by fiddler
(Previous Newton's Third Law posts are here, here and here.)
Benjamin Spock de Vries says he is not Commander X, one of the 'leaders' of Anonymous whom Aaron Barr of HBGary supposedly found online. Apparently, Barr wrote several memos in which he connected Commander X's identity to de Vries, all of which are included among the memos leaked by Anonymous. This mistaken identification led to an oddly amusing exchange, when Barr contacted him during the attack on HBGary by Anonymous:
"I am not Anonymous," de Vries told me during an agitated phone conversation last night. "I have never logged onto any Anonymous sites. I don't use IRC. I couldn't hack my way out of a paper bag."In fact, de Vries says he hadn't even heard of the whole HBGary-Anonymous mishegas until Barr contacted him on February 5 via his Facebook alter ego, Julian Goodspeak (yes, really), and begged de Vries to please call off the DDOS attack on HBGary's servers.
What attack? de Vries asked.
What followed was a weirdly elliptical conversation in which Barr chatted with the person he thought was Commander X while de Vries thought they were talking about something else entirely.
The reason Barr thought De Vries was the elusive X? Because de Vries is the founder and admin of a Facebook Group called Global Strike 2011, which appears to be popular with the Anons. That, or many of its members are just particularly enamored of Guy Fawkes masks and wicked cool handles like Anarcho Femmina and Anonomous AnonopsEsp (then again, who isn't?).
Barr thought he had cracked the Anons by taking information from Facebook, Linked In, and Twitter and "correlating" it with activity inside IRC chats conducted by actual members of Anonymous. So he made what appears to be wildly inaccurate assumptions based on the facts that a) de Vries was the admin for Global Strike 2011, ii) fans of Anonymous frequented the site, and z) activity on that site occurred at more or less the same time as statements made inside IRC.
Ipso facto, de Vries is Commander X. Also, Justin Bieber is Lady Gaga's love child. Pass it on.
I attempted to contact Mr. Barr for comment via email. I'm still awaiting his response.
Granted, de Vries is not your average Joe. He's a Certified Permaculture Designer, which means he designs sustainable agricultural systems, as well as a bit of an anarchist. He says he wants to change the world not by computer hacking, but by "economic action of passive resistance, mainly by gardening." He fears for his physical safety and claims he has holed up in a "crack hotel" to avoid unwelcome visits from HBGary henchmen....
And since de Vries hasn't been targeted by the FBI during its recent crackdown on suspected Anonymous hackers, it's unlikely that he'd be involved at all, aside from his involuntarily being tagged "it" by Barr.
But Barr's mistake raises other considerations:
The problem here is bigger than De Vries, Barr, HBGary, Anonymous or even WikiLeaks. It's about what happens when you mine data from different sources, employ dubious assumptions, and leap to erroneous conclusions. It's too easy to get the wrong guy. And if you think this doesn't happen, ask Khaled Masri, a German citizen who was ‘rendered' to Afghanistan by the CIA in 2003 and tortured for five months, based on a case of mistaken identity. Or Oregon attorney Brandon Mayfield, who was wrongly arrested for bombing a train in Madrid in 2004 and only got sprung because the Spanish police did their homework and found the actual bomber. If you believe the NSA isn't mining data to locate terrorist threats before they strike, you just haven't been paying attention. If you fit the wrong profile or hit the wrong data points, you could be an innocent victim, like Masri, Mayfield, or de Vries. Let's just hope they're better at data mining than Aaron Barr is.
Meanwhile, someone who says he's the real Commander X has a few things to say in this interview with IT World about how Anonymous works and the various other groups the collective is associated with -- and about HBGary.
...I'd like to switch to a few questions about HBGary, if that's alright. Have you ever had any contact with Aaron Barr or anyone else from HBGary?
Aaron Barr knows better than to contact me. Trust me, he is losing sleep waiting for what comes next. His life is basically destroyed now. And he deserves it. As for what else I could do to Mr. Barr, that is for me to delight in and him to lose sleep over.
Did you have any involvement in the hack that exposed all those emails?
Actually, no. I was contacted by Anon Ops the moment they had perused his "report" to let me know the PLF and myself figured prominently. The HBGary attack was done by Anonymous. As for who? Confidential.
One of the stories floating about after the hack is that HBGary had decompiled code for Stuxnet, and now that's in the hands of the Anons. Any truth to that?
Absolutely none. Anonymous does NOT create viruses or other malicious code. Ever. It's one of the guiding principles and it is never broken....
Have you ever been contacted by US law enforcement as a result of your activities with PLF or Anon?
Contacted? Yeah they send me Xmas cards. LOL.
I have been in FBI custody for my "unlawful activities," and I have had computers and other communications devices confiscated, or stolen as I see it.
So they know who you are?
I didn't say that. They have not made a connection between Commander X and any one of the 40 people they have f***ed with. They are trying though.
You’ve said "I don't want to be famous I want to be free. Not hunted like an animal or stalked like a criminal." Do you feel hunted and stalked?
F*** wouldn't you?
Yes. So why do it?
Because I live to protect the innocent and defenseless. Because it's the right thing to do and someone has to do it. Because it's fun kicking the ass of tyrants and human rights violators. Because it's who I am.
HBGary's primary method of data sifting is described here, with illustrations from some of the leaked files with names removed. The article also points out Barr's stalker-like behavior and questionable ethics:
When Aaron Barr was finalizing a recent computer security presentation for the U.S. Transportation Security Administration, a colleague had a bit of good-natured advice for him: “Scare the shit out of them!”
In retrospect, this may not have been the advice Barr needed. As CEO of the government-focused infosec company HBGary Federal, Barr had to bring in big clients — and quickly — as the startup business hemorrhaged cash. To do so, he had no problem with trying to “scare the sh*t out of them.” When working with a major DC law firm in late 2010 on a potential deal involving social media, for instance, Barr decided that scraping Facebook to stalk a key partner and his family might be a good idea. When he sent his law firm contact a note filled with personal information about the partner, his wife, her family and her photography business, the result was immediate.
“Thanks. I am not sure I will share what you sent last night — he might freak out.”
This rather creepy behavior became common; Barr used it as a sign of his social media prowess. Another target of his investigations went to “a Jewish Church in DC, the Temple Micah.” Someone else “married @ the Inn at Perry Cabin in St. Michaels, MD (non-denominational ceremony).” Barr was even willing to helpfully guesstimate the ages of children in photographs (“they have 2 kids, son and daughter look to be 7 and 4″).... With one potential client, Barr sifted the man’s social media data and then noted that “I am tempted to create a person from his highschool and send him a request, but that might be overstepping it.”...
As the money ran out on HBGary Federal, Barr increasingly had no problem “overstepping it.” In November, when a major U.S. bank wanted a strategy for taking down WikiLeaks, Barr immediately drafted a presentation in which he suggested “cyber attacks against the infrastructure to get data on document submitters. This would kill the project. Since the servers are now in Sweden and France, putting a team together to get access is more straightforward.”
Faking documents seemed like a good idea, too, documents which could later be “called out” so as to make WikiLeaks look unreliable....
When the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wanted to look into some of its opponents, Barr teamed with two other security companies and went nuts, proposing that the Chamber create an absurdly expensive “fusion cell” of the kind “developed and utilized by Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC)” — and costing $2 million a month. And if the fusion cell couldn’t turn up enough opposition research, the security firms would be happy to create honeypot websites to lure the Chamber’s union-loving opponents in order to grab more data from them.
The security companies even began grabbing tweets from liberal activists and mapping the connections between people using advanced link analysis software most often used by the intelligence community....
How did Barr, a man with long experience in security and intelligence, come to spend his days as a CEO e-stalking clients and their wives on Facebook? Why did he start performing “reconnaissance” on the largest nuclear power company in the United States? Why did he suggest pressuring corporate critics to shut up, even as he privately insisted that corporations “suck the lifeblood out of humanity”? And why did he launch his ill-fated investigation into Anonymous, one which may well have destroyed his company and damaged his career?
Thanks to his leaked e-mails, the downward spiral is easy enough to retrace. Barr was under tremendous pressure to bring in cash, pressure which began on Nov. 23, 2009.
That’s when Barr started the CEO job at HBGary Federal. Its parent company, the security firm HBGary, wanted a separate firm to handle government work and the clearances that went with it, and Barr was brought in from Northrup Grumman to launch the operation.
In an e-mail announcing Barr’s move, HBGary CEO Greg Hoglund told his company that “these two are A+ players in the DoD contracting space and are able to ‘walk the halls’ in customer spaces. Some very big players made offers to Ted and Aaron last week, and instead they chose HBGary. This reflects extremely well on our company. ‘A’ players attract ‘A’ players.”
Barr at first loved the job. In December, he sent an e-mail at 1:30am; it was the “3rd night in a row I have woken up in the middle of the night and can’t sleep because my mind is racing. It’s nice to be excited about work, but I need some sleep.”
Barr had a huge list of contacts, but turning those contacts into contracts for government work with a fledgling company proved challenging. Less than a year into the job, HBGary Federal looked like it might go bust.
On Oct. 3, 2010, HBGary CEO Greg Hoglund told Aaron that “we should have a pow-wow about the future of HBGary Federal. [HBGary President] Penny and I both agree that it hasn’t really been a success… You guys are basically out of money and none of the work you had planned has come in.”
Aaron agreed. “This has not worked out as any of us have planned to date and we are nearly out of money,” he said.
While he worked on government contracts, Barr drummed up a little business doing social media training for corporations using, in one of his slides, a bit of research into one Steven Paul Jobs.
The training sessions, following the old “scare the sh*t out of them” approach, showed people just how simple it was to dredge up personal information by correlating data from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and more. At $1,000 per person, the training could pull in tens of thousands of dollars a day, but it was sporadic. More was needed; contracts were needed, preferably multi-year ones.
The parent company also had issues. A few weeks after the discussions about closing up HBGary Federal, HBGary President Penny Leavy-Hoglund (Greg’s wife), sent an e-mail to her sales team, telling them “to work a quota and to bring in revenue in a timely manner. It’s not ‘optional’ as to when it needs to close, if you haven’t met your number, the closing needs to happen now, not later. You need to live, eat, breath and ensure you meet your number, not kind of hit it, MEET IT… Guys, no one is making their quota.”
She concluded darkly, “I have some serious doubts about some people’s ability to do their job. There will be changes coming shortly and those decisions will be new people’s to make.”
And then, unexpectedly, came the hope of salvation.
By October 2010, Barr was under considerable stress. His CEO job was under threat, and the e-mails show that the specter of divorce loomed over his personal life.
On Oct. 19, a note arrived. HBGary Federal might be able to provide part of “a complete intelligence solution to a law firm that approached us.” That law firm was DC-based powerhouse Hunton & Williams, which boasted 1,000 attorneys and terrific contacts. They had a client who wanted to do a little corporate investigative work, and three small security firms thought they might band together to win the deal....
Palantir would provide its expensive link analysis software running on a hosted server, while Berico would “prime the contract supplying the project management, development resources and process/methodology development.” HBGary Federal would come alongside to provide “digital intelligence collection” and “social media exploitation” — Barr’s strengths....
Barr may have wanted to cast his company's net wider than major banks and the intelligence community, though it's unclear whether he was actually going to turn over info to the FBI or not. He was also trying to get a contract with Apple Computers in relation to social-media-mining software but despite his efforts that seems to have gone nowhere.
Since the hack, Anonymous, or people portraying themselves as members of Anonymous, seem to have scared HBGary Federal pretty thoroughly. The company was scheduled to have a booth and multiple speakers at the annual RSA Security Conference in San Francisco, but it backed out, citing unspecified threats to personnel. I'm not sure that this cardboard sign at their booth should have sparked that great a reaction, but the primary contact with Anonymous concerning the conference may well have been elsewhere. The link at the last article concerning threats leads to a 404 error page. However, this ZDNet article on their leaving the conference has this image from their booth:
As you may recall, the US Chamber of Commerce was among the organizations for whom HBGary was devising anti-Anonymous strategies, although they have delivered a non-denial denial and said they hadn't hired HBGary. Well, no, they hadn't, not exactly; they asked HBGary to work on spec.
Since then, the law firm Hunton & Williams, which had been acting as matchmaker for HBGary for several contacts, including with the Chamber, is to face complaints filed with the bar association for this work.
In one exchange of e-mails that has been seized on by Stop The Chamber's Zeese, Hunton attorney John Woods wrote to Aaron Barr, CEO of HBGary Federal, one of the tech firms:
http://velvetrevolution.us/stop_chamber/
That link goes to Stop the Chamber's website. Richard Wyatt is another attorney at Hunton who has represented the Chamber in the past. Hunton and the three attorneys who are linked to the case have declined to comment since hacked e-mails detailing the firm's role in the planning were published last week.
Zeese says he plans to file complaints with the D.C. bar against Woods, Wyatt and a third attorney, Bob Quackenboss, on Monday. He says Stop the Chamber will ask "for action up to and including loss of bar license." The D.C. bar has a primer on the complaint process here, which explains that misconduct can include "dishonesty and deceit." (The rules of professional conduct are here.) Disbarment appears to be the strongest possible punishment....
More information on Hunton & Williams is available here. Some excerpts:
...What makes Hunton's involvement in the anti-WikiLeaks scheming so striking is that the firm represents some of the biggest names in corporate America. Hunton's website touts its representation of Wells Fargo, Altria (aka Phillip Morris), the telecom Cingular, and defense contractor General Dynamics, among many others.
Hunton also has a big lobbying business in Washington. Its clients include Koch Industries, the private energy giant whose owners fund a range of right-wing and libertarian causes. (See the 2010 lobbying records for Hunton's work for Koch here; it involved fighting climate change legislation.) Other clients include Americans for Affordable Climate Policy, which is funded by the coal industry, the Gas Processors Association, the nuclear power company Entergy, U.S. Sugar Corp., and so on.
Just how well connected is Hunton? According to one of the hacked e-mails from December, Hunton was recommended to Bank of America's general counsel by none other than the U.S. Department of Justice. I have an inquiry in with the DOJ about this and will update if I hear back. As an employee of Palantir, one of the three tech firms involved in hatching the anti-WikiLeaks plan, put it:
The man mentioned in the e-mail, Richard Wyatt, is the co-chief of Hunton's litigation group. As ThinkProgress pointed out, Wyatt is the Chamber of Commerce's attorney in its lawsuit against the Yes Men, who infuriated the business group by posing as Chamber officials in a 2009 prank.
The Hunton attorney who appears most frequently in the trove of e-mails is John W. Woods, who, according to his Hunton bio, "regularly counsels clients on ... electronic surveillance" and "has a particular focus in advising corporations in the legal response to network security intrusions and data breaches."
Woods corresponded with HBGary executive Aaron Barr about a proposal to attack Chamber critics....
Barr responded with some links to social media pages of an official at the anti-Chamber group, noting that the official and his family "go to a Jewish Church in DC, the Temple Micah."
The third Hunton attorney who appears in the e-mails is Robert "Bob" Quackenboss, a trial lawyer who specializes in helping corporations fight labor. He has worked on "public communications response to union-coordinated attack campaigns," counseled "employers on practical global labor relations strategies, collective bargaining and management of union elections," and even arranged for "physical security" for corporations targeted by unions. Quackenboss was said to be the "key client contact" with the Chamber as Hunton developed plans and talked about fees with the three tech firms....
UPDATE, 2/23/11, 5:03 p.m. EST:
Glenn Greenwald at Salon has more on Palantir's actions and reactions; the article is long, detailed and well worth your time. I'll quote this gem:
And there are sufficient facts listed there to lead to the conclusion that this official version is not the entire story. All of those facts point back toward the involvement of Hunton & Williams at the center of the scandal, coordinating meetings and events:
But the real party here which deserves much more scrutiny is Hunton & Williams -- one of the most well-connected legal and lobbying firms in DC -- and its partner John Woods. Using teams of people scouring all the available emails, FDL has done its typically thorough job of setting forth all the key facts and the key players -- including from Booz Allen -- and Woods is at the center of all of it: the key cog acting on behalf of the Bank of America and the Chamber. It's Woods who is soliciting these firms to submit these proposals, pursuant to work for the Chamber and the Bank; according to Palantir emails, H&W was recommended to the Bank by the Justice Department to coordinate the anti-WikiLeaks work.
Despite being at the center of this increasingly disturbing scandal, Woods and H&W steadfastly refuse to comment to anyone. As The New York Times noted on Saturday when reporting this story: "A Hunton & Williams spokesman did not comment." For a lawyer to be at the center of an odious and quite possibly illegal scheme to target progressive activists and their families, threaten the careers of journalists as a means of silencing them, and fabricate forged documents intended for public consumption -- and then steadfastly refuse to comment -- is just inexcusable. Perhaps some polite email and telephone encouragement from the public is needed for Woods to account for what he and his firm have done. In exchange for the privileges lawyers receive (including the exclusive right to furnish legal advice, represent others, and act as officers of the court), members of the Bar have particular ethical obligations to the public. At the very least, the spirit -- if not the letter -- of those obligations is being seriously breached by a lawyer who appears to be at the center of these kinds of pernicious, lawless plots and then refuses to account to the public for what he did.
Given my involvement in this story, I'm going to defer to others in terms of the reporting. But -- given the players involved and the facts that continue to emerge -- this story is far too significant to allow to die due to lack of attention. Many of the named targets are actively considering commencing civil proceedings (which would entail compulsory discovery) as well as ethical grievances with the relevant Bar associations. As the episode with Palantir demonstrates, simply relying on the voluntary statements of the corporations involved ensures that the actual facts will remain concealed if not actively distorted. The DOJ ought to investigate this as well, but for reasons I detailed on Friday, that is unlikely in the extreme. Entities of this type routinely engage in conduct like this with impunity, and the serendipity that led to their exposure in this case should be seized to impose some accountability. That this was discovered through a random email hack -- and that these firms felt so free to propose these schemes in writing and, at least from what is known, not a single person raised any objection at all -- underscores how common this behavior is....
A transcript of Greenwald's own interview with Sam Seder on The Majority Report is here.
Empty Wheel, in The HBGary Scandal: Using Counterterrorism Tactics on Citizen Activism, describes analysis Aaron Barr did on Tanja Anamary Nijmeijer, a member of FARC and the subject of an ongoing investigation by conducted by the Miami and Counterterrorism Section of DOJ, with assistance from the DNI. There's also more in the article about Barr's relationship with intelligence agencies, including this:
Barr’s contemplated work (and in some cases, ongoing discussions) with entities like DOD’s Cyberops, NSA, and CIA is all the more troubling given an exchange he had with his former colleague from Northrup Grumman. Barr described the meeting with his former client, emphasizing that that client was not capable of “doing the right activities” “because of authority and policy restrictions.”
The conversation was very interesting today. The admit they had no idea this was happening until it hit the streets. They have no idea how to manage things like this in the future. And the agree they are not capable of doing the right activities (like I did) to be better prepared in the future because of authority and policy restrictions.
That is, whoever the client was, they agreed that they couldn’t do the kind of spying domestically Barr could because of policy restrictions.
Barr’s former colleague asked “Do you suppose there might be a market for an offshore intel gathering organization that would sell results?” To which Barr responded, “absolutely needed. Government is not going to get out of their way anytime soon to be able to do this work.”
As I will show in the future, Barr had already done this kind of analysis within the intelligence community. He had pushed to apply it to citizen activism (as well as Anonymous, though some of the people he targeted may also have engaged solely in First Amendment protected activities), and the intelligence community was anxious to hear about his Anonymous work (though there’s no indication they knew how dubious it was).
..."It's a powerhouse law firm and if they're allowed to deal in this kind of illegal activity, what do ethics in the law mean?" asks Kevin Zeese, attorney for the group StopTheChamber.com. "These guys are openly talking about potentially criminal activities -- invading privacy, moving toward libel and slander and defamation of character -- by creating forged documents, tricking us to putting them out, and accusing us of putting out disinformation."...
If you really want to impress Richard [Wyatt], I would look at the following web-site and tell him something about the guys behind it:
DOJ called the GC of BofA and told them to hire Hunton and Williams, specifically to hire Richard Wyatt who I'm beginning to think is the emperor. They want to present to the bank a team capable of doing a comprehensive investigation into the data leak.
So apparently, if Palantir's new version is to be believed, a 26-year-old engineer went off on his own and -- without any supervision or direction -- participated in the development of odious smear campaigns intended for two of the nation's deepest-pocket organizations (Bank of America and the Chamber), potential clients which the emails repeatedly emphasize would be very lucrative. I'll leave it to others to decide how credible that version is...
Barr was born to be in the Stasi. Pity he missed his calling.
Posted by: russell | February 23, 2011 at 05:05 PM
I think the phrase Tynan was looking for, here, is ipso fatso.
Posted by: Slartibartfast | February 23, 2011 at 05:09 PM
Russell, the way things are going, that may be the only place Barr could get hired now if he left HBGary.
Posted by: fiddler | February 23, 2011 at 05:33 PM
Its parent company, the security firm HBGary, wanted a separate firm to handle government work and the clearances that went with it,
For those who don't know, there's probably another reason why HBGary Federal was a separate firm. By law, companies providing services for the federal government have to give the feds the best possible price of all their customers. They can't give any customer a better deal than the federal government. The law is supposed to keep the feds from getting screwed. In practice, companies establish sibling corporations that ONLY do work for the government; since those companies have no other clients, they can charge the feds whatever they like.
Posted by: Turbulence | February 23, 2011 at 05:37 PM
Julius Caesar, Act 3, scene 3
SCENE III. A street.
Enter CINNA the poet
CINNA THE POET
I dreamt to-night that I did feast with Caesar,
And things unlucky charge my fantasy:
I have no will to wander forth of doors,
Yet something leads me forth.
Enter Citizens
First Citizen What is your name?
Second Citizen Whither are you going?
Third Citizen Where do you dwell?
Fourth Citizen Are you a married man or a bachelor?
Second Citizen Answer every man directly.
First Citizen Ay, and briefly.
Fourth Citizen Ay, and wisely.
Third Citizen Ay, and truly, you were best.
CINNA THE POET
What is my name? Whither am I going? Where do I
dwell? Am I a married man or a bachelor? Then, to
answer every man directly and briefly, wisely and
truly: wisely I say, I am a bachelor.
Second Citizen That's as much as to say, they are fools that marry: you'll bear me a bang for that, I fear. Proceed; directly.
CINNA THE POET Directly, I am going to Caesar's funeral.
First Citizen As a friend or an enemy?
CINNA THE POET As a friend.
Second Citizen That matter is answered directly.
Fourth Citizen For your dwelling,--briefly.
CINNA THE POET Briefly, I dwell by the Capitol.
Third Citizen Your name, sir, truly.
CINNA THE POET Truly, my name is Cinna.
First Citizen Tear him to pieces; he's a conspirator.
CINNA THE POET I am Cinna the poet, I am Cinna the poet.
Fourth Citizen Tear him for his bad verses, tear him for his bad verses.
CINNA THE POET I am not Cinna the conspirator.
Fourth Citizen It is no matter, his name's Cinna; pluck but his
name out of his heart, and turn him going.
Third Citizen Tear him, tear him! Come, brands ho! fire-brands:
to Brutus', to Cassius'; burn all: some to Decius'
house, and some to Casca's; some to Ligarius': away, go!
Exeunt
Posted by: liberal japonicus | February 23, 2011 at 05:41 PM
LJ:
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer'd it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest -
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men -
Come I to speak in Caesar's funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
Posted by: fiddler | February 23, 2011 at 06:40 PM
...Which is, of course, the start of Marc Antony's speech over the body of Julius Caesar, in the preceding scene (Act 3, scene 2).
Posted by: fiddler | February 23, 2011 at 06:47 PM
Actually, I was thinking of the part where you talk about the problems of singling out the innocent. Not that I think Barr is an innocent, but when you talk about mistaken identity, that is always the scene that I flash on. Should have given a bit more explanation, but I accidentally hit the post button and couldn't think of a graceful way of explaining it post post, as it were.
Posted by: liberal japonicus | February 23, 2011 at 07:12 PM
Greenwald is quoted as saying:
"For a lawyer to be at the center of an odious and quite possibly illegal scheme to target progressive activists and their families, threaten the careers of journalists as a means of silencing them, and fabricate forged documents intended for public consumption -- and then steadfastly refuse to comment -- is just inexcusable."
Actually, Greenwald, a lawyer, should know better. For whatever the merits of whatever else is being blogged about, lawyers should not spew forth to defend themselves if doing so might harm their clients' interests. Their refusal to comment is most likely very appropriate - the opposite of "inexcusable." If someone has standing to sue Hunton and Williams, the firm should certainly do what's required by a court.
Posted by: sapient | February 23, 2011 at 07:48 PM
lawyers should not spew forth to defend themselves if doing so might harm their clients' interests.
So the client's interest is the only thing that matters? There's no larger social interest?
I mean, if a newspaper found out that my employer had asked me to engage in criminal or unethical actions and then asked me about it, I'm sure my employer would prefer that I keep my mouth shut about the crimes and ethical violations they were trying to effect. But as a (nonlawyer) professional, I might just have an obligation to society to expose such criminality when the opportunity presented itself in the form of a nice reporter.
I suspect the public's distrust of lawyers stems in no small part from the perception that lawyers act as if they only have obligations to their clients and none to society at large.
Posted by: Turbulence | February 23, 2011 at 11:03 PM
None of which is to say this isn't an excellent post, Fiddler! It is!
All sorts of interesting info, well gathered and linked.
Please don't misunderstand and think that I somehow put together that last set of links just for this comment; it simply was easier for me to grab my past HTML of some links, and drop them in, and to therefore agree that people who haven't been following the very long story of governmental data-mining, Stellar Wind, Hepting, and so on, haven't been paying attention. That's all!
Please keep up the fine work!
Posted by: Gary Farber | February 23, 2011 at 11:29 PM
It suddenly occurs to me to wonder if possibly you picked up the "updated" in every post title thing from Glenn?
It's something he's always done, and there are so many blogs out there these days, maybe it's become common among many other well-known blogs I'm not familiar with; it's 1000% possible, given how many Big Name Blogs I don't follow. I just wonder because you're linking to Glenn, and he's the only one I've ever noticed using that form.
It doesn't particularly matter; just an idle curiosity. Though I've never quite followed why he does it that way.
But you should definitely follow your own preferred style as you wish!
Posted by: Gary Farber | February 23, 2011 at 11:33 PM
lawyers should not spew forth to defend themselves if doing so might harm their clients' interests.
Not quite right. If you client confesses to you that he robbed a bank last week, that's confidential.
If you client tells you of his plans to rob a bank next week, though, that's not confidential, and in fact, you have a duty to disclose it to law enforcement. The attorney-client privilege does not allow attorneys to conspire with their clients to commit crimes.
Posted by: rea | February 24, 2011 at 10:50 AM
A lawyer has a duty to the client and to the court, (and, as rea says, to law enforcement, depending on the circumstances) but no duty to make public statements. If Hunton & Williams has done something illegal (odious or not), or if it violated professional ethics, it is required to answer whatever charges are brought against it in court or before a bar panel.
Posted by: sapient | February 24, 2011 at 12:09 PM
That's uh, too rich.
Second, let's spend A Day At The Races:
Why, yes, I am a Marxist.This whole saga is like one way overlong Marx Brothers series of sketches, but lacking a Margaret Dumont.
No, thenk yew.Fiddler:
As a small piece of credit, that's "emptywheel" you're quoting. Just as you might like to be credited as "Fiddler," rather than "Obsidian Wings," though perhaps not.Please forgive me for being fiddly. :-)
You work on this side, I work on that side, we meet up somewhere in the middle.
On ObWi, Margaret Dumont is played by John Th-- Count me, something or other, in, out, hello I must be going.
We probably need a playbill for ObWi, so one can know all the players.
I suppose a FAQ on all the regulars would be unwieldy, but perhaps they can discuss at Taking It Outside.
Posted by: Gary Farber | February 25, 2011 at 10:20 PM
Why, you make me think of my youth.
Posted by: Countme--In | February 25, 2011 at 10:44 PM
'Anonymous' takes down Americans for Prosperity website:
Uh oh. We're crossing streams.Posted by: Gary Farber | February 28, 2011 at 03:15 AM
Hi. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/02/anonymous_vs_hb.html"> Bruce Schneier on Anonymous vs HBGary.
On I hope unrelated fronts, BOA online back up, nixes hacker rumors.
I hope not. But I know some of this story is untrue, because the entire Bank of America system for all of California went offline yesterday, which I know because:a) I recently opened an account;
b) As soon as I got home from opening the account, I found a trojan email from BOA in my inbox. I found this very suspicious, called my "personal banker," very nice clueless person who was recently hired, barely understood what I was talking about;
c) I've been unable to get through to my BoA account online for many days, after getting locked out several times, and having little time to deal with it further; since I only have all of $25 in it, it didn't matter; it was possibly my personal memorization mnemonic for my passwords had failed; I've tried unsuccessful to make them work, on and off, for some days, and yesterday confirmed the account was hacked, because the BOA security system sent my "confirmation" info to a hotmail account.
I don't have a hotmail account.
I couldn't get through on the nationwide BOA phone system.
I then called the local branch yesterday, and my "personal banker" was "on vacation."
The bank manager was helpless because THEIR ENTIRE COMPUTER SYSTEM WAS DOWN.
Duh.
Why was it down? Good question.
March 1, 2011 1:02 PM PST
No update. Twitter had a lot yesterday.Bank of America online banking down across U.S.
But BOA does seem to be running again, Twitter seems quiet.
More on what's said to be so about Monday and Tuesday:
I'm staying away from the BoA website until I have time to deal with my account, which isn't urgent for me, and won't happen until next week. At least.
But at the least, it looks a lot like either my "personal banker" got personally hacked, or her branch did, or BoA did, or... I just don't know right now.
What I do know are probably unrelated things:
1) Bank of America had a national computer network shutdown yesterday.
2) If they have been hacked, they're investigating now, and would not be announcing anything but denials.
3) My personal account has been hacked. I've personally verified this.
I surely hope these three things are unrelated.
They almost certainly are just coincidences.
But I know I'm feeling a bit jumpy about things computer security-wise right now.
I wish I had one of my expert computer security friends visiting right now to personally check out my own system. I'm sure I've been having odd problems simply because I'm not a security expert, nor a Vista expert, far from either, and it's undoubtedly just the normal computer problems most everyone has, and I regularly have, just like you probably do, unless you're more computer whiz than I am, which doesn't take much.
On the general subject of newwork security, and, hey, let's look at the military intel and social network side: Spy bloggers not ‘friending’ U.S. targets, Centcom says.
Links not included, see original.I've written about some of this stuff before. Links not being included, given that I've done well over a hundred posts, more, on data-mining, NSA, The Program, related material.
And, no, I'm not making a post of this.
I really don't feel like attracting more attention to ObWi about Anonymous right now.
I'm sure it's just jumpiness on my part.
Posted by: Gary Farber | March 02, 2011 at 11:58 PM
This is... interesting. Persona Management Software.
Italics mine.Solicitation Number: RTB220610
Agency: Department of the Air Force:
I know I feel safer.
Don't you?
Posted by: Gary Farber | March 03, 2011 at 12:27 AM
Alleged WikiLeaker could face death penalty.
Noted.Posted by: Gary Farber | March 03, 2011 at 01:21 AM
CommonDreams decided that the Persona story was "NEW!" and "REVEALED!" by them on March 17th, 2011, based on this Grauniad story of the same date.
Sigh. Ahead of the curve again. And here decided that the Persona story was "NEW!" and "REVEALED!" by them on March 17th, 2011, based on this Grauniad story of the same date.
Sigh. Ahead of the curve again. Charlie Stross was slightly mocking me in email that this was "old news" from June, 2010, as it was, although I only threw it in when I mentioned the aforementioned BoA story.
Charlie pointed me at a Ken MacLeod story, but I really need to be blogging, like I should have blogged this Persona story, sigh.
Posted by: Gary Farber | March 19, 2011 at 12:02 PM
This is a particularly great story. It's a living Bill Gibson/Bruce Sterling/Charlie Stross story.
Posted by: Gary Farber | March 19, 2011 at 12:45 PM
Gary, I would have been pleased to read these posts had I known they were there when you posted them, several weeks ago. It would have been very helpful to read them *then*. As I said elsewhere, I don't habitually read back through past posts for further comments after a few days, or after the conversations have moved on to later posts. If you post comments after that time in the future (there should be a verb tense for that phrase, but it doesn't exist in English) please drop me an email and I'll go back and look at them.
Posted by: fiddler | April 03, 2011 at 01:08 PM
These comments, that is, though some are long enough to be posts.
::reaching for coffee and, with any luck, more awakeness::
Posted by: fiddler | April 03, 2011 at 01:09 PM