Justice Integrity Project

August 22, 2011

by Andrew Kreig

Are you feeling friendly? Perhaps you’d like to meet Holly Weber, below, or others like her through their Facebook, Linked-In and Twitter accounts.

Or maybe recent news has prompted you to get active in politics — or even to protest in some way?

Demonstrations outside the White Holly WeberHouse this weekend in Washington, DC prompted mass jailings of environmentalists who oppose President Obama’s approval of a trans-continental pipeline they fear as a threat to clean water. Even larger mass protests against Democrats and Republicans are shaping up this fall in the city because of opposition to the major parties on such issues as jobs, Social Security and Medicare, war spending, taxes and civil liberties.

Here’s the bottom line: Be careful, whatever your views.

New evidence emerged in Washington late last week of sophisticated phishing and similar surveillance plots. The snitch scams were reportedly run by government-affiliated IT contractors to obtain personal information from those who criticize federal officials or key members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Holly Weber, the lovely University of Denver alumn, for example, does not exist — except as avatar.

A related controversy erupted this month over whether the anti-secrecy, IT hacktivist group Anonymous really created, The Plan….War Against the System. These are high-tech, widely viewed YouTube videos this summer encouraging membership signups to Anonymous via the Web. Anonymous Message, a portentious-sounding response video with similar high-tech trappings (including Guy Fawkes masks), warns against taking the first YouTube videos seriously. As background, the FBI has been arresting Anonymous members since early this year on charges they illegally retaliated against PayPal, VISA and other companies that cut off services to WikiLeaks. So, who made The Plan recruitment video? Secret agents? As for its 368,000 recent viewers? Those who linger over such a video, much less sign up online, may not be thinking any more clearly than those who think that “Holly Weber” suddenly wants to be their friend.

See below for our Project research guide to developments — and our new contest: “Find the Missing White Girl.”

Will the Real Holly Weber Please Stand Up?

For starters, the fictitious Weber is not the CSI actress and Maxim model of the same age by that name, shown at right in a photo by Luke Force via Wikipedia. Instead, emailsHolly Weber stolen by Anonymous in February from an IT contractor named HBGary Federal suggest that its CEO, Aaron Burr, created a fictitious Weber. Reporter Lee Fang of the progressive website ThinkProgress last week broke the story as a new twist to a scandal that Anonymous and ThinkProgress exposed last February. The gist was that HBGary Federal was part of a larger plot to sabotage communications by reporters, liberals, bloggers, unions and others. Here’s the recap, from Fang’s article last week:

Earlier this year, ThinkProgress obtained 75,000 private emails from the defense contractor HBGary Federal via the hacktivist group called Anonymous. The emails led to two shocking revelations.

First, that an assortment of private military firms collectively called “Team Themis” had been tapped by Bank of America to conduct a cyber war against reporters sympathetically covering the WikiLeaks revelations. And second, that late in 2010, the same set of firms began work separately for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a Republican-aligned corporate lobbying group, to develop a similar campaign of sabotage against progressive organizations, including the SEIU and ThinkProgress.

You may think this has little to do with you. But like it or not, you are involved with avatars as a U.S. taxpayer and citizen even if you confine your social media outreach to close friends, or avoid such social media entirely.

Former Navy and National Security Agency analyst Wayne Madsen reported on Feb. 21, for example, an Air Force bid solicitation last year for contractors to create social media avatars for 500 fictitious people. As one security feature, the Air Force required that avatars be disguised with new IP addresses that change every day so no one can tell if they are fake. Here is the Air Force language excerpted from bid invitation No: RTB220610: “Software will allow 10 personas per user, replete with background, history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographacilly [sic] consistent. Individual applications will enable an operator to exercise a number of different online persons from the same workstation and without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries.” Madsen reprinted the government requirements in full on his subscription-only site. His headline was, “Beware the government’s avatars, especially fear your own.”

To be sure, this particular Air Force contract for social media avatars was relatively modest in size. But we know from other sources that scant oversight exists for the public to know the total scope of such efforts or similar practices. The Defense Department last month refused a request from two U.S. senators to learn more about surveillance on U.S. citizens, as described here: Administration rebuffs Wyden, Udall on surveillance query. Such individual congressional inquiries — feeble though results are in practice these days — occur sporadically because leaders of both parties are extremely reluctant to probe government surveillance more vigorously. That’s understandable for a number of reasons, including national security and the possibility that some in government have their own secrets on record in someone’s files.

In the summer of 2008, Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama illustrated that bipartisan consensus against oversight: He campaigned in Democratic primaries against immunity for telecom companies that violated customer privacy. But he promptly voted for immunity after he secured the Democratic nomination.

Obama went on to name his close friend, Harvard Law School constitutional scholar Cass Sunstein, as White House director of federal regulation at the Office of Management and Budget. This was after Sunstein, among other things during an illustrious careeer, co-authored Conspiracy Theories, a 2008 paper advocating disruptive communications tactics similar to those involved in the HBGary scandal. The paper bemoans, from the perspective of government leaders, the willingness of millions of Americans to believe in conspiracies. Sunstein, at left in a photo via Wikipedia, proposed five solutions to such bad ideas, including forbidding conspiracies or taxing them. For now, however, he argues that the best of these options for government leaders is secretly to hire agents — some of whom might be reporters or academics, or pretend to be such neutral analysts — to disrupt political circles where bad ideas are discussed.

In Obama Confidant’s Spine-Chilling Proposal, Salon columnist and constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald described Sunstein’s approach as follows:

So Sunstein isn’t calling right now for proposals (1) and (2) — having Government “ban conspiracy theorizing” or “impose some kind of tax on those who” do it — but he says “each will have a place under imaginable conditions.” I’d love to know the “conditions” under which the government-enforced banning of conspiracy theories or the imposition of taxes on those who advocate them will “have a place.” That would require, at a bare minimum, a repeal of the First Amendment. Anyone who believes this should, for that reason alone, be barred from any meaningful government position.

More currently, the federal government and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have been extremely unhappy with the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks exposed many secret State Department cables and threatened such important Chamber members as the Bank of America with disclosure of financial irregularities.

On Aug. 7, 2010, former Bush strategist Karl Rove went on Fox News to call for Assange’s death because of the disclosures.  In calling for such an extraordinary punishment before any country had even charged Assange with a crime, Rove was more than a mere pundit. A close friend and longtime colleague of Chamber of Commerce President Thomas Donohue, Rove boasted on his website that his clients have included Sweden’s governing party. As it happens, Assange visited Sweden later in August 2010 for a speech. He then bedded two attendees who separately invited him to stay with them in their apartments during his trip. The women then alleged sexual misconduct. Assange turned himself in and has been essentially under house arrest in the United Kingdom since then. He is appealing Sweden’s effort to return him to the country for more questioning and potential prosecution.

Read the rest of Kreig’s article by clicking HERE

Andrew Kreig is Justice Integrity Project Executive Director and co-founder. Andrew Kreig has two decades experience as an attorney and non-profit executive in Washington, DC. An author and longtime investigative reporter, his primary focus since 2008 has been exploring allegations of official corruption and other misconduct in federal agencies. Also, he has been a consultant and volunteer leader in advising several non-profit groups fostering cutting-edge applications within the communications industries. In 2008, he became a senior fellow with the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University and an affiliated research fellow with the Information Economy Project at George Mason University School of Law.

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