#projectpm

It was announced on Wednesday morning that Barrett Brown, a man who became a very public talking head for AnonOps (the brain trust that is arguably the cortex of the hacktivist group Anonymous, even though theretechnically isn’t one) is facing up to 100 years in jail for three separate indictments. Two of the indictments—the threatening of an FBI officer in a YouTube video and the concealing of evidence—do not seem worthy of such a harsh sentence, considering a man in Houston recieved only 42 months for threatening to blow up an FBI building, and a former dentist got 18 months for threatening to kill an FBI agent. The third, however, pertains to Barrett Brown's pasting of a link in an Anonymous IRC chat room to a document full of credit card numbers and their authentication codes that was stolen from the security company Stratfor, in the midst of a hack that released over five million internal emails. Those emails were published to Wikileaks. Some writers have rightfully raised their concerns about the legalities behind sharing a link that points to stolen material (which is why I have not linked to those five million emails) and whether or not that should be an indictable offense. However, Barrett’s work and research into Stratfor tells a much more complicated and disturbing story than a pile of stolen Visa cards.

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.”

TrapWire has since largely been dismissed as nothing to “freak out” over, and that hopefully is the case. However, far beyond what the surveillance software itself can or can’t do, the revelation that TrapWire exists has caused a chain reaction of discoveries that have seemingly revealed a mob of very powerful cybersecurity firms.

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.

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.”

Ntrepid also has a product they call Tartan, that’s detailed in this internal presentation hosted by the Wall Street Journal. In Ntrepid’s own parlance, they describe Tartan as a program that can “Analyze illicit organizations and less structured social networks by identifying: Ranks of influence within human networks… [and can] end the use of [online] aliases.” Clearly they are looking to dismantle the smoke and mirrors that groups like Anonymous maintain, by hanging out in chatrooms where they do not need to identify themselves officially, with many private communications happening at once. This creates a difficult-to-penetrate den, where people can easily hide online. Evidently, Ntrepid is seeking to pull all of that apart with Tartan.

Corporate info on 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.

A lot of this information and the connections between it all would not be easy to figure out were it not for Barrett Brown. For one, Barrett started ProjectPM, a wiki that is completely dedicated to piecing together all of this information about surveillance companies in the United States. He even got on the phone with a representative at Cubic to tell them that their company was full of liars and that they do in fact own TrapWire. Without Barrett Brown, tons of this research would likely have gone unearthed. 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.”

Barrett Brown was not a hacker. He did not infiltrate any systems, nor did he appear to know how to do anything of the sort (he did try to take down the Mexican drug cartels in 2011, but that is a whole other story). Barrett was an investigative journalist who has been published in the Guardian, Vanity Fair,Huffington Post, and Business Week. He closely (perhaps too closely) aligned himself with Anonymous, and dug into some very serious, complicated, and high-level issues pertaining to the future of America’s cyberwar conquests. In light of recent news that the Pentagon wants 4,000 new “hackers for cyber command,” it’s clear that the US’ infrastructure for private cyber defense companies is only growing, and their motives are oftentimes confusing and frightening.

Over the past couple of weeks, the controversy surrounding the case against Barrett Brown—the journalist charged with three crimes, including spreading stolen credit card information that was encrypted within leaked emails from the security company Stratfor—has been stirring.

Last week, as I noted in my interview with Barrett from prison, Barrett’s mother plead guilty to her charge of obstructing evidence: she hid his computers from the FBI. Late last night, the news broke through the “Free Barrett Brown” Twitter account that Brown’s Wiki, ProjectPM, which is described on the project’s Twitter page as being, “Dedicated to research of government corruption, sitting in bubble baths drinking wine,” was being subpoenaed by the Department of Justice.

ProjectPM is an online compendium where Barrett and his fellow researchers share information they've been gathering about the intelligence industry in the United States. The Department of Justice is suing the company’s hosting provider, CloudFlare. While ProjectPM appeared to have gone down on Wednesday, it seems the site is back up. This kind of spotty connection has been very common for the site over the past few months. Even Googling ProjectPM does not yield any results that point to the site.

Screenshot from Wednesday of ProjectPM error message

That said, certain articles on the site are available through Google Cache. One of the more disturbingly intriguing articles available is on Persona Management, the software developed by intelligence companies to develop phony online identities that can be used to manipulate others and disseminate propaganda. The article details a conversation—allegedly discovered through stolen internal emails, between Aaron Barr the former CEO of the security company HBGary and the former CEO of Mantech—where Aaron is demonstrating a primitive fake persona meant to “represent an intelligence contracting employee and USAF veteran, on Facebook and Twitter.” ProjectPM also claims that Aaron Barr and HBGary were out to “infiltrate Anonymous.”

Another article about Persona Development is even more concerning. The article details a PDF supposedly taken from a correspondence between Aaron Barr and Robert Frisbie that describes the tiers of fake personas and how believable they can actually become. It states that the “most detailed character[s]” also known as a “Level 3” are “required to conduct human-to-human direct contact likely in-person to satisfy some more advanced exercise requirements.

This character must look, smell, and feel 100 percent real at the most detailed level. This character will need to be associated with a real company, hold a real position with that company and have all the technical and business artifacts associated with the position and organization. The trick here is while the persona needs to be real, the actual person may not be working in this role 100 percent of the time. In these cases there are still tricks that can be used to more rapidly age or update accounts. One such trick is to build outward facing accounts such as twitter, YouTube, or blogs with generic names.”

If ProjectPM goes down, there is a similar site out there operated by the hacktivist group Telecomix. They run a Wiki called Bluecabinet that serves as a counterpart to Barrett’s own ProjectPM. I spoke to a volunteer for Bluecabinet, before the Department of Justice’s subpoena against ProjectPM, who described the differences between the two research projects to me: “Barrett Brown came to the Bluecabinet IRC mostly to discuss specific companies. He said that he liked Telecomix and Bluecabinet because we were more mature. But, both ProjectPM and Bluecabinet are concerned about the militarization of the internet and abuse of technology by governments that target the public, especially information activists.”

While Telecomix continues to do the same type of work as Barrett Brown, through their Bluecabinet Wiki, they do not seem discouraged by the punishment that Barrett is facing: “Barrett Brown was obviously targeted. He was outspoken and stood out as a journalist activist. The US government’s prosecution of information activists is so extreme, I'm concerned that they would create a honeypot or entrap me or other researchers. Obviously someone was monitoring Barrett in the IRC chatroom and documenting what links to data he posted. But his arrest has not slowed down the volunteer work of Bluecabinet at all. It has just made us more careful.”

ProjectPM’s lawyer, Jason Flores-Williams, has already launched a “Motion to Intervene and Quash Subpeona” and they have also published a press release online. In it, the Department of Justice’s subpoena is compared to the censorship in China: “The Department of Justice is abusing its subpoena power to invade lives, threaten freedoms and destroy people for simply exploring the truth about their government. Like China, they are trying to suppress and control the free flow of information and ideas.”

As reported yesterday in the Dallas News, the US Attorney’s office has requested that the motion is dismissed. According to the office, Flores-Williams is not “licensed to practice law in Texas and he failed to explain why it was not possible to confer with the government.” So far, there has been no response from the judge.