WikiLeaks
Today,
Tuesday 29 November 2016, WikiLeaks publishes in searchable format
more than 60 thousand emails from private intelligence firm HBGary.
The publication today marks the early release of US political
prisoner Barrett Brown, who was detained in 2012 and sentenced to 63
months in prison in connection with his journalism on Stratfor and
HBGary. Coinciding with Mr Brown's release from prison WikiLeaks is
publishing a searchable index of the HBGary emails. WikiLeaks
published the Stratfor emails in 2012.
The
HBGary emails are from four email accounts of key people from HBGary
and HBGary Federal. HBGary was founded in 2003 by Greg Hoglund to
provide cyber security-related services to corporate clients. A
separate entity, HBGary Federal, was managed by Aaron Barr to do
similar work for government agencies and so had staff with security
clearances and worked with companies such as Booz Allen Hamilton (one
of the contractors Edward Snowden worked for).
In
February 2011 Aaron Barr did an interview with the UK’s Finanical
Times that stated he had been investigating the internet activist
group Anonymous and claimed to have uncovered the real identities of
some of what he described as the leaders of the organisation. In
retaliation Anonymous penetrated Barr’s organisation and took
emails from the accounts of four key people from HBGary and HBGary
Federal: Aaron Barr and Greg Hoglund, but also Ted Vera (then Chief
Operating Officer at HBGary Federal) and Phil Wallisch, a former
Principal Technical Consultant.
These
emails and revelations from them started to be published on the
internet, predominantly through the work of Barrett Brown and a
crowd-sourced investigative journalism project he ran: Project PM. As
a result, later that month Barr was forced to step down, HBGary
Federal closed and HBGary, Inc. was sold to ManTech International.
This would have been little consolation to Mr Brown, who a month
later on 6 March 2012 had both his and his mother’s houses raided
by the FBI, seeking “Records relating to HBGary, Infragard,
Endgame Systems, Anonymous, LulzSec, IRC chats, Twitter,
wiki.echelon2.org, and pastebin.com.” Agents seized his
laptops.
Barrett
Brown’s work through Project PM was one of the first collaborative
investigations into the US corporate surveillance industry. Looking
into coporate firms that work hand-in-hand with the government to
surveil on citizens, Mr Brown was one of the first to shed light on
this unaccountable industry.
The
HBGary revelations that came out through the work of Barret Brown and
others showed that HBGary and related companies were involved in
plans to spread disinformation and to attack watchdog organisations,
including WikiLeaks and US Chamber Watch. For example, the emails
revealed a plan to form a group called Team Themis with a number of
companies from the industry to "ruin" WikiLeaks by
submitting false documents in the hope they would be published, as
well as discrediting WikiLeaks staff and supporters (including the
journalist Glenn Greenwald). HBGary was also bidding to fulfil a
tender from the US Air Force to assist it in manipulating social
media to spread propaganda about the Air Force.
The
emails also reveal that HBGary tried to discredit the watchdog group
US Chamber Watch, a critic of the US Chamber of Commerce, again
through disinformation. The plan was to make a "fake insider
persona" within US Chamber Watch to lead them to publicise false
information in an attempt to "prove that US Chamber Watch
cannot be trusted with information and/or tell the truth."
Barrett
Brown was indicted on felony counts due to his journalistic work on
the HBGary emails and other related corporations. He has been in
prison ever since, often being put into solitary confinement and
having his communications restricted. The HBGary emails largely
disappeared from the internet. Today the HBGary emails are safe for
all to search in honour of Mr Brown’s work and in celebration of
his release.
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