The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) recently raided the apartment of Barrett Brown, an unofficial, self-appointed Anonymous spokesperson.
“The FBI is now searching through my belongings for information on HBGary, Endgame Systems, and the website that my group Project PM maintains for the purpose of disseminating info on such firms as these, Echelon2.org,” Brown confirmed in a PasteBin post.
“They will find quite a bit of information on all of these things. They will also find further evidence of wrongdoing on the part of two other ‘security contractors’ who posted pictures of what they believed to be my apartment so that, as one of them put it, the Zeta drug cartel would know which house I lived in. They will find the name of the contractors in question; they will find screen shots showing one of them in particular has ties to the former CEO of HBGary Federal.”
According to Brown, the recent crackdown against cyber activists belonging to groups like Anonymous was organized, in part, by HBGary Federal, Palantir, Berico, and Endgame Systems – security companies that combined forces to create a sort of “cyber-offense unit” dubbed Team Themis.
“With the assistance of the law firm Hunton & Williams, they went about collecting potential clients, including two institutions which desired to go on the offensive against certain activist groups. One of these institutions, the Chamber of Commerce, provided them with the names of various individuals believed to be involved with groups that opposed their policies, and asked them to come up with a plan by which to discredit them,” Brown claimed.
“The fact that Team Themis also discussed the option of hacking the servers of Wikileaks, and engaging in a campaign of intimidation against the journalist Glenn Greenwald due to his support of the organization, did not seem to generate much activity over at the DoJ or FBI, either.”
Brown also noted that calls for a Congressional inquiry into the creation of false documents and fake insider persona in an effort to discredit cyber activists was conveniently shot down by Rep. Lamar Smith.
“His reasoning was that the Justice Department is best equipped to decide if any investigation is warranted in this instance. I would tend to disagree with that insomuch as that they helped to put these activities in motion.
“But they will not choose to investigate those sorts of things. The state has friends, and the state has enemies,” he added.
