All right, y'all welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest on the show is Marcy Wheeler, a.k.a.
Empty Wheel, the American blogger from FireDogLake and also all over the place, The Huffington Post and Daily Kos and The Guardian online.
And boy, we got a couple of important articles to discuss today.
The Disinformation Campaign Bank of America Considered and Security Firms Pitching Bank of America on WikiLeaks Response Proposed Targeting Glenn Greenwald.
Very important stuff.
Welcome to the show, Empty Wheel.
How are you?
Hey, thanks for having me.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
So, my man, Glenn Greenwald, somebody's messing with him.
What happened?
What's going on?
The background story is there's this group, Anonymous, and a couple of days ago this private security firm, HBRE, came out and said, hey, we've identified all the leaders of Anonymous.
Anonymous is the group that's been hacking people like Visa and MasterCard for trying to shut down WikiLeaks.
So in response to that, Anonymous hacked them, hacked the security firm, and they released these documents online, 50,000 emails online, and in those emails was this presentation that these three security firms were pitching to Bank of America back in December to try and help them push back against WikiLeaks.
Remember that WikiLeaks is rumored to have a file that may drop sometime soon implicating Bank of America, and so these guys were pitching Bank of America to help them respond to WikiLeaks.
And in that pitch, so it's a PowerPoint slide, one of the things they kind of...
They're offering to do a bunch of things.
They even talk about hacking WikiLeaks, which would be illegal.
But one of the things they propose doing, or one of the things they do for WikiLeaks is give what they purport to be.
It's wrong, but they purport to be a map of the important people behind WikiLeaks.
They include Glenn in that, and then they have a separate slide specifically saying if we can get people like Glenn Greenwald to stop supporting WikiLeaks, they're going to go under.
And did they say anything specifically about how they would attempt to persuade Glenn Greenwald to change his attitude?
Yeah, that's where it gets really ridiculous.
They talk about...
This is a direct quote.
These are established professionals that have a liberal bent, but ultimately most of them, if pushed, will choose professional preservation over cause, such is the mentality of most business professionals.
In other words, what they're saying is if you push Glenn Greenwald and you challenge him with his professionalism, then he's going to give up on WikiLeaks and, I don't know, maybe stop supporting them, stop advocating for free speech, and stop advocating for transparency.
Now, anybody who knows...
Anybody who's even read Glenn Greenwald for the past however many years he's been writing knows that's ridiculous.
Right, I'm thinking of Bugs Bunny and his little sign.
He don't know me very well, do he?
I know, and these guys were trying to get Bank of America to pay for this stuff.
It's like you could read Glenn for a week and understand that you're not going to...
I mean, first of all, Digby pointed this out yesterday.
Glenn Greenwald's job is screaming to support the First Amendment.
This is what he does.
It's his job.
So he's been doing it for years, and he's been doing it under a lot of pressure.
There's a lot of people out there who would love to shut Glenn Greenwald up, and he keeps going and keeps going and keeps going, and they think that they're going to be able to somehow threaten him with claims of professionalism, and that'll shut him up.
And, you know, it's hysterically funny, and I hope that what we don't know actually is whether Bank of America did pay for this service.
There's a lot more in the dump, and I'm going to be writing about this coming up, but there's a lot more about ongoing negotiations with these security firms and the Chamber of Commerce to go after kind of anti-chamber, web-based organizations.
But we don't know whether Bank of America, thus far, I don't think anyone's seen any evidence that they actually got the contract with Bank of America.
It just goes to attribute to, like, how stupid these guys are, and also to what they're willing to go to.
I mean, presumably, you know, they're going to pick out people who have close ties to anti-chamber efforts and try and shut them up, too, with this claim that we, fighting back against corporate power, are all about professionalism.
Yeah, well, you know, it's funny, because especially when the subject, and this is what they're apparently blind to, when the subject is the First Amendment, and as you're saying, this is particularly his job, is taking exactly these stands.
There's just no other stand for him to take and still be him on this at all.
He'd have to go be a lawyer again, you know, on the other side of First Amendment issues, I guess.
So that goes to their cluelessness, but what I think is really the funnest part of this, other than them, in their ignorance, trying to target Glenn, is just the whole thing about how this security firm had bragged to the Financial Times that, oh, we're on to this group Anonymous, we're going to get them, and immediately Anonymous hacked them and posted 44,000 emails from their security company, and as you quote in here, they mocked them.
You've identified us, huh, from our bogus IP addresses on our IRC chat?
That's some pretty good investigative work you guys did.
They just mocked them and exposed, put their entire company online.
That's hilarious to me.
I just love the age of Wikileaks.
They also say, you know, the security firm, HBGary, was trying to pitch the FBI.
Go to the FBI and say, here, look, we've done all the investigative work you need to do to take down Anonymous, and they're like, you're not going to sell it to the FBI.
You know why?
Here, we just made it available for free, and when you read more of the emails, it makes it clear how much of kind of scummy consultants these guys are.
I mean, they're just trying to do anything to get, you know, again, the Chamber of Commerce ones are some really eye-opening ones, to get these big contracts to do work for, quote, unquote, intelligence, and we know they're incompetent at security because they were hacked using a fairly simple hack, as far as I understand it, and we know that they aren't very good at collecting intelligence because, again, in what they were saying about Glenn Greenwald, they were like, oh, you know, his name just came to the forefront in December as he was getting involved in Wikileaks, and it's like, you know, Glenn has been writing about Wikileaks for years, and to the extent that Glenn has fame or notoriety, however you want to consider it, it's also years old, and so these guys apparently have no idea who Glenn Greenwald is, yet they're trying to sell themselves as great intelligence collectors.
Now, who else is on this list other than Glenn Greenwald to be targeted?
One of the people that's on the list is David House, who is a computer researcher in the Boston area, but he's best known in the whole Wikileaks saga as just about the only one who's regularly visiting Manning, Bradley Manning, in Quantico.
So, you know, he visited Manning last week, and he's the only person who's actually talked to Manning directly, so he's the one who's been saying, you know, the isolation from other people really seems to be getting to him mentally.
That, you know, they identified him as one of the people that they might target, and again, David House is somebody who people are trying to insinuate, well, you know, if you're visiting Bradley Manning, then what does that mean?
They also, one of the other interesting people that's on there is Jacob Appelbaum, who is one of the people, and actually Brigitte Young's daughter.
They're two of the people that we know the government's, not subpoenaed, but they tried to order all their Twitter information, and Twitter actually unsealed the request, and they're going to court on that next week.
So they're two of the people that we know the government's looking into to try and investigate Julian Assange and somehow bring him down for espionage or whatever they think they're going to do.
Now back to David House for a minute here.
As far as I know, there's no rumor or indication or anything that would say that Bradley Manning is behind the Bank of America leak, right?
I mean, so why in the world would Bank of America want to take on WikiLeaks from the angle of going after Bradley Manning's friend?
What could possibly be their advantage in that?
Right.
I mean, and I don't know whether these quote-unquote intelligence, private intelligence people understood that or not, but it's clear that they don't have a very good list of everyone who's involved with WikiLeaks.
It's also clear that they don't really have an understanding of what, I mean, as far as I understand it, they don't have a very good understanding of how WikiLeaks works.
Hold it right there.
I'm sorry.
We've got to take this break.
This is Marcy Wheeler, Empty Wheel, from FireDogLake.
After this.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
We're talking with Empty Wheel, Marcy Wheeler from FireDogLake.com and a bunch of other websites, too.
And we're talking about this security firm that's pitching to Bank of America a plan of action to undermine those who support WikiLeaks.
And maybe I kind of jumped the gun in the sloppy in the introduction to the show and wanted to jump straight to the Glenn Greenwald part, but maybe we can go back and you can tell me a little bit about what you know or what they say anyway about the Bank of America, WikiLeaks, and what it is that would have them so upset that they would be going to clowns like those who represent this security firm to try to do something about it.
Well, actually, I mean, there were reports yesterday that Assange was kind of playing down whether the ultimate Bank of America leak is going to be that big or not.
And that's partly because he's in a bunch of squabbles and it's not clear when we're actually going to get that.
But I just think Bank of America panicked when it became clear at the end of November that they didn't know what was going to be released in WikiLeaks.
It could be anything.
It could be a disgruntled executive.
And, of course, they've got so much dirty laundry to hide.
I think they went and tried to figure out what was in that dirty laundry.
And it was part of, I mean, what these firms are pitching is just kind of classic corporate, I mean, it's corporate espionage, but it's also crisis management.
And these firms just decided to use Bank of America's panic moment to try and get a big contract.
Now, one of the things that's interesting about this is they talk about the Department of Justice having referred the law firm that they were working with here.
And I'm sort of curious what role the Department of Justice has in Bank of America's attempt to preempt any kind of WikiLeaks because that would be sort of curious, I think.
The Justice Department referred Bank of America to this security firm.
To a law firm that, in turn, was bringing together these three security firms.
And the law firm's called Hunton & Williams.
And what seems to be happening is Hunton & Williams is going in as the prime contractor to people.
It seems to be the same thing that they're pitching with the Chamber of Commerce as well to bring together these three security firms to offer all sorts of, like, a combination of data analysis to see how other people are communicating online and what they claim to be as intelligence, but looks like it's a bunch of incompetent Google searches.
And some, you know, they promise to do kind of basically in the lot, to attempt to discredit, to troll social media and say things in social media to try and combat, you know, people who are hurting the reputations of corporations or what have you.
So, I mean, that seems to be the plan.
I'm just actually really curious.
One of the firms involved, Palantir, which does the data analysis side, is a huge government contractor.
They do defense and intelligence contracting.
And that seems to be part of the cred here, is that these defense contractors are going to the private sector and saying, we can do the same kind of intelligence analysis we do for the federal government for you in the private sector.
But that means they're going to point that at us, the citizens who are just trying to protect free speech and so on.
Right.
All right.
Well, I want to change the subject, but then again, I'm not sure I asked you all the right questions about this one.
So if you have anything more on this topic, please go ahead.
No, I think the real important message is that what we're seeing is corporations working with private intelligence firms to try and push back against citizen activists.
Well, I sure like what Anonymous is doing here.
Things like this, I mean, just think of what's going to happen or what's already happening over at Greenwald's place today.
Oh, so you think you're going to make me stop talking about the First Amendment, huh?
I mean, we know how he is.
He just gets better and better no matter what happens.
Yeah.
Trying to pressure Glenn Greenwald to shut up is just about the last way you'll actually get him to shut up.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
All right.
Now, here's the most important thing in the whole wide world, and that's the lawless torture regime.
And you've got a write-up here called Look Forward and Promote the Torturers.
And it's about this Associated Press investigative piece about all the individual CIA torturers and how great their torture has been for their careers.
Could you please tell us a bit more about that?
Yeah.
Basically what they did is they went back at all of the major screw-ups that the CIA has been involved with, a bunch of which are torture, some of which are the things like shooting down a missionary's plane in Peru a decade ago or more.
But what they do is they track what happened to the CIA people who were involved.
So what happened to the guy who killed an Afghan by freezing him to death back in 2001?
What happened to the woman who okayed the rendition to torture of a German by mistake?
And as it turns out, a lot of these people are now running our counterterrorism policy.
Some of them are in charge of the Middle Eastern Division and CIA.
Some of them are in charge of the global jihad analysis and CIA.
And it's not that surprising because John Brennan, who comes out of the CIA, was in charge.
He was involved in all of these things, too, and he's Obama's top counterterrorism advisor.
And who knows, in ten minutes, the guy we rendered to these people to Egypt to torture them might assume, might become president of Egypt.
But it seems like everybody who was involved in the torture programs that started under Cheney, all have fared very well since then.
Well, I'm sure you saw, and I think Greenwald, as is usually the case, put it best about the ratification of all that Cheney did wrong.
I mean, you look at, you think back on when Bush left office and his approval rating was in the high 20s, I think, and people really elected Obama to repudiate that Bush legacy and say to the world, kind of sorry about that, but we're going to try to fix it now or whatever.
These are all the things the American people had decided, basically what were wrong with Dick Cheney and George Bush, and then now they've won the argument because Obama has ratified it.
The fact that the American people turned against all this, finally, is irrelevant because now it's been ratified by a Democratic president.
It's permanent, like when Eisenhower didn't repeal the New Deal or when Richard Nixon expanded the Great Society, that kind of thing.
Once a program is set in force by one side, the other side might be against it, but once they take power and don't stop it, now it's permanent.
There's no undoing it.
They won.
Cheney won.
I mean, I think Obama in his first day said, well, I'm going to quit Mo, and then about two weeks later he kind of decided, oh, maybe it wasn't going to be that easy.
There are two issues.
One is it's clear he was elected to reverse all of this.
It hasn't happened.
I mentioned John Brennan again.
He's Obama's homeland security advisor in the National Security Council.
He was originally considered to take over CIA, but he wasn't going to get any Senate confirmation because he's tied too closely to torture and to Cheney's illegal wiretapping program.
But that's the thing.
I mean, this guy was right in the thick of things, and he's one of Obama's top advisors, and I think once Obama came to rely on him, he no longer had the ability, because he's not the expert.
So he allowed his expert to tell him whether to get rid of the torturers or not, and instead they've all now.
And the other thing is they not only were brutal, they not only engaged in torture, but they were incompetent.
And so what does it say?
These people who were both incompetent and broke the law have been promoted up and are the ones telling us what we should know, how we should defend the country from terrorism.
Right.
Well, it means things like what you just talked about, the point man on all these extraordinary renditions is about to become the next puppet dictator of Egypt.
That's what it leads to right there.
Yeah, I'm hoping that doesn't happen, and we'll see.
But the fact that Hillary Clinton all but endorsed that on Saturday and doesn't understand why both for Americans and for Egyptians that's just utterly unacceptable, because to people in D.C.
I think it's just, you know, well, they've been working with him for two decades, so it's okay.
He's one of us.
And it's like it's not acceptable.
It's not acceptable to continue to promote and to, you know, kind of commit more and more to these people who have carried out these horrible actions.
All right, well, I'm sorry we're all out of time, but I really appreciate your time and your work over there at Firedog Lake, Marcy.
Thanks a lot.
Take care.
All right, everybody, that is Marcy Wheeler.
She's from Firedog Lake, emptywheel.firedoglake.com, and you can, of course, find her at the Huffington Post and all over the place as well as Antiwar Radio.
We'll be right back.
