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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