Thread: Military Contractors Use Facebook to Infiltrate Progressive Groups

Revealed: Fake Facebook Identity Used By Military Contractors Plotting To Hack Progressive Organizations

By Lee Fang on Aug 18, 2011 at 12:05 pm

Earlier this year, ThinkProgress obtained 75,000 private emails from the defense contractor HBGary Federal via the hacktivist group called Anonymous. The emails led to two shocking revelations. First, that an assortment of private military firms collectively called “Team Themis” had been tapped by Bank of America to conduct a cyber war against reporters sympathetically covering the Wikileaks revelations.

And second, that late in 2010, the same set of firms began work separately for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a Republican-aligned corporate lobbying group, to develop a similar campaign of sabotage against progressive organizations, including the SEIU and ThinkProgress.

In presentations obtained by ThinkProgress from the e-mail dump detailing the tactics potentially used against progressives, HBGary Federal floated the idea of using “fake insider personas” to infiltrate left-leaning groups critical of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s policies. As HBGary Federal executive Aaron Barr described in several emails, his firm could work with partner companies Palantir and Berico Technologies to manipulate fake online identities, using networks like Facebook, to gain access to private information from his targets.


Other presentations are more specific and describe efforts to use social media to hack computers and find vulnerabilities among even the families of people who work at organizations critical of the Chamber.



In one email from the dump, Barr discusses a fake persona he created called “Holly Weber.” She would be born in Portland in 1984, attend Reynolds High School, and work for Lockheed Martin after a stint in the Air Force. Earlier this week, Twitter users actually identified the phony account. Before it was taken down, ThinkProgress snagged screen shots of the fake persona’s Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. (Barr also described his strategy for pretending to be teenagers online).
View a screenshot of the fake account below:


Profile for "Holly Weber," a fake identity created by defense contractors to manipulate their targets

Barr, who sold his illicit talents to the highest bidder, appears to be drawing on Maxim for inspiration. A Maxim covergirl named Holly Weber was also born in 1984. Unlike Barr’s creation, the Maxim one is real.
Hunton and Williams, the law firm representing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, had been immersed in talks with HBGary Federal, Palantir, and Berico to deliver on a $2 million deal to move forward with the hacking plot against the Chamber’s critics. However, after Anonymous leaked HBGary’s emails and a few reporters picked up on the story, the Chamber distanced itself from the deal. The emails show that HBGary Federal had also worked to sell “persona management” solutions to the U.S. government for cyber intelligence work.

Originally Posted by KAPPA

First, that an assortment of private military firms collectively called “Team Themis” had been tapped by Bank of America to conduct a cyber war against reporters sympathetically covering the Wikileaks revelations.

And what on earth has happened to those wikileaks, allegedly concerning BoA? Yet to see the light of day.

Originally Posted by sabang

Originally Posted by KAPPA

First, that an assortment of private military firms collectively called “Team Themis” had been tapped by Bank of America to conduct a cyber war against reporters sympathetically covering the Wikileaks revelations.

And what on earth has happened to those wikileaks, allegedly concerning BoA? Yet to see the light of day.

It's possible that Domscheit Berg and the "Technician" hold those leaks, in the book by Berg "Inside Wikileaks" Berg reveals that when they split from Assange they took huge amounts of leaked data with them because as they claim?, they felt Assange would not handle those leaks responsibly.

As for the OP not really any surprise that a huge war has started on the INTERNET, both an information/advertising politics war, and a destructive cyberspace war, with more or less official Government agency's, law enforcement, private security contractors etc., International companys (Sony, Pay Pal etc.) fighting back against cyberspace attacks from foreign States and intelligence, and from politically motivated hacker communities, Governments and Companies using the same methods the under ground movements have been using to turn minds and entrap enemies.

We normal INTERNET users will come to pay a heavy price in terms of freedom of information, Government sanctioned blocked or disrupted sites, much less anonymity rights and covert surveillance on the net because of those assholes.

I would not be surprised if some form of Government issued "INTERNET access identification license" will become mandatory at some point in the future.

Holly Weber

Lockheed-Martin, US Air Force

God figure, the propaganda machine of the MIC is now using the social media.

larvidchr.. agree with you on that,...i did some work at G.C.H.Q. along long time back, and was told then everything would be moniterd and censored in the future/communication-information/ at the time i laughed and asked the guy if his name was george orwell...which didnt go down very well, but what the guy said is going to happen, for sure...

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's former right-hand man has irrevocably destroyed 3500 unpublished files leaked to the whistleblower site including the complete US no-fly list, five gigabytes of Bank of America documents and detailed information about 20 neo-Nazi groups.
Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who left WikiLeaks last year after a falling out with Assange, revealed the document destruction in an interview with Der Spiegel.
WikiLeaks has hit back, accusing Domscheit-Berg of being in bed with US intelligence agencies and of jeopardising the leaking of “many issues of public importance, human rights abuses, mass telecommunications interception, banking and the planning of dozens of neo-nazi groups”.

....Assange accuses Domscheit-Berg of being in contact with the FBI, implying that he is helping out the US investigation into WikiLeaks and Assange. He also links Domscheit-Berg's wife, Anke, to the CIA.


.... Domscheit-Berg's WikiLeaks rival, OpenLeaks, promises to be more transparent than WikiLeaks and route information to media organisations and interest groups instead of publishing material itself. The site still appears to be starting up and there has yet to be any high-profile leaks.

Wiki war: 3500 unpublished leaks destroyed forever as Assange hits out

It rather looks like Daniel Schmidt has been 'gotten to' by the moneyed & 'control of information' interests- and if what he says is true, he has destroyed some important information. BankAmerica and neo-Nazi groups can breathe a lot easier then. Assange himself is tied up with the interminable (delayed, yet again) and trivial Swedish consensual 'rape' & broken condom allegations. Call me a conspiracy theorist if you like, but I think that is no accident- keep him neutered as long as possible, while the 'threat' posed by the inconvenient information is dealt with by whatever means possible. The fact remains, the US government has absolutely nothing on Assange in legal terms.

Meanwhile, Schmidt (who no doubt has been well taken care of) has released absolutely nothing from his 'Openleaks' website, and his "Inside Wikileaks" book just happens to have been published by a subsidiary of Random House, the worlds largest book publisher. And not one single person has been killed or maimed as a result of these 'scurrilous wikileaks'- they were in fact thoroughly vetted with the assistance of US Intelligence agencies to preclude such a possibility.

The open question is whether Assange still has the information that Schmidt says he destroyed copied elsewhere- one would normally think so, unless he completely and naively trusted this bloke... We'll just have to wait and see while his legal non cases are dragged out as long as possible. But the Wikileaks response suggests maybe not. So the public interest is protected by BA being able to destroy leaked information about it's corrupt and dishonest practises? Obviously not.