{"id":4103,"date":"2011-02-18T08:05:14","date_gmt":"2011-02-18T16:05:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=4103"},"modified":"2011-02-18T08:05:14","modified_gmt":"2011-02-18T16:05:14","slug":"us-chamber-black-ops","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2011\/02\/18\/us-chamber-black-ops\/","title":{"rendered":"US Chamber Black-Ops"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week we talked briefly about the US Chamber of Commerce planning to spy on lefties.  The more we learn about this, the uglier it gets.  What the chamber has planned goes way beyond mere political espionage.  It\u2019s outright, highly illegal, cyber-warfare.<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\"18dr-evil\"Last Thursday, ThinkProgress revealed<\/a> that lawyers representing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, one of the most powerful trade associations for large corporations like ExxonMobil and CitiGroup, had solicited a proposal from a set of military contractors to develop a surreptitious campaign to attack the Chamber\u2019s political opponents<\/strong>, including ThinkProgress, the Change to Win labor coalition, SEIU, StopTheChamber.com, MoveOn.org, U.S. Chamber Watch and others. The lawyers from the Chamber\u2019s longtime law firm Hunton and Williams had been compiling their own data set on some of these targets. However, the lawyers sought the military contractors for assistance. <\/p>\n

As ThinkProgress has reported, the proposals \u2014 created by military contractors Palantir, Berico Technologies, and HBGary Federal, collectively known as \u201cTeam Themis\u201d \u2014 were discussed at length with the Chamber\u2019s lawyers over the course of several months starting in October of 2010. The core proposals called for snooping on the families of progressive activists<\/strong>, creating phony identities to penetrate progressive organizations<\/strong>, creating bots to \u201cscrape\u201d social media for information, and submitting fake documents to Chamber opponents as a false flag trick to discredit progressive organizations<\/strong>. <\/p>\n

In addition to the Team Themis plans that ThinkProgress and other outlets<\/a> have reported on, a closer look at the proposals show that the firms had planned to use exploits to steal information from the Chamber\u2019s opponents, or worse<\/strong>. On November 2, HBGary Federal executive Aaron Barr sent John Woods, a lawyer at Hunton and Williams representing the Chamber, two documents discussing tactics for assisting the Chamber (view the e-mail<\/a> here). One presentation (click here<\/a> to download) boasted of HBGary Federal\u2019s capabilities in \u201cInformation Operations,\u201d a military contractor term for offensive data extraction techniques typically reserved for use against terrorist groups<\/strong>. The slide includes sections on \u201cVulnerability Research\/Exploit Development<\/font><\/strong>\u201d and \u201cMalware Analysis and Reverse Engineering<\/font><\/strong>.\u201d View a screenshot below: <\/p>\n

\"18hbgaryfederal\"<\/p>\n

HBGary, the parent company of HBGary Federal, specializes<\/a> in analyzing \u201cmalware,\u201d computer viruses that are used to maliciously steal data from computers or networks<\/strong>. In other presentations, Barr makes clear that his expertise in \u201cInformation Operations\u201d covers forms<\/a> of hacking like a \u201ccomputer network attack,\u201d \u201ccustom malware development,\u201d and \u201cpersistent software implants.\u201d<\/strong> The presentation shows Barr boasting<\/a> that he had knowledge of using \u201czero day\u201d attacks to exploit vulnerabilities in Flash, Java, Windows 2000 and other programs to steal data from a target\u2019s computer<\/strong>\u2026 [emphasis added<\/em>]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Inserted from <Think Progress<\/a>><\/p>\n

This is the organization that SCOTUS incorrectly deemed a person and their money, speech.  This is the extent to which they will go to help the Republican party reach its primary goal: the establishment of a 1,000 year Republican Regime of one party rule. Then Republicans will be free to pursue their other objective: the transfer of wealth from the poor and middle classes to millionaires, billionaires and criminal corporations.  The fascist five are wrong.<\/font><\/p>\n

Corporations are NOT people!  Money is NOT Speech!<\/font><\/font><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week we talked briefly about the US Chamber of Commerce planning to spy on lefties.  The more we learn about this, the uglier it gets.  What the chamber has planned goes way beyond mere political espionage.  It\u2019s outright, highly illegal, cyber-warfare. Last Thursday, ThinkProgress revealed that lawyers representing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, one […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4103"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4103\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}