, HBGary was part of a consortia that submitted a proposal to develop a “persona management” system for the United States Air Force, that would allow one user to control multiple online identities for commenting in social media spaces, thus giving the appearance of grassroots support or opposition to certain policies.

Once again, we see the importance of sockpuppetry.

The data dump from the HBGary hack was so vast that no one person could sort through it alone. So Brown decided to crowdsource the effort. He created a wiki page, called it ProjectPM, and invited other investigative journalists to join in. Under Brown’s leadership, the initiative began to slowly untangle a web of connections between the US government, corporations, lobbyists and a shadowy group of private military and information security consultants.

And now we come to Endgame:

Brown began looking into Endgame Systems, an information security firm that seemed particularly concerned about staying in the shadows. “Please let HBGary know we don’t ever want to see our name in a press release,” one leaked e-mail read. One of its products, available for a $2.5 million annual subscription, gave customers access to “zero-day exploits”—security vulnerabilities unknown to software companies—for computer systems all over the world. Business Week published a story on Endgame in 2011, reporting that “Endgame executives will bring up maps of airports, parliament buildings, and corporate offices. The executives then create a list of the computers running inside the facilities, including what software the computers run, and a menu of attacks that could work against those particular systems.” For Brown, this raised the question of whether Endgame was selling these exploits to foreign actors and whether they would be used against computer systems in the United States. Shortly thereafter, the hammer came down.

For more on Endgame, see this piece in Defense News:

Endgame Systems is a secretive cyber company with an intriguing specialty. The firm’s chief product, software called Bonesaw, is a “cyber targeting application” that tracks servers and routers worldwide, mapping the hardware attached to the Web.

These are the access points through which the National Security Agency, Cyber Command and other U.S. agencies, could launch operations against adversaries and threats.

The head of Endgame is a young fellow named Nathaniel Fick, whose service as a Marine in Iraq was dramatized in the HBO series Generation Kill. Fick seems to be one of those Special Chosen Ones. You know the kind. From an early age, the fates select these rare individuals for great things; before a single grey hair has sprouted on their heads, they get tapped to run intelligence agencies or spy-tech private firms.

We've been seeing a lot of Special Chosen Ones lately.

So that's what Brown was poking into, and that's why the feds got him out of the way by tossing him into the pokey on bullshit charges. It's a pretty fair bet that his buddy Hastings decided to pick up where Brown left off.

That's when he got slammed in the face by the mailed fist of Pure Coincidence.

Endgame and more...

There are so many noteworthy stories out there, I don't know where to begin. Let's move quickly...

The warrior cop. The writer of this WSJ piece, Radley Balko, has strong Cato ties, so caveat lector. Still, he raises good points. The line between the beat cop and the soldier has been blurred.

The number of raids conducted by SWAT-like police units has grown accordingly. In the 1970s, there were just a few hundred a year; by the early 1980s, there were some 3,000 a year. In 2005 (the last year for which Dr. Kraska collected data), there were approximately 50,000 raids. Some federal agencies also now have their own SWAT teams, including NASA and the Department of the Interior.

Are we more violent than we were then? No. So then -- why the rising numbers?

The militarization of our police may have subterranean links to this Facebook (sorry!) offering by Robert Reich...

Why is the nation more bitterly divided today than it's been in eighty years? Why is there more anger and vituperation than even during Joe McCarthy's anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s, the struggle for civil rights in the 1960s, the Vietnam war, the Watergate scandal? Political scientists say the gap between the median Republican voter and the median Democrat is wider today on a whole host of issues than it's been since the 1920s. And those on the regressive Republican right might as well be on a different planet.

But I think the deeper reality has economic roots. For more than three decades now, the middle class has been losing ground. The median wage of male workers is now lower than it was in 1980, adjusted for inflation. And all the mechanisms we have used to cope with this descent -- young mothers streaming into paid work in the late 1970s and 1980s, everyone working longer hours in the 1990s, and then borrowing against rising home values until 2007 -- are now exhausted. Wages are still dropping -- the median is now 4 percent below what it was at the start of the so-called recovery. And upward mobility has become a cruel joke.

The right-wing media infrastructure exists to make sure that the proles blame their growing number of problems on anyone except those who deserve the blame -- the Wall Street ueber-capitalists and the militant anti-Keynesians.

Eventually, though, the pressures may build to the point of explosion. Hence the need for cops who are really soldiers.

Barrett Brown on Endgame. As you know, Michael Hastings was looking into Endgame when he met with his accident. Barrett Brown, another Endgame investigator, is in jail right now on bullshit charges. If you haven't seen it yet, you should check out this Democracy Now segment, which includes a recent interview with Peter Ludlow, who is following in Brown's footsteps. The following words came from Brown himself, back in 2012, shortly after his legal troubles began...

The warrants themselves refer to the information that they’re seeking as regarding Anonymous, of course, a few other things of that nature, and also two companies: HBGary and Endgame Systems. Both of these are intelligence contracting companies that Anonymous had a run-in with in February of 2011, during which a number of emails were taken from HBGary, in particular, which themselves revealed a number of conspiracies being perpetuated by those companies in conjunction with Justice Department and several other institutions, including Bank of America, against WikiLeaks and against several journalists.

I would like to emphasize, once again, that HBGary has strong ties to the Breitbart media empire. I never did figure out where Breitbart got the money to start such a large operation...

Here's Ludlow, carrying Brown's research forward:

Yeah, Endgame is a very interesting thing. I mean, Endgame is this kind of very secretive private intelligence company. And you even see in the HBGary hack, you see these messages where someone from Endgame says in an email, "We don’t ever want to see our name in a press release from you guys." And what makes it particularly interesting is, if you read the search warrant that’s issued to Barrett when he’s busted, it says, "Well, we’re looking for stuff related to HBGary and Endgame Systems." You know, like, why Endgame Systems?

And this is a corporation that’s involved in what are called "zero-day exploits." Now, what’s a zero-day exploit? Basically, what that means is that there are certain security flaws in the software that we have and that we use, and sometimes the company doesn’t know about it. Sometimes it’s known about it for seven days, and they’ve had seven days to work on it. A zero-day exploit is one that the software company doesn’t know about. And Endgame Systems packages these things and sells them. So, for example, they have one where you get—it’s a subscription for like $2.5 million a year, and you get these exploits. So it’s things that a hacker would do, but because they’re a business and they’re making money for it, it’s—apparently it’s OK, right? And it seems that the Justice Department is kind of running interference for these guys...

A fellow named Jim March actually tried to pay a visit to the good folks at Endgame. I've embedded the video above. Here's a long-ish piece he wrote about his experiences and his research into this odd company...

This company is a private spin-off from the major intelligence source X-Force that was founded originally by Chris Klaus whose career dates to at least 1994 when he founded Internet Security Systems, a private “white hat” counter-hacker group.

The X-Force was a team of elite cyber-security specialists who operated within ISS in an Atlanta office and made daily reports to the intelligence community and White House about Internet security and malicious software threats. They were allegedly defensive in nature, at least when they started out, and protective of US security. One of their members was Christopher Rouland who was a famous hacker who got caught attacking the Pentagon’s systems by US Airforce cyber-cop Jim Christy who gave him a “break” so long as he would work from then forward as a “white hat” cybersleuth for the US government.4

“White hat” in this context means defensive Internet security - fighting the “black hat” attackers. We write this in part to show that Rouland and his company Endgame have in fact gone back to “black hat” with the approval of the Federal government, doing (and facilitating for others) the sorts of attacks that the Pentagon, the NSA and the like don’t want their fingers found in.

Rouland took over the X-Force and ISS operations from Klaus for a period of time until ISS and X-Force were bought out as a package by IBM.5 Rouland either decided not to continue with IBM or his criminal record excluded him; for whatever reason he switched a few years ago and co-founded a new private corporation called “Endgame” with the generous funding of Chris Darby who is the CEO of In-Q-Tel, an independent strategy investment firm that supports the missions of the Central Intelligence Agency and the broader intelligence community.6 Darby still sits on Endgame's board of directors.7

One key member of the board of directors at Endgame is retired Lt. General Kenneth A. Minihan8 whose claim to fame is that he was the 14th director of the National Security Agency/Central Security Service.

It might be added that Mr. Rouland was the designer of the www.senate.gov website and infrastructure which would have potentially allowed him to plant taps.15 Let us be clear: the senate.gov site is more than a website, it is a communication infrastructure for the Senators and their staffers and taps into that by somebody we know for a fact started out as a criminal should be of serious concern to all. We know that another contractor by the name of Mike Connell did work on the equivalent House side (doing portions for various committees and individual Republican house member websites)16 and Connell died in a plane crash shortly after being called to testify in an Ohio electronic voting case.17 So there's a pattern of sketchy people doing things to the most important computers in the nation.

Indeed!

There's a lot more to talk about, but that should do for now...

Trump vs. THE OBAMA CONSPIRACY! (And much more...)

(Note: I began to write this post about ten minutes after Trump issued his tweets. I've rewritten and expanded this piece since its original publication.)

As the sun rose, once more the nation plunged into madness. In a flurry of angry tweets, Donald Trump accused Barack Obama of wiretapping his (Trump's) phones...

Donald Trump has accused Barack Obama of “wire tapping” his offices in New York City before the presidential election in November last year, claiming the former president had overseen a “Nixon/Watergate”-style intervention.

Launching a series of tweets at 5.35am eastern time on Saturday morning, the US president said: “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!”

He followed up that initial tweet with a string of others in the following 30 minutes that claimed Obama had defied a court rejection to tap his office, and invited a “good lawyer” to make a case against the alleged process.

The obvious questions: Is this a paranoid outburst based on some poorly-sourced story in the right-wing press? Or did Trump receive actual intelligence to this effect? If the latter, has he accurately portrayed what he was told?

There are other possibilities: Maybe Trump has gone completely mad. Maybe Trump is just lying. Maybe there is a plot afoot to frame Obama. The more I ponder that final theory, the more intriguing it seems.

The suggestion has been made that Trump's tweetstorm was a reaction to this Brietbart story, which you really ought to read if you're in the market for a laughable, evidence-free conspiracy theory. But that particular exercise in inanity doesn't really explain why Donnie tweeted what he tweeted.

Right now, let's stick with the theory that Trump received word of something that the previous administration actually did.

The allegation that Obama sought a court order before tapping Trump Tower is really an admission that the intent was to proceed legally. Of course, the president himself doesn't order a tap: The FBI does. It may have been that the initial request was deemed overly broad, and that the court granted a second request which was more narrowly defined. That sort of thing has certainly happened before.

If so, then I fail to comprehend what the tappers did wrong, except insofar as their actions were too little, too late.

Added note: I appreciated one TPM reader's witty observation:

IMPEACH OBAMA NOW!

BTW, if your private server in Trump Tower is communicating with Russian banks, you should expect a FISA warrant.

Yesterday, Rachel Maddow noted that the Flynn affair indicated that the FBI sought a FISA warrant to eavesdrop on "U.S. persons." If the warrant covered Kislyak's phone, it probably covered other phones. This DU thread notes several other indicators that the FISA court approved taps on Team Trump -- for example, Louise Mensch so reported all the way back in November, and the Guardian made a similar claim in January.

However, no previous story has alleged that Trump himself was tapped.

IC wars. For weeks now, I've been warning people that the commonly-heard "Trump versus the intelligence community" framework is simplistic and misleading: There is a pro-Trump faction within our intelligence community. Unfortunately, I seem to be the only one who has noticed its existence. True, Louise Mensch has argued that the pro-Trump coterie in the NY branch of the FBI are actually Russian moles -- a rather fanciful suggestion, in my view. Instead of going down that road, I would suggest taking a hard look at Breitbart, which has always been a far "spookier" operation than most people comprehend.

For those curious enough to do further research, here are some suggested Google searches:

1. MZM and Mantech.

2. Mantech and Breitbart. (You'll be amazed to see how thoroughly Breitbart has covered every movement and twitch of a company that normally would be of no interest to most readers.)

3. HB Gary and Breitbart.

4. Palantir and HBGary.

5. Palantir and Michael Flynn.

Check out my earlier posts which mention those keywords. At the time, those posts seemed unrelated, but the links are now apparent -- and everything plugs into Breitbart.

Brietbart has always been spookier than the Winchester Mystery House. Never forget that.

Important documents. Serious Trumpgate researchers will want to snatch up a couple of important new reports which were just uploaded to Google Documents.

1. Scott Dworkin's analysis of the Steele dossier originally appeared (in germinal form) on Democratic Underground. This is good stuff. Really good. There are still a few die-hard dolts out there who continue to scoff at the dossier. To such people I say: Study Dworkin's work.

Christopher Steele is one of the heroes of our time.

2. This in-depth detailed report (by someone calling himself "Postimus Maximus") is the closest thing we have right now to a book-length treatment of Donniegate. All of the players are there; the timelines are clear and concise. If you're like me, you've privately fretted that this scandal is too complicated, has too many moving parts. This document will make everything clear.

Nota bene: Google has already taken this document down once, and may do so again. So snap it up now.

The report ends with some suggested sources for those who want to follow the latest developments. Be warned: Some of these twitter feeds take us deep into "strange bedfellows" territory. An anti-Trumper with Spookworld ties can provide much useful information, but you must understand going in that you're not dealing with the kind of people who normally follow Think Progress.

The following are people I advise following on twitter for early Trump-Russia related news. They are also the source of some of the connections and stories in this doc. Though as always I provided the news-source following each link).  Disclaimer: I don’t claim everything they say is correct or reflect my personal thoughts.

1. https://twitter.com/louisemensch
2. https://twitter.com/Khanoisseur
3. https://twitter.com/th3j35t3r
4. https://twitter.com/funder
5. https://twitter.com/sarahkendzior
6. https://twitter.com/20committee

I made an account to provide updates, if you’d prefer to keep track that way:
https://twitter.com/PostimusMaximus

The Alt Left. This Vanity Fair piece reminds us that there is plenty of rotten fruit on the left side of the basket. Most people don't understand that Alexander Dugin -- the seminal theoretician of the new fascist resurgence -- has advocated the manipulation of both the left and the right in order to render the United States ungovernable. Pushing the extremes weakens the center.

The alt-left can’t match that for strength, malignancy, or tentacled reach, but its dude-bros and “purity progressives” exert a powerful reality-distortion field online and foster factionalism on the lib-left. Its outlets include not only Jacobin but also the Intercept, one of whose co-founders is the inexhaustible Glenn Greenwald, lawyer, author, journalist, and crucial conduit for Edward Snowden’s stolen N.S.A. data to The Guardian; Web sites such as Truthdig, Consortiumnews, and Naked Capitalism; and anomalous apostates such as Mickey Kaus, a former contributor to liberal percolators of ideas and opinions such as Washington Monthly, the New Republic, Harper’s, and Slate, who migrated sideways and down to the right-wing Daily Caller, did a temporary hitch as a columnist for the Breitbart bughouse in 2016, and serves as a tweeting defender of Trump’s proposed wall.

Other busy beavers on Twitter include Michael Tracey, Freddie deBoer, Mark Ames, Connor Kilpatrick (a Jacobin contributor), Jeremy Scahill (journalist and Intercept co-founder), and similar fun guys. A Tumblr site devoted to “Trumpian Leftism” captures the intellectual flavor of their temperaments.

One of the alt-left’s political darlings is Tulsi Gabbard, a progressive congresswoman from Hawaii who met with then president-elect Donald Trump in Trump Tower and was rumored to be under consideration for a Cabinet position, and its quixotic preacher-man and noble leper is Cornel West, once an orator at every social-justice convocation who got so uncoiled by his rancorous contempt for Obama and cast adrift into the hazy fringes of the alt-left—see Michael Eric Dyson’s definitive autopsy, “The Ghost of Cornel West,” the New Republic, April 19, 2015—that in 2016 he supported the Green Party candidacy of Jill Stein, that stellar mind.

I've added paragraph breaks to aid readability. We need much, much more research along these lines -- but at the same time, we need subtlety and nuance. I remain a great fan of Consortiumnews and an occasional reader of Jacobin. In former times, I had a very high opinion of Greenwald, and one of these days I would like to like him again. I myself have been a harsh critic of both Obama and Hillary from the left. I also understand the need for an ornery, idealistic strain of progressive thought that defies both convention and compromise.

But Trump, Breitbart and the new fascist resurgence have changed much of the landscape.

Now that we have a clearer understanding of Putinism -- or rather, Duginism -- we must continually ask ourselves: Is this "left-wing" critique really what it seems to be? Or are we aiding a foreign power who wants to see America destroyed by a new civil war?

If Emma Goldman were alive today, she'd be the first to warn against bogus "left-wingers" who -- wittingly or unwittingly -- have empowered fascism.

(By the way: That Vanity Fair piece really should have found room to mention Salon and Hideous Asshole Goodman.)

Final note: The Trumpers and Breitbarters are now pretending that public, on-the-record meetings with Kislyak and other Russians should be considered morally equivalent to Team Trump's furtive (and often loudly denied) communications with Team Putin. By this logic, a waiter who serves pasta to a professional hit man is every bit as guilty as a millionaire who carries a large attache case to a secret meeting with that same hit man. Are Americans dumb enough to buy such an argument?

Trump, terror and the coming coup

Many thanks to John Titus for turning me on to this incredibly important piece. I hope that he will not mind extensive quotation. Hit the link and study the whole thing -- and then study his sources; nothing else you read today will be of comparable importance.

Three major publications are out this week that suggest we should be ready for a running coup, a planned terror attack and the subsequent power grab by Bannon and Trump. These publications are the Canberra Times out of Australia, CNN online, and The New Yorker. Not exactly radical rags.

Here's CNN, warning of an impending coup:

The confusion and chaos generated at the bureaucratic and individual level by Trump’s most spectacular executive order — his ban of individuals from selected predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States — came in part from its sudden announcement. From enforcers to the public, many were thrown off guard.

Welcome to the shock event, designed precisely to jar the political system and civil society, causing a disorientation and disruption among the public and the political class that aids the leader in consolidating his power.

Those who still refuse to take Trump seriously cite his incompetence for the rough start in office. Yet this blitzkrieg was intentional. “Get used to it. @POTUS is a man of action and impact … Shock to the system. And he’s just getting started” his counselor Kellyanne Conway tweeted Saturday.”

As Titus notes, this analysis owes much to the basic idea driving The Shock Doctrine. I will confess that I had my problems with Naomi Klein's work on first glance. ("We're going over the Cameron thing again?" ) But that book and documentary seem prescient now.

“As Conway implies, these first days of the Trump administration could be considered a prologue to a bigger drama, and one that reflects the thinking of Trump and Bannon alike. From their actions and pronouncements, we cannot exclude an intention to carry out a type of coup.

Many may raise their eyebrows at my use of this word, which brings to mind military juntas in faraway countries who use violence and the element of surprise to gain power. Our situation is different. Trump gained power legally but this week has provided many indications that his inner circle intends to shock or strike at the system, using the resulting spaces of chaos and flux to create a kind of government within the government: one beholden only to the chief executive.”

Ryan Lizza, writing in the New Yorker, predicts Big Wedding II almost as boldly as I do. I am considering holding a raffle: The prize will go to the first person who guesses the correct date.

Jack Goldsmith, a former senior Justice Department official in the George W. Bush Administration, who helped design the post-9/11 anti-terror legal architecture, recently suggested that Trump might actually want his travel ban to be overturned. That way, in the wake of an attack, he can use the judiciary as a bogeyman and justify any new efforts to push through more extreme measures.

I asked Goldsmith and others what the menu of options might be for a President Trump empowered by the justifiable fears Americans would have in the aftermath of a serious attack. “If it is a large and grim attack, he might ask for more surveillance powers inside the U.S. (including fewer restrictions on data mingling and storage and queries), more immigration control power at the border, an exception to Posse Comitatus (which prohibits the military from law enforcement in the homeland), and perhaps more immigration-related detention powers,” Goldsmith wrote in an e-mail. “In the extreme scenario Trump could ask Congress to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, which would cut off the kind of access to courts you are seeing right now."

Matt Olsen, the former head of the National Counterterrorism Center, told me that he didn’t agree with Goldsmith’s suggestion that Trump actually wants the executive order overturned, but he said that he thought Trump was laying the groundwork for arguments he might make after an attack. “This is a win-win for Trump,” Olsen said. “We can assume there will be another terrorist attack in the U.S. If the executive order is in place, he will point to the attack as support for the executive order and the need to expand it to other countries with bad dudes (Muslims). If the executive order has been struck down, Trump will blame judges and Democrats for the attack.”

Todd Breasseale, the former assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, was also alarmed. “I had a very similar discussion with a former senior intel official on this very issue, before Jack’s column,” he told me. “We both wholly believe that Trump needs a bogeyman. But, more importantly, he needs distraction and a blame source. In terrorists, he has his bogeyman. In his control of the prevailing press narrative via tweet, he has distraction. And, in the judiciary, he has a source of blame for why his way was right from the beginning.” Breasseale added, “I am fully confident that an attack is exactly what he wants and needs.”

Emphasis added.

The most difficult of the three articles cited by Titus is the one published by Australia's Canberra Times. This piece offers speculation about Trump's relationship with the "Deep State." Since that term sounds a bit too Alex Jones-y for my taste -- remember when Roger Stone blamed the "Deep State" for that nasty case of "polonium poisoning"? -- I prefer to speak of the military/intelligence community.

That community may fairly be called "the Deep State" in this sense: Administrations come and go, but spooks and War Guys usually stay in their seats. Change does occur in their world, but that change is rarely sudden. One must never speak of that community as though it were a single monolithic entity, for within that community there are differing factions, differing ideologies, differing loyalties.

Trump -- being the candidate of Alex Jones and other right-wing conspiracy buffs (most of whom are easily-gulled simpletons) -- portrays himself the antidote to this Deep State. But Trump is no outsider. Or rather: Steve Bannon is no outsider.

The Breitbart empire has long pretended to be antagonistic to the Establishment. Yet Breitbart has always had ties to that very Establishment -- or rather, to a far right faction within it.

A while back, I announced that I was working on a long, long piece that would look into Breitbart's relationship with a segment of the intelligence community. I put off writing that article because -- well, frankly, doing the job right required a lot of work and a lot of thought. Would the effort be worth it? I'm still not sure how many people would pay attention to something so lengthy and abstruse.

While researching that piece, I ended up re-reading many of my earlier posts. (I've reached the age at which one reads older writings with a genuine sense of discovery.) The experience was uncanny. Many unconnected posts turned out to be connected: Without comprehending what I was doing, I had -- over the course of eleven years -- worked on One Big Story, even though I thought I had written a myriad small stories.

Believe it or not, this line of investigation goes back to the "Duke" Cunningham bribery scandal, now more than a decade old. If you are feeling ambitious (or masochistic), you may want to read what I wrote about all of that, especially the posts about MZM.

Then read about what happened to MZM.

Then read my posts about the HBGary scandal.

Then read about what happened to that company.

Then read my posts about the death of Michael Hastings.

Then read about how all of the above -- yes, all of it -- links up with the Breitbart crew.

If you go on to do some heavy-duty research, you'll also discover how all of this ties in with Michael Flynn and to the Alt-Right movement.

I have hesitated to emphasize the links between Bannon, Trump and the intelligence community because doing so might be seen as contradicting the narrative that Putin and the FSB control Trump. To be honest, that narrative is hard to reconcile with the thesis that I'm working on. Make no mistake: I remain quite certain that the Putin/Trump link is real, and that liberals are correct when they portray Trump as the toady of the Enemy Without.

Nevertheless, there is also an Enemy Within. Alex Jones and his nitwit brotherhood tout Trumpism as the antidote to the Great American Conspiracy. In fact, Trumpism is the Great American Conspiracy.

And if what I've just said seems outlandish or obscure -- well, now you know why I never completed that article.

A snitch. A hacker. A mystery. (And now: An update!)

The snitch: Hector Xavier Monsegur (known as Sabu), the de facto leader of the hacking group called LulzSec, has been outed as an FBI informant: See here and here and here.

The Guardian story (first link above) reveals that LulzSec

has been behind a wave of cyber raids against American corporations including Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, the intelligence consultancy Stratfor, British and American law enforcement bodies, and the Irish political party Fine Gael.

Previous reports on the Stratfor data dump revealed that the hacker collective Anonymous had wormed their way into the cyber-heart of the private intel group. LulzSec is, or was, an offshoot of Anonymous.

A week ago, I suggested that a branch of American intelligence may have been the real author of the great Stratfor leak. Now we have evidence for that scenario, or at least a similar scenario. Anonymous broke into Stratfor late last year, and "Sabu" has been working for the FBI for at least six months. You do the math.

It should also be noted that Anonymous worked with the FBI to take down child porn sites. That was in October of last year.

Gizmodo reveals that others within the hacking community have felt for a while that Monsegur was "turned" last June.

From the Guardian:

A second document shows that Monsegur – styled this time as CW-1 – provided an FBI-owned computer to facilitate the release of 5m emails taken from US security consultancy Stratfor and which are now being published by WikiLeaks. That suggests the FBI may have had an inside track on discussions between Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, and Anonymous, another hacking group, about the leaking of thousands of confidential emails and documents.

An inside track, yes. But the feds did not arrest the Anonymous and LulzSec hackers until after Stratfor was (more or less) turned into a laughing stock. In fact, the FBI provided the server which held the Stratfor data dump.

All in all, I'd say that my paranoid theory doesn't look so paranoid now. I don't think that Friedman, Burton and company find the Bureau quite so laughable these days.

The hacker. Wired notes that one of the people ratted out by Sabu was a fellow named Jeremy Hammond.

Hammond, a member of Anonymous — a group loosely affiliated with LulzSec — is believed to be the main actor behind the hack of U.S. private intelligence company Stratfor in December, which resulted in the seizure of more than 5 million company e-mails, customer credit card numbers and other confidential information. The government said in a court filing that Hammond “used some of the stolen credit card data to make at least $700,000 worth of unauthorized charges.” ...The Stratfor hackers publicly said they were using the cards to make donations to charity, and provided screenshots.

Charity or no charity, playing around with credit cards is incredibly stupid -- so stupid, in fact, as to lead me to wonder if this part of the charge was concocted. For what it is worth, Anonymous sent out a statement to the BBC denying any responsibility for the Stratfor hack.

That denial may be true -- technically.

If I understand matters aright (which ain't no easy task: Hackerland is a complex place), Hammond had headed up his own Anonymous spin-off org called Antisec. Ars Technica offers the most in-depth coverage of the Hammond affair that I've seen so far. (Also see here.) These stories offer excerpts from incriminating IRC chats between Hammond and his hacker compatriots, including Monsegur/"Sabu."

The mystery. It's easy to understand how the feds got hold of the private dialogs with Monsegur -- he was working for Uncle all along. What I don't yet understand are the logs of conversations (mostly about Stratfor) that Hammond had with others in the hacking community.

Hammond used IRC, Internet Relay Chat. While "normal" IRC conversations may be logged by the servers, hipper users (or more paranoid users) may utilize a mode called DCC, which allows one computer to "talk" directly to another computer, with no intermediaries and (in theory) no eavesdroppers. Hammond, who has had several previous encounters with the law, would surely have used DCC for conversations about potentially illegal activities. And keeping a log on his own system would have been idiocy.

Why, then, do we have transcripts of Hammonds' chats with people other than Monsegur?

The answer may be revealed in the actual indictment, which I have not yet read. This story reveals that the FBI had traced Hammond and placed him under observation -- but they could legally trace only the IP addresses Hammond visited.

On March 1, the agents obtained a court order allowing them to use a "pen register/trap and trace" device that could reveal only "addressing information" and not content. In other words, if it worked, agents could see what IP addresses Hammond was visiting, but they would see nothing else.

Okay. So who logged the chats? Offhand, I can think of three scenarios:

1. Monsegur was not the only FBI snitch. (Tellingly, the FBI is hiding the handles of other people chatting with Hammond.)

2. Someone planted a keylogger or other spyware onto Hammond's system.

3. The NSA got involved. The NSA scoops up everything.

Maybe I'm missing something obvious here. Maybe you have a clearer idea than I do as to what really went down. There are many people out there who are wiser than I am about How Hackers Do It. To be frank, I don't want to possess any detailed knowledge of that sort.

If Hammond logged his own incriminating material, he was very foolish.

That said, I do feel sorry for Hammond. Looks to me like the FBI covertly helped him take down Stratfor, a private firm which had developed an arrogant and contemptuous attitude toward the Bureau -- and perhaps toward the entire American intelligence community. Once Stratfor got a much-needed kick in the rear, Hammond became expendable.

Update: This is fascinating news...

Hackers, quite possibly from the government, replaced Anonymous DDOS software available for download with a version that steals passwords.

More here:

In previous attacks, Anonymous hacktivists have shown an affinity for Slowloris, a simple tool for DDoSing websites. The group distributes this software through a how-to guide on Pastebin. On January 20, however, hackers broke into this document and changed the Slowloris download links to a modified version of the software infected with Zeus, a popular Trojan horse.

The infected client still works as expected, however behind the scenes it’s doing much more. Zeus steals passwords as well as other credentials including cookies. The link change occurred around the same time as the raid on Megaupload, Symantec says. Unless Anonymous checked the code behind the document, they would have never known anything changed.

By now, you'd think that someone would have concocted an app that allows one to determine quickly and easily which outside computers are in communication with your system. Firewalls are never informative enough; neither is Task Manager.

Here's an interesting reaction to the hacked version of Slowloris:

Kevin McAleavey, cofounder of the KNOS Project, says he found the malicious link, and agrees in part with Wallis. He believes that the more sophisticated members of Anonymous would not fall for it.

But, he suspects there are plenty who would. "I've always maintained that Anonymous consists of a few slick coders and a cast of thousands of morons," McAleavey says.

Apparently, the hack was detected by most antivirus programs. So keep your system clean, boys and girls. I'm going to go back to my policy of scanning every night.

The gummint may not have inserted the trojan. HBGary or some similar organization might have done the job. The Breitbart-linked hackers who targeted Anthony Weiner (and then made an amusing show of "investigating" their own impersonations) have had a complex -- and only partially adversarial -- relationship with Anonymous.

That's the problem with leaderless rebellions, eh wot?