More Private Security Firms Tasked with Discrediting Progressive Organisations

It all started with a hard drive from Bank of America. Assange is currently sitting on a treasure trove of information about a major US bank. Nobody is sure who it is, and Assange says he likes to “watch them all tremble” but at this point Bank of America is sure acting as if they will be the subject of the next major leak to come out of wikileaks. It is rumored that the leaks will reveal that Bank of America knowingly illegally foreclosed on hundreds of thousands of American homes. This could cause serious damage to Bank of America not only in the Public Relations arena, but the information could also be used as hundreds of thousands of homeowners begin to sue Bank of America. On top of Civil lawsuits Bank of America would also have to deal with possible criminal proceedings that would not only cost them tens of millions of dollars in legal fees, but could also put some of the highest executives at Bank of America behind bars. Dealing in free information is serious business :)

So. What has Bank of America done? They know that if the information surfaces there’s really not much they can do besides put out their talking head PR bullshitters on television. And smarmy PR goons aren’t exactly the best face of a company that may have just stolen millions of dollars of property from oridinary Americans. It appears that they would do the same as the US Chamber. It has now become public that the US Chamber hired HB Gary Federal, Palantir, and Berico Technologies (collectively called Team Themis) to develop tactics for damaging progressive groups and labor unions. This seems to be the new war plan that the corporate ruling elite would like to employ as new leaks begin to surface. They (the companies) don’t even need to get their PR goons involved, they can farm out the entire operation to a different company. By doing so they isolate themselves from any criminal repercussions the other firm may be involved in, and they also succeed in attacking those who support wikileaks. So the debate wouldn’t be about how Bank of America stole millions of dollars of property from hardworking Americans. It would instead be about whether or not this information should’ve been made public. It’s a tactic which was very successful during the last round of wikileaks dumps where most of the media ignored the leaks themselves because they didn’t fit any political narrative that they had been crafting. So, they focused on Julian Assange, and they focused on the debate surrounding whether or not he was a “high tech terrorist” (Joe Biden) who deserved to be “hunted down like Al Qaeda” (Sarah Palin) . By making the whole story about Assange in his secret bat cave, hacking the names of undercover agents doing humanitarian aid jobs while raping swedish feminists: we forget all about the leaks themselves. It’s not a mistake, it’s not human nature (to gravitate towards a charismatic personality like Assange) it’s an orchestrated PR attempt to divert the debate and take it somewhere else.

This is why it is so important that any supporters of wikileaks or the information be squelched. Thanks to anonymous we can see exactly how much HB Gary and other companies were looking to obtain to carry out the job. $200,000 up front for research, and then 2 million to finish the job. But is this sort of an aggressive tactic against really the smartest option? It seems that so far it has backfired terribly and the HB Gary situation got so bad that now Anonymous will soon be launching AnonLeaks . The first dump will be the 40,000 emails from HB Gary.

It has now also come to light that anon is in possession of a Windows computer worm called Stuxnet which was discovered in July 2010. It targets industrial software and equipment. It is the first discovered malware that spies on and subverts industrial systems, and the first to include a programmable logic controller (PLC) rootkit. Basically this worm could wreak havoc on super computers used by corporations. Resulting in losses of potentially tens of millions of dollars, or in a worst case scenario. Complete loss of data. Now imagine something like this being unleashed inside the banking systems computers and you get a sense of the stakes currently at play here.

Stuxnet was first created by the US and Israel military as a worm to mess with Iran’s nuclear facilities. Russia condemns the worm, saying that the worm could have created a Chernobyl-like disaster in Iran, and called on NATO to investigate it.