02.14.11

Odious corporate spying firms, continued

Posted in Cyberterrorism at 12:41 pm by George Smith

At Cryptome, a proposal put together by HBGary F, Palantir Technologies and Berico Technologies.

Here.

It is a draft copy pitch for the team’s services to corporate America, presumably for the purposes of spying on and dirty-tricking critics or adversaries. It is part of the document leak which resulted when the hacking group Anonymous struck back at Aaron Barr of HBGary Federal for exposing members in a story to the Financial Times.

One paragraph implies creation of fraudulent content on the web in order to discredit targets:

If needed or desired we have the capability to create very realistic web content to engage specific audiences to gather more specific information … This encompasses persona creation, landing pages and other new media content. For this to be successful it [sic] requires a strong understanding of the target as well as a strong understanding how to use such techniques in operations.

The individuals involved in the pitch are Aaron Barr of HBGary Federal, Doug Philippone of Palantir, and Guy Filippelli of Berico.

Philippone “commanded multiple Joint Special Operations Command outstations in support of the global war on terror. Doug ran the foreign fighter campaign on the Syrian border in 2005 to stop the flow of suicide bombers into Baghdad and helped to ensure a successful Iraqi election.

The corporate pitch was for use by Hunton & Williams, the law firm identified as intermediary for connecting the spying firms with Bank of America and the Chamber of Commerce, for use in plans to target WikiLeaks, Glenn Greenwald, ThinkProgress and other, as yet unnamed, journalists.

Related: The ‘Odious corporate spying firms’ collection.

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