08/07/13 – Christian Stork – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, I'm Scott Horton here for WallStreetWindow.com.
Mike Swanson is a successful former hedge fund manager whose site is unique on the web.
Subscribers are allowed a window into Mike's very real main account and receive announcements and explanations for all his market moves.
Federal Reserve has been inflating the money supply to finance the bank bailouts and terror war overseas.
So, Mike's betting on commodities, mining stocks, European markets, and other hedges against a depreciating dollar.
Play along on paper or with real money and then be your own judge of Mike's investment strategies.
Let's see what happens at WallStreetWindow.com.
First though is our friend Christian Stork from WhoWhatWhy.com, WhoWhatWhy.com.
And this piece is a very good one, connections between Michael Hastings, Edward Snowden, and Barrett Brown, the war with the security state by Christian Stork at WhoWhatWhy.com.
Welcome back to the show, Christian.
How are you?
Doing well.
Thanks, Scott.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
And I sure appreciate your journalism, too.
We talked before about Barrett Brown and Project PM and et cetera, et cetera.
Why don't you give people a background in case they've never heard of Barrett Brown?
This is really important, everybody.
Listen up close.
Who's Barrett Brown, Christian?
Sure.
Barrett Brown is a journalist.
He penned a few articles for Vanity Fair.
He was known as a satirist on the border of doing satire and news.
His stuff was always very dry.
People likened him to H.L. Mencken, and he was a very eclectic person who had a very strange...
I don't want to say strange, necessarily, but an interesting personality.
He had substance abuse problems for some of his life, so he was just an all-around edgy character.
And he becomes acquainted with the hacking collective Anonymous, because he's just more or less prolific on the Internet, and they start frequenting the same Internet relay chats or IRCs.
And while with them, he's not, in any true sense of the word, a hacker.
He doesn't have the skills to break into securitized networks or anything that the big operatives in Anonymous consider to be a skill set, particularly World Security, the anonymous offshoot that Jeremy Hammond was allegedly a part of, and which took a turn for the worse when an FBI...
It turned out that their leader was an FBI informant.
But regardless, Brown, you know, he's not a hacker.
He doesn't have any particular skills in this realm, but he is in contact with a number of these people, and he does some work with them when they're doing their hashtag Optinesia and a number of other things they're doing to help facilitate the Arab Spring in its early days.
And Brown eventually remains in contact with them after Anonymous hacked the emails of the CEO of a cybersecurity firm known as HBGary Federal and its parent company, HBGary.
Now when Brown begins looking at these things, they're completely, you know, it's a correspondence between a CEO and other executives and his employees, and so, you know, the conversations are drawn out across months.
Well, hold it right there.
Let me interrupt you here for just a second and try to firm up a couple of things.
What I understand what you just told me is Bear Brown was not a hacker.
He didn't have the skills to be a hacker anymore, and I got the skills to be a hacker.
He's a journalist, and some people call them sort of an unofficial spokesman for Anonymous, although I don't think that was ever necessarily really the case.
I mean, they're Anonymous after all, and they don't have spokesmen, and there are many of them with different opinions.
Nobody even knows who they all are.
But he was not involved in breaking into anyone's computers.
At best, he was a bystander as somebody else was breaking into something else.
Is that correct?
That's correct.
He's not implicated in any of the Anonymous hacks at all.
The unofficial spokesman line comes from a brief stint he took over for Greg Hoosh.
Greg Hoosh was an Anonymous activist who was a hacker and who was outed because he had uploaded one of the first Anonymous wake-up propaganda calls.
I'm sure maybe your listeners are familiar with them, you know, short YouTube videos in which they list their next targets and why exactly they're targeting them.
So Hoosh was outed in a lawsuit by the Church of Scientology when Anonymous had attacked the Church of Scientology in 2008, and so he had already...his name was out in the public, so he basically became the go-to spokesperson for media organizations who were looking for answers or for at least input from Anonymous when these huge hacks would occur.
Barrett Brown, because he also frequented these internet relay chats and because he didn't use a pen name and published under his own name and had a public profile himself, he at points adopted that position of relaying information from Anonymous to journalists who were interested in hearing it.
So he was, in a sense, a go-to source for journalists looking for insight into Anonymous, but in terms of being an efficient spokesman, you're completely right.
Anonymous is, by definition, anonymous.
There is no hierarchy.
There's no structure.
No one could designate him a spokesperson even if they wanted to.
Right, exactly.
And that's what he told me when I introduced him as such.
When I interviewed him back in, I guess, 2010 and 2011 or something, and it was always really hard to understand him because he had a really bad phone connection there in New York or something.
It was kind of hard to understand him, but I'm pretty sure that was what he told me, was I'm no unofficial even anything.
You know, I can tell you about them, but I'm reporting on them.
I'm not one of them, kind of a thing.
Okay, and then the second thing is, please tell us about HBGary and how it was that they got into it with Anonymous in the first place, and then we can talk about Barrett's role.
Sure.
So HBGary is a big cybersecurity firm which has a subsidiary known as HBGary Federal.
That's actually since been dissolved, but HBGary Federal at the time was headed by a man named Aaron Barr.
Now, at the time, which was 2010, 2011, there were a number of high-profile anonymous attacks, in particular against PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard in relation to the WikiLeaks blockade that they were pioneering, and a whole range of other things.
I'm sure your listeners are familiar with it if they can conjure up memories from back then, but at the time, HBGary Federal's CEO had given an interview to the Financial Times in which he claimed that his firm had the technological ability to pinpoint who these hackers were, who Anonymous's, quote-unquote, beaters were.
And in retaliation, I mean, it was basically a product pitch.
Essentially, he's giving an interview to the world's premier business journal saying, I have all this great software that can track down these anonymous hucksters, and he didn't think that Anonymous would be reading the business press, and they noticed that he had claimed to get out them, so the next day they hacked the servers of HBGary and HBGary Federal.
That's funny.
These guys are so sophisticated, they've never heard of a Google alert, huh?
Precisely, yeah.
You're completely right.
There's a huge degree of grandiosity among some of these cybersecurity firms, which is really unwarranted, but regardless, Anonymous hacked the company's servers, uploaded upwards of 70,000 emails from Aaron Barr's personal account to the web and defaced the website of HBGary altogether.
Aaron Barr ended up having to resign in disgrace, and what Anonymous essentially had was this huge trove of emails, which, as I mentioned before, were completely written out of context.
It was revealing correspondence that went on between executives at HBGary and other firms over the course of the years.
Obviously, the details of many of the projects were hashed out, more likely in person-to-person meetings.
It was this really incomplete picture, masked in human communication between Aaron Barr and others, that Brad Brown and his research wiki, which is known as Project PM, became interested in going through, placing them on a linear timeline, categorizing them, and discovering whatever they could from within about the private security industry, particularly private intelligence contractors and the types who make these computer programs, which anyone familiar with Ed Snowden's recent leaks know are coming to bear with a very high degree of scariness in terms of how they have bearing over our lives, these programs which these cybersecurity firms contract out with intelligence agencies.
Okay, and this is what he got in so much trouble for, was basically just spreading the information around how you can help dig through this treasure trove of information.
I don't know if this is exactly the parallel that you're talking about with Snowden here or with Manning or whatever, but basically what he's in trouble for would be punishing the Washington Post for doing journalism based on what Snowden gave them or whatever.
The leak was already leaked.
It doesn't matter if they committed 100 felonies breaking into HBGary.
Once the information was all posted online, it was within Barrett Brown's right to post a link to that in every chat room on earth, right?
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Yeah, I mean, ostensibly, one would think that's his right, although, pardon me, the indictments for men are for three things, two of which are, I would consider completely specious, but if your listeners are interested in the full background, they should read my story, The Saga of Barrett Brown, also at whoatlaw.com, and they'll get to know how these indictments from the government were started.
The first indictment was for threatening a federal agent, in which Barrett Brown made a YouTube video exploring his anger that he had for the lead FBI agent who was harassing his mother and doing all sorts of shady law enforcement type things.
So Barrett Brown expressed his dismay in a pretty stupid manner and very thinly threatened to the FBI agent by saying, you know, I'm going to go after your kids, but he was referring to finding out who his children were and posting that and essentially making information about the FBI agent public.
Right, but let's clarify that.
We've spoken about this before.
He used some pretty imprecise language, but if you're trying to be honest and not just put words in his mouth and misinterpret it, when he says, oh, I'm going to get you, I'm sorry, I always forget the exact quote, but whatever exactly the words he used to make the threat, it was clear that all he meant was he's going to dox you.
He's going to Google search the hell out of you and publish every private thing about you that he can online.
That's not quite the same as I'm coming to burn your house down.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
But obviously the government was looking for anything they could get on him, which is basically why I've concluded and a number of other people who have examined the case have concluded that the charges are almost certainly just cutouts for what the real nut of the government's dispute is with him, which is that he had the gall to research these extremely powerful, well-connected firms that the government contracts work out to.
So the first indictment was threatening a federal agent.
The second indictment is perhaps the most dangerous one, which is trafficking in stolen authentication features, which essentially means that he had copied and pasted a link between internet relay chats that connected to a section of the trove of 70,000 emails, which ends up including the credit card information of subscribers.
It was actually not...
Pardon me.
I'm getting my hacks mixed up.
It wasn't the 70,000 emails that Project PM was examining.
It was the emails from Stratfor that Jeremy Hammond allegedly, or I suppose he's copped to a plea, but had hacked and had released.
And he was bringing them into Project PM's research orbit so that they could be incorporated into this nexus of the private intelligence contracting industry.
I see.
And now, is that still the same legal theory like I was talking about with going after the post for publishing what Snowden gives him kind of a thing?
I mean, even if it's, again, even if it's criminal to break into, even if it's against the law to break into Stratfor and steal all their email addresses, is there really, under your understanding, is there any reason to think that it's actually a crime for then Barrett to post that link somewhere and say, hey, look what somebody else did?
Well, this is just a huge legal gray area.
So I can't say with any certainty.
Obviously, it's clear where my sympathies lie and the fact that I think that the charge is ridiculous.
If you want to pursue...
Yeah, but I mean, do you know, have you, you know, can you report to us that any like legal minds agree with you or they think it's an open and shut case against him or not?
Or what do you think?
No.
No, actually, most legal minds are dumbfounded, at least the ones I've consulted.
I know that his lawyers, in particular, his new lawyers, Ahmed Gabor and Charles Swift, were very upset with the potential case law that could arise from a precedent being set in this whereby linking information, particularly that being done by a journalist, if there is, quote unquote, illegal information in that link, if by posting that link, you are trafficking in stolen data or stolen information.
So they're worried about a new precedent.
They're not looking at an old precedent and they're afraid that this old precedent might count.
They're saying this, if he's convicted, this would be a brand new thing in American law.
That's exactly right.
I mean, cybersecurity law is just like the Wild West in terms of there's no, I mean, this technology is very recent and it's almost a cliche at this point to say that the law has lagged behind the technology, especially with surveillance issues.
Right now, I'm sorry, you know, Christian, I'm sorry, because I've asked you so much about Barrett and especially Brown.
We've already covered on the show, but we got 11 minutes now to talk about our friend Michael Hastings, who recently died in a tragic single car accident in Los Angeles and his role in all of this and what it has to do with Barrett Brown and this whole saga.
Right.
So Hastings and Brown first become acquainted through the blogging consortium Truce Plant in 2009.
They were both very upset with the mainstream media.
They both saw themselves as outsiders, as rebels to the system, as it were.
Brown approaches Hastings with the idea for Project PM back in 2009, along with a number of other established journalists, including people from the New York Times.
At the time, Project PM, because this is before the hack emails, it was more of just an idea repository for multiple journalists looking for ways to improve the news media climate.
But eventually, Hastings says he's interested, remains in contact with Brown, but can't fully join forces on Project PM because he's got other commitments.
It turns out that when Brown first approached Hastings, Hastings said he couldn't initially join his other commitment that he's referring to with The Runaway General, which was his famous article that took down Stanley McChrystal.
Now, after the article about Stanley McChrystal, this huge media backlash occurred against Michael Hastings from mainstream media types, people who had seen him as violating the cardinal rule of access journalism, that he couldn't have quoted his subjects without their express approval.
Brown quickly pens an article for Vanity Fair titled, Why the Hacks Meet Michael Hastings, and then they blurbed each other's books, and a professional relationship begins to cement.
Now, according to members of Project PM who I spoke with, Hastings was affiliated with PM, but never really engaged in the gritty work of going through the emails and helping contribute to the research effort.
He mostly just communicated with Brown, usually as a source, and he rarely engaged in strategy sessions or actual workflow of Project PM.
Eventually, when Brown's house was first raided in early 2012, Hastings has an exclusive on the Brown raid in which he includes a copy of the search warrant, and he had gotten—my sources tell me that he had gotten that from Brown, and that it was his first time mentioning Brown at all, and his travails.
Now, then silence overcomes Michael Hastings.
He does not mention Barrett Brown for an entire year, until January 24, 2013, in which he tweets that leaders should get ready for their minds to be blown when discussing his new work on Barrett Brown.
So, Hastings makes plans to visit Brown in custody for an interview.
This is supposed to go on in June 2013, the interview, and in April, his first mention of Brown since the 2012—oh, excuse me, not April.
In early June, prior to the planned interview, his first mention of Brown since the 2012 raid is finally published, and it's in an article called, Why Democrats Love to Spy on Americans.
Your listeners can pull it up on BuzzFeed, I'm sure.
In it, he mentions Brown's work with Project PM and the prosecution in the context of Obama's war on missile blowers, and the war that Hastings seems to imply is beginning to creep into a war on journalists, like Brown.
Now, Brown eventually never meets with Hastings, because, obviously, Hastings dies in this one car crash in L.A. straightaway, just a few days after he published the article.
Now, according to sources who were briefed on the exchanges between Brown and Hastings, Brown had specifically been asked by Hastings about the Romas coin revelations of Project PM.
Now, if any of your listeners are interested, they can look it up.
It's R-O-M-A-S backslash C-O-I-N, and it was the name given to a contract held by the U.S. government for an expansive campaign of mass surveillance and data mining against the Arab world.
Now, it was discussed in the context of a recompete for the contract that caught the eye of H.P. Gary Federal and its CEO, Aaron Barr, who then sought out TASD Corporation to form a consortium of firms that could wrest control of the contract from its current holder, Northrop Grumman.
And it's clear from discussion that the program centered around mobile phone application development, and there are constant references throughout the emails and correspondence between Aaron Barr and other executives for things like semantic analysis, latent semantic indexing.
And these indicate that they're looking, or at least I think it's pretty fair to suppose that the firms involved are looking for a way to derive meaning from the communication they're eavesdropping on without having to have an analyst pour over it.
So, automated dissection of communication.
And this would seem especially important, because the targets are members of a foreign culture, which, obviously, American analysts, it would be pretty hard to derive meaning from a lot of what they're saying.
So, this was of particular importance to Michael Hastings, at least according to those who heard his discussions with Sarah Brown.
And we, in the article, explore the plausibility of whether these things would have been important for Hastings to have noted, because this is all in the context of the email that Hastings had sent out about 12 hours—or, excuse me, about 15 hours—before he died to friends and colleagues, in which he said that he's under investigation by the FBI regarding the NSA and, obviously, things that had to do with the Regent Edward Snowden leak.
So, we use that as an indicator and cross-reference it with other things that he had discussed that we know about.
Like I just mentioned, the Ramos coin contract.
He had also published an article in May of 2012 on propaganda efforts by the State Department, and in that article, he discusses the persona management software, which also is littered across the correspondence of Aaron Barr and the Project PM emails.
And persona management refers to software by which an individual person can control however many fake online persona with their own, you know, cultural, complete background, geolocation identifiers—everything to make the common man believe that these avatars are completely real people.
And it's particularly important in the context of what's known as information operations or psyops—psychological operations—in terms of swaying public opinion, either on public fora or in discussion—online discussion of some sort.
So, he referenced those in a 2012 article, and since there was heavy overlap with the Project PM emails, we discussed their importance, as well.
And then the final company, which, although it's not indicated he was expressly working on, nor has he mentioned it particularly, we think is an interest—may have been one of his angles on the Brown story, which is that of Endgame Systems.
Now, Endgame Systems is probably the most secretive company on Earth in the Sarah Brown emails—or in the Project PM emails that they're studying.
And Endgame Systems, what it specializes in, is selling what are known as zero-day exploits, which are software vulnerabilities that are not previously known until the day of the attack, which means developers had zero days to patch the problem, by definition.
So, these are essentially embedded entry points in software that can sell on the black market for millions of dollars.
There's actually a recent New York Times piece a few weeks ago—it might have been last month—that explained how the biggest consumers of these used to be software companies themselves.
So, Apple would—or a hacker would find an entry point in Apple OSX software, and then they would sell it back to Apple, and Apple would give them a free t-shirt for a very limited amount of money.
But now, because hacking and cyber warfare is such a priority in both the U.S. and of powers across the world, its biggest market is among intelligence agencies, because they're looking for ways to hack into other countries' computer networks.
And Endgame Systems, which specializes in software vulnerabilities that can be penetrated before it's ever known— You got one minute.
All right.
Well, I'll just allow a better expert to sum it up for your listeners.
If they want, they should read James Bamford's recent piece in Wired, which explains at the end what Endgame does quite succinctly.
But their Premier software, which is known as Pronesaw, functions as a user-friendly map that tracks servers and routers across the world and maps out all the hard and software attached to their net, including geolocation.
So a user can pull up the map, designate a target country like China, enter the name or address of the facility they're trying to penetrate, like a People's Liberation Army facility, and it will pull up what entry points exist for all the software and hardware that is connected to the internet in that building.
So Endgame Systems is a massive, massive partner in the American quest for cyber war dominance.
Right.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry we're going to have to leave it there, but we're going to I know you're going to keep writing about this and I'm going to keep interviewing you about it.
Thank you very much, Christian.
Thank you so much.
All right.
That is Christian Stork.
He writes for WhoWhatWhy.com.
WhoWhatWhy.com.
This one is connections between Michael Hastings, Edward Snowden and Barrett Brown.
The war with the security state.
We'll be right back with Dan Ellsberg after this.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here for TheBumperSticker.com.
I created it, but quickly sold to Rick so I could do this instead.
In the decades since, he's made one hell of a great company.
TheBumperSticker.com makes digitally printed, photo quality, full color bumper stickers for your band or your business, as well as magnets, adhesive vinyl decals and labels for products and industrial use and your political cause or campaign, too.
TheBumperSticker.com also offers full custom graphic design for bringing your idea to reality.
Let TheBumperSticker.com help you get the word out.
That's TheBumperSticker.com.
At TheBumperSticker.com.
Tell them you heard it here.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here for the Council for the National Interest at CouncilForTheNationalInterest.org.
Are you sick of the neocons in the Israel lobby pretending as though they've earned some kind of monopoly on foreign policy wisdom in Washington, D.C.?
These peanut clowns who've never been right about anything?
Well, the Council for the National Interest is pushing back, putting America first and telling the lobby to go take a hike.
The empire's bad enough without the neocons making it all about the interests of a foreign state.
Help CNI promote peace.
Visit their site at CouncilForTheNationalInterest.org and click donate under about us at the top of the page.
That's CouncilForTheNationalInterest.org.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here for Rocky Mountain Miners at RockyMountainMiners.com.
Ever wanted to destroy the Federal Reserve System?
Now's your chance.
New free market currencies are making our fake government money a thing of the past and good riddance.
If you want to mine new bitcoins and litecoins into circulation, you need a computer set up to crack the codes to the new coins.
Get the Prospector from RockyMountainMiners.com.
It's ready to do the work right out of the box.
Crack the equations, spend the money.
Use promo code SCOTTHORTONSHOW and save $100.
Get all the info and get the Prospector at RockyMountainMiners.com.
Hey y'all, Scott here hawking stickers for the back of your truck.
They've got some great ones at LibertyStickers.com.
Get your son killed, Jeb Bush 2016.
FDR, no longer the worst president in American history.
The National Security Agency, blackmailing your congressman since 1952.
And USA, sometimes we back Al Qaeda, sometimes we don't.
And there's over a thousand other great ones on the wars, police, state elections, the Federal Reserve, and more at LibertyStickers.com.
They'll take care of all your custom printing for your bandier business at TheBumperSticker.com, LibertyStickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
Hey y'all, Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new project, Listen and Think Audio at ListenAndThink.com.
They've got two new audiobooks read by the deepest voice in libertarianism, the great historian Jeff Riggenbach.
Our Last Hope, Rediscovering the Lost Path to Liberty by Michael Meharry of the Tenth Amendment Center is available now.
And Beyond Democracy, co-authored by Frank Karsten of the Mises Institute Netherlands and journalist Carl Beckman will be released this month.
And they're only just getting started.
So check out ListenAndThink.com.
You may be able to get your first audiobook absolutely free.
That's ListenAndThink Audio at ListenAndThink.com.