Even Disney/Pixar may be involved in an alleged global electronic surveillance ring.
In February, the hacktivist group Anonymous released 70,000 emails from security firm HBGary Federal, revealing that the firm had been part of an effort to sell its information-warfare services to companies seeking to attack WikiLeaks. Barrett Brown combed through the emails and found evidence of what he says is a massive surveillance effort involving numerous security firms. According to Brown, this effort is primarily targeting the Arab world, and is evidently run for the U.S. government. Even Disney/Pixar appears to have been caught up in the effort, at least peripherally. The HBGary Federal emails suggest the alleged program, known as Romas/COIN, is about to be upgraded to a new program known as Odyssey.THE MARK: Can you tell us what you discovered about Romas/COIN in the 70,000 HBGary Federal emails that were released in February?
BARRETT BROWN: Northrop Grumman has held the contract for Romas/COIN for at least three years now – possibly longer. The picture we have of what Romas/COIN is is not based on anything from the client, whichever military intelligence agency the client is, but is rather based on what these companies were trying to provide to that client as a means of winning that contract away from Northrop Grumman.
To be more specific, [former Northrop Grumman CEO] Aaron Barr, having left Northrop Grumman, was put in charge of HBGary Federal, and he began talking to the CEO of Mantech, another contractor, and some of the principals at TASC, which is a much larger contractor. Barr said, "We should compete for this contract when it comes up for renewal. Let's get a bunch of companies together and be in a position to offer a better product."
By the end of 2010, they had obtained not just TASC, HBGary Federal, Mantech, and a few others, but also companies like SocialEyez, which is a United Arab Emirates-based firm that provides natural language processing. By its own admission on its main website, SocialEyez can monitor millions of multilingual conversations a day and assess them.
At some point, Aaron Barr asked a contact at the Office of the Secretary of Defense to put him in touch with a contact at Pixar. The OSD contact arranged to get him in touch with [an individual] who is a former National Security Agency (NSA) technology director, and who, for some reason, now works at Pixar/Disney. So that raises the questions of what Pixar/Disney is doing, why it has former NSA people working for it, and why the OSD is able to recommend someone at Pixar/Disney.
You see, all the capabilities they're looking for in terms of translation, natural language processing, expert systems, the use of websites, and Aaron Barr's own program called MAGPII (which is short for Magnifying Personal Information), are the basis for Romas/COIN, which appears to be a very complex apparatus that provides an unprecedented picture of what's being said and communicated within a large spectrum. It involves surveillance, and it seems to involve putting out some degree of misinformation.
On the whole, the problem with this is that, even though we have all these capabilities written down – their communication with Apple and Google, and the fact that they were seeking out AT&T and looking at online game companies – it never gets to the point where we really know what the specific goal is, beyond the fact that there is surveillance incorporated into it. That's why I'm hoping that others with better familiarity with these procedures might add to the existing dataset.
THE MARK: So, just to clarify, we know that there's a very big, complex, multifaceted apparatus, but we don't know what it does.
BROWN: Right. And I think the fact that all these companies are more than ready to provide things via this system is very problematic. Between this large industry that's growing very quickly, and the increasing pressure on intelligence agencies in terms of intent and mentality, I think the recipe here is for more and more sophisticated surveillance and information-manipulation capabilities.
One of the things that was stressed in our research was the sort of weird, close network you see among all these companies. I mean, just looking at HBGary, you see emails between it and TASC, SAIC, Booz Allen Hamilton, Mantech, Archimedes Global, and tons of other companies. There's a whole lot of collaboration within the industry. Having looked at the interactions for so long, my view is that what you have here is a budding technocratic class. I really think it bears more scrutiny than it's getting.
A company called Endgame Systems is mentioned several times in the context of being actively opposed to its name getting out. The company actually says to Aaron Barr that it doesn't want to appear in a press release. It’s a smaller company, run by a former NSA fellow, and it’s providing a couple of services involving botnets, but also something else. The fact is, Endgame Systems is actively opposed to being scrutinized, and its federal clients don't want it to be scrutinized.
To the extent that policy can be put into action by way of informational capabilities, policy is being decided not by congressional oversight, or by any elected officials, but rather by the intelligence community itself within the military. It gets voted a great deal of money, which it can use any way it wants; it can write up what it wants and give it to these companies, which are inclined to provide whatever these agencies want – without much thought for how it might affect democratic institutions or how it might corrode the information stream.
THE MARK: In the wiki, you discuss the possibility that this apparatus might be used to disseminate information as well as survey social networks. That sounds very foreboding.
BROWN: That's based on a couple of discussions in the emails where they talk about the translators having to produce content. There are also a few other reasons to believe that, based on a couple of websites they're putting up, mobile phone apps, and that kind of thing.
I'm not saying this is a giant propaganda organ. Misinformation is being put out to some degree, but that may just be in terms of providing what appears to be a commercial product (which it really is not). So when I say putting out information, I don't necessarily mean that this is something that's putting out misinformation on a grand scale. You have to remember that what we're working with here is little bits and pieces of discussions over a year-long period.
THE MARK: What kind of effect do you think exposing information on the intelligence-contracting community will have?
BROWN: It seems to me that if they don't want scrutiny, more scrutiny should be directed at them. If the media's role is to serve as a watchdog, then you would think the fact that this large group is hiding its actions would set off an alarm for them.
At this point, the New York Times is more interested in asking me about LulzSec. For the most part, the media industry in this country is so broken that I could reveal anything, and without enough luck – or without some component that happens to strike the fancy of some editor somewhere – it's just not going to make it into public consciousness. It's never going to prompt an investigation by the media or by Congress without a hook. Now, if there were some kind of sex involved, or if Charlie Sheen were somehow a client, then that would be wonderful.
Things being the way they are, I would recommend that anyone who wants to get away with something should just go ahead and do it. Go ahead and join the intelligence-contracting industry; go spy on civilians; go do the bidding of the Bank of America; and be responsible for illegal attacks against WikiLeaks. You'll get away with it.
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Source: The Mark
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