barracuda wrote:Not sure if this is the right thread for this, but...
Fox News Twitter feed says Obama dead in apparent hack
good as any
...
Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by hanshan » Tue Jul 05, 2011 8:13 am
barracuda wrote:Not sure if this is the right thread for this, but...
Fox News Twitter feed says Obama dead in apparent hack
by JackRiddler » Wed Jul 06, 2011 4:49 pm
Security Grifters Partner-Up on Sinister Cyber-Surveillance Project
by Tom Burghardt / July 5th, 2011
Last week, the White House released its National Strategy for Counterterrorism, a macabre document that places a premium on “public safety” over civil liberties and constitutional rights.
Indeed, “hope and change” huckster Barack Obama had the temerity to assert that the President “bears no greater responsibility than ensuring the safety and security of the American people.”
Pity that others, including CIA “black site” prisoners tortured to death to “keep us safe” (some 100 at last count) aren’t extended the same courtesy as The Washington Post reported last week.
As Secrecy News editor Steven Aftergood correctly points out, the claim that the President “has no greater responsibility than ‘protecting the American people’ is a paternalistic invention that is historically unfounded and potentially damaging to the political heritage of the nation.”
Aftergood avers, “the presidential oath of office that is prescribed by the U.S. Constitution (Art. II, sect. 1) makes it clear that the President’s supreme responsibility is to ‘…preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.’ There is no mention of public safety. It is the constitutional order that the President is sworn to protect, even if doing so entails risks to the safety and security of the American people.”
But as our former republic slips ever-closer towards corporate dictatorship, Obama’s mendacious twaddle about “protecting the American people,” serves only to obscure, and reinforce, the inescapable fact that it’s a rigged game.
Rest assured, “what happens in Vegas,” Baghdad, Kabul or Manama–from driftnet spying to political-inspired witchhunts to illegal detention–won’t, and hasn’t, “stayed in Vegas.”
Cyber Here, Cyber There, Cyber-Surveillance Everywhere
Last month, researcher Barrett Brown and the OpMetalGear network lifted the lid on a new U.S. Government-sponsored cyber-surveillance project, Romas/COIN, now Odyssey, a multiyear, multimillion dollar enterprise currently run by defense and security giant Northrop Grumman.
With some $10.8 billion in revenue largely derived from contracts with the Defense Department, Northrop Grumman was No. 2 on the Washington Technology 2011 Top 100 List of Prime Federal Contractors.
“For at least two years,” Brown writes, “the U.S. has been conducting a secretive and immensely sophisticated campaign of mass surveillance and data mining against the Arab world, allowing the intelligence community to monitor the habits, conversations, and activity of millions of individuals at once.”
Information on this shadowy program was derived by scrutinizing hundreds of the more than 70,000 HBGary emails leaked onto the web by the cyber-guerrilla collective Anonymous.
Brown uncovered evidence that the “top contender to win the federal contract and thus take over the program is a team of about a dozen companies which were brought together in large part by Aaron Barr–the same disgraced CEO who resigned from his own firm earlier this year after he was discovered to have planned a full-scale information war against political activists at the behest of corporate clients.”
Readers will recall that Barr claimed he could exploit social media to gather information about WikiLeaks supporters in a bid to destroy that organization. Earlier this year, Barr told the Financial Times he had used scraping techniques and had infiltrated WikiLeaks supporter Anonymous, in part by using IRC, Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites.
According to emails subsequently released by Anonymous, it was revealed that the ultra rightist U.S. Chamber of Commerce had hired white shoe law firm Hunton & Williams, and that Hunton attorneys, upon recommendation of an unnamed U.S. Department of Justice official, solicited a set of private security contractors–HBGary, HBGary Federal, Palantir and Berico Technologies (collectively known as Team Themis)–and stitched-up a sabotage campaign against WikiLeaks, journalists, labor unions, progressive political groups and Chamber critics.
Amongst the firms who sought to grab the Romas/COIN/Odyssey contract from Northrop when it came up for a “recompete” was TASC, which describes itself as “a renowned provider of advanced systems engineering, integration and decision-support services across the intelligence, defense, homeland security and federal markets.”
According to Bloomberg BusinessWeek, TASC’s head of “Cybersecurity Initiatives,” Larry Strang, was formerly a Vice President with Northrop Grumman who led that firm’s Cybersecurity Group and served as Northrop’s NSA Account Manager. Prior to that, Strang, a retired Air Force Lt. Colonel, was Vice President for Operations at the spooky Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC).
Brown relates that emails between TASC executives Al Pisani, John Lovegrow and former HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr, provided details that they “were in talks with each other as well as Mantech executive Bob Frisbie on a ‘recompete’ pursuant to ‘counter intelligence’ operations that were already being conducted on behalf of the federal government by another firm, SAIC, with which they hoped to compete for contracts.”
In fact, HBGary Federal and TASC may have been cats-paws for defense giant ManTech International in the race to secure U.S. Government cyber-surveillance contracts. Clocking in at No. 22 on Washington Technology’s “2011 Top 100 list,” ManTech earned some $1.46 billion in 2010, largely derived from work in “systems engineering and integration, technology and software development, enterprise security architecture, intelligence operations support, critical infrastructure protection and computer forensics.” The firm’s major customers include the Defense Department, Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon’s geek squad that is busily working to develop software for their Cyber Insider Threat (CINDER) program.
Both HBGary Federal and parent company HBGary, a California-based security firm run by the husband-wife team, Greg Hoglund and Penny Leavy, had been key players for the design of malware, undetectable rootkits and other “full directory exfiltration tools over TCP/IP” for the Defense Department according to documents released by the secret-shredding web site Public Intelligence.
Additional published documents revealed that they and had done so in close collaboration with General Dynamics (Project C and Task Z), which had requested “multiple protocols to be scoped as viable options … for VoIP (Skype) protocol, BitTorrent protocol, video over HTTP (port 80), and HTTPS (port 443)” for unnamed secret state agencies.
According to Brown, it appears that Romas/COIN/Odyssey was also big on social media surveillance, especially when it came to “Foreign Mobile” and “Foreign Web” monitoring. Indeed, documents published by Public Intelligence (scooped-up by the HBGary-Anonymous hack) was a ManTech International-HBGary collaboration describing plans for Internet Based Reconnaissance Operations. The October 2010 presentation described plans that would hand “customers,” presumably state intelligence agencies but also, as revealed by Anonymous, corporate security entities and public relations firms, the means to perform “native language searching” combined with “non-attributable architecture” and a “small footprint” that can be “as widely or narrowly focused as needed.”
ManTech and HBGary promised to provide customers the ability to “Locate/Profile Internet ‘Points of Interest’” on “individuals, companies, ISPs” and “organizations,” and would do so through “detailed network mapping” that will “identify registered networks and registered domains”; “Graphical network representation based on Active Hosts”; “Operating system and network application identification”; “Identification of possible perimeter defenses” through “Technology Research, Intelligence Gap Fill, Counterintelligence Research” and “Customer Public Image Assessment.”
The presentation described the social media monitoring process as one that would “employ highly skilled network professionals (read, ex-spooks and former military intelligence operatives) who will use “Non-attributable Internet access, custom developed toolsets and techniques, Native Language and in-country techniques” that “utilize foreign language search engines, mapping tools” and “iterative researching methodologies” for searching “Websites, picture sites, mapping sites/programs”; “Blogs and social networking sites”; “Forums and Bulletin Boards”; “Network Information: Whois, Trace Route, NetTroll, DNS”; “Archived and cached websites.”
Clients who bought into the ManTech-HBGary “product” were promised “Rapid Non-attributable Open Source Research Results”; “Sourced Research Findings”; “Triage level Analysis”; “Vulnerability Assessment” and “Graphical Network and Social Diagramming” via data mining and extensive link analysis.
Undoubtedly, readers recall this is precisely what the National Security Agency has been doing since the 1990s, if not earlier, through their electronic communications intercept program Echelon, a multibillion Pentagon project that conducted corporate espionage for American multinational firms as researcher Nicky Hager revealed in his 1997 piece for CovertAction Quarterly.
Other firms included in Lovegrove’s email to Barr indicate that the new Romas/COIN/Odyssey “team” was to have included: “TASC (PMO [Project Management Operations], creative services); HBGary (Strategy, planning, PMO); Akamai (infrastructure); Archimedes Global (Specialized linguistics, strategy, planning); Acclaim Technical Services (specialized linguistics); Mission Essential Personnel (linguistic services); Cipher (strategy, planning operations); PointAbout (rapid mobile application development, list of strategic partners); Google (strategy, mobile application and platform development–long list of strategic partners); Apple (mobile and desktop platform, application assistance–long list of strategic partners). We are trying to schedule an interview with ATT plus some other small app developers.”
Recall that AT&T is the NSA’s prime telecommunications partner in that agency’s illegal driftnet surveillance program and has been the recipient of “retroactive immunity” under the despicable FISA Amendments Act, a law supported by then-Senator Barack Obama. Also recall that the giant tech firm Apple was recently mired in scandal over reports that their mobile phone platform had, without their owners’ knowledge or consent, speared geolocational data from the iPhone and then stored this information in an Apple-controlled data base accessible to law enforcement through various “lawful interception” schemes.
“Whatever the exact nature and scope of COIN,” Brown writes, “the firms that had been assembled for the purpose by Barr and TASC never got a chance to bid on the program’s recompete. In late September, Lovegrove noted to Barr and others that he’d spoken to the ‘CO [contracting officer] for COIN’.” The TASC executive told Barr that “the current procurement approach” was cancelled, citing “changed requirements.”
Apparently the Pentagon, or other unspecified secret state satrapy told the contestants that “an updated RFI [request for information]” will be issued soon. According to a later missive from Lovegrove to Barr, “COIN has been replaced by a procurement called Odyssey.” While it is still not entirely clear what Romas/COIN or the Odyssey program would do once deployed, Brown claims that “mobile phone software and applications constitute a major component of the program.”
And given Barr’s monomaniacal obsession with social media surveillance (that worked out well with Anonymous!) the presence of Alterian and SocialEyez on the procurement team may indicate that the secret state is alarmed by the prospect that the “Arab Spring” just might slip from proverbial “safe hands” and threaten Gulf dictatorships and Saudi Arabia with the frightening specter of democratic transformation.
Although the email from TASC executive Chris Clair to John Lovegrow names “Alterion” as a company to contact because of their their “SM2 tool,” in all likelihood this is a typo given the fact that it is the UK-based firm “Alterian” that has developed said SM2 tool, described on their web site as a “business intelligence product that provides visibility into social media and lets you tap into a new kind of data resource; your customers’ direct thoughts and opinions.”
This would be a highly-profitable partnership indeed for enterprising intelligence agencies and opaque corporate partners intent on monitoring political developments across the Middle East.
In fact, a 2010 press release, announced that Alterian had forged a partnership with the Dubai-based firm SocialEyez for “the world’s first social media monitoring service designed for the Arab market.”
We’re informed that SocialEyez, a division of Media Watch Middle East, described as “the leading media monitoring service in the Middle East,” offers services in “television, radio, social media, online news and internet monitoring across most sectors including commercial, government and PR.”
That Barr and his partners were interested in bringing these firms to the Romas/COIN table is not surprising considering that the Alterian/SocialEyez deal promises “to develop and launch an Arabic language interface for Alterian SM2 to make it the world’s first Arab language social media monitoring tool.” Inquiring minds can’t help but wonder which three-lettered American agencies alongside a stable of “corporate and government clients, including leading Blue Chips” might be interested in “maximising their social media monitoring investment”?
Pentagon “Manhunters” in the House
On an even more sinister note, the inclusion of Archimedes Global on the Romas/COIN team should set alarm bells ringing.
Archimedes is a small, privately-held niche security firm headquartered in Tampa, Florida where, surprise, surprise, U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM) has it’s main headquarters at the MacDill Air Force Base. On their web site, Archimedes describes itself as “a diversified technology company providing energy and information solutions to government and businesses worldwide.” The firm claims that it “delivers solutions” to its clients by “combining deep domain expertise, multi-disciplinary education and training, and technology-enabled innovations.”
While short on information regarding what it actually does, evidence suggests that the firm is chock-a-block with former spooks and Special Forces operators, skilled in the black arts of counterintelligence, various information operations, subversion and, let’s be frank, tasks euphemistically referred to in the grisly trade as “wet work.”
According to The Washington Post, the firm was established in 2005. However, although the Post claims in their “Top Secret America” series that the number of employees and revenue is “unknown,” Dana Priest and William M. Arkin note that Archimedes have five government clients and are have speared contracts relating to “Ground forces operations,” “Human intelligence,” Psychological operations,” and “Specialized military operations.”
Brown relates that Archimedes was slated to provide “Specialized linguistics, strategy, planning” for the proposed Romas/COIN/Odyssey project for an unknown U.S. Government entity.
Based on available evidence however, one can speculate that Archimedes may have been chosen as part of the HBGary Federal/TASC team precisely because of their previous work as private contractors in human intelligence (HUMINT), running spies and infiltrating assets into organizations of interest to the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) throughout the Middle East, Central- and South Asia.
In 2009, Antifascist Calling revealed that one of Archimedes Global’s senior directors, retired Air Force Lt. Colonel George A. Crawford, published a chilling monograph, Manhunting: Counter-Network Organizing for Irregular Warfare, for the highly-influential Joint Special Operations University (JSOU) at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa.
JSOU is the “educational component” of United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). With a mission that touts its ability to “plan and synchronize operations” against America’s geopolitical adversaries and rivals, JSOU’s Strategic Studies Department “advances SOF strategic influence by its interaction in academic, interagency, and United States military communities.”
Accordingly, Archimedes “information and risk” brief claim they can solve “the most difficult communication and risk problems by seeing over the horizon with a blend of art and science.” And with focus areas that include “strategic communications, media analysis and support, crisis communications, and risk and vulnerability assessment and mitigation,” it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to infer that those well-schooled in the dark art of information operations (INFOOPS) would find a friendly home inside the Romas/COIN contract team.
With some 25-years experience “as a foreign area officer specializing in Eastern Europe and Central Asia,” including a stint “as acting Air and Defense Attaché to Kyrgyzstan,” Crawford brings an interesting skill-set to the table. Crawford writes:
Manhunting–the deliberate concentration of national power to find, influence, capture, or when necessary kill an individual to disrupt a human network–has emerged as a key component of operations to counter irregular warfare adversaries in lieu of traditional state-on-state conflict measures. It has arguably become a primary area of emphasis in countering terrorist and insurgent opponents. (George A. Crawford, Manhunting: Counter-Network Organization for Irregular Warfare, JSOU Report 09-7, The JSOU Press, Hurlburt Field, Florida, September 2009, p. 1)
Acknowledged manhunting masters in their own right, the Israeli settler-colonial security apparat have perfected the art of “targeted killing,” when they aren’t dropping banned munitions such as white phosphorus on unarmed, defenseless civilian populations or attacking civilian vessels on the high seas.
Like their Israeli counterparts who come highly recommended as models of restraint, an American manhunting agency will employ similarly subtle, though no less lethal, tactics. Crawford informs us:
When compared with conventional force-on-force warfare, manhunting fundamentally alters the ratio between warfare’s respective firepower, maneuver, and psychological elements. Firepower becomes less significant in terms of mass, while the precision and discretion with which firepower is employed takes on tremendous significance, especially during influence operations. Why drop a bomb when effects operations or a knife might do? (Crawford, op. cit., p. 11, emphasis added)
Alongside actual shooters, “sensitive site exploitation (SSE) teams are critical operational components for Pentagon “manhunters.” We’re told that SSE teams will be assembled and able to respond on-call “in the event of a raid on a suspect site or to conduct independent ‘break-in and search’ operations without leaving evidence of their intrusion.” Such teams must possess “individual skills” such as “physical forensics, computer or electronic exploitation, document exploitation, investigative techniques, biometric collection, interrogation/debriefing and related skills.”
As if to drive home the point that the target of such sinister operations are the American people and world public opinion, Crawford, ever the consummate INFOOPS warrior, views “strategic information operations” as key to this murderous enterprise. Indeed, they “must be delicately woven into planned kinetic operations to increase the probability that a given operation or campaign will achieve its intended effect.”
Personnel skilled at conducting strategic information operations–to include psychological operations, public information, deception, media and computer network operations, and related activities–are important for victory. Despite robust DoD and Intelligence Community capabilities in this area, efforts to establish organizations that focus information operations have not been viewed as a positive development by the public or the media, who perceive government-sponsored information efforts with suspicion. Consequently, these efforts must take place away from public eyes. Strategic information operations may also require the establishment of regional or local offices to ensure dissemination of influence packages and assess their impact. Thus manhunting influence may call for parallel or independent structures at all levels…” (Crawford, op. cit., pp. 27-28, emphasis added)
While we do not as yet have a complete picture of the Romas/COIN/Odyssey project, some preliminary conclusions can be drawn.
“Altogether, then,” Brown writes, “a successful bid for the relevant contract was seen to require the combined capabilities of perhaps a dozen firms–capabilities whereby millions of conversations can be monitored and automatically analyzed, whereby a wide range of personal data can be obtained and stored in secret, and whereby some unknown degree of information can be released to a given population through a variety of means and without any hint that the actual source is U.S. military intelligence.”
Although Brown’s initial research concluded that Romas/COIN/Odyssey will operate “in conjunction with other surveillance and propaganda assets controlled by the U.S. and its partners,” with a firm like Archimedes on-board, once information has been assembled on individuals described in other contexts as “radicals” or “key extremists,” will they subsequently be made to “disappear” into the hands of “friendly” security services such as those of strategic U.S. partners Bahrain and Saudi Arabia?
We’re reminded that “Barr was also at the center of a series of conspiracies by which his own company and two others hired out their collective capabilities for use by corporations that sought to destroy their political enemies by clandestine and dishonest means.”
Indeed, “none of the companies involved,” Brown writes, have been investigated; a proposed Congressional inquiry was denied by the committee chair, noting that it was the Justice Department’s decision as to whether to investigate, even though it was the Justice Department itself that made the initial introductions. Those in the intelligence contracting industry who believe themselves above the law are entirely correct.”
Brown warns that “a far greater danger is posed by the practice of arming small and unaccountable groups of state and military personnel with a set of tools by which to achieve better and better ‘situational awareness’ on entire populations” while simultaneously manipulating “the information flow in such a way as to deceive those same populations.”
Beginning, it should be noted, right here at home…
by Plutonia » Mon Jul 11, 2011 4:00 pm
Anonymous Leaks 90,000 Military Email Accounts in Latest #AntiSec Attack
Booz Allen Hamilton is a massive American consulting firm that does a substantial amount of work for the Pentagon. This means they've got a lot of military business on their servers—which Anonymous hacked. Today they've leaked it.
The leak, dubbed 'Military Meltdown Monday,' includes 90,000 logins of military personnel—including personnel from US CENTCOM, SOCOM, the Marine Corps, various Air Force facilities, Homeland Security, State Department staff, and what looks like private sector contractors. Their correspondences could include exchanges with Booz Allen's highly brassy staff of retired defense folk: current execs include three former Directors of National Intelligence and one former head of the CIA. Anon was also kind enough to gut 4 GB of source code from Booz Allen's servers. Anon cites the firm's alleged complicity in the SWIFT financial monitoring program as at least partial motive for the attack.
Along with the email release is something of a hacked grabbag:
Additionally we found some related datas on different servers we got access to after finding credentials in the Booz Allen System. We added anything which could be interesting.
And last but not least we found maps and keys for various other treasure chests buried on the islands of government agencies, federal contractors and shady whitehat companies. This material surely will keep our blackhat friends busy for a while
We'll have to wait a bit to see the extent to which Anonymous has compromised some delicate defense mysteries, if any. At any rate, it's a big chunk of egg in the face of a company tasked with doing the Pentagon's work for it in the interest of our safety. A company whose servers had, in Anon's words, "basically...no security measures in place."
http://gizmodo.com/5820049/anonymous-le ... sec-attack
by seemslikeadream » Mon Jul 11, 2011 4:06 pm
by Plutonia » Mon Jul 11, 2011 4:07 pm
by Plutonia » Mon Jul 11, 2011 8:19 pm
The loose collective of hackers also posted an "invoice" to Booz Allen for its work, a "bill" of $310. The total, the group said, is based on four hours of "man power, $40; network auditing, $35; Web-app auditing, $35; network infiltration, $0; password and SQL dumping, $200; decryption of data, $0; and media and press, $0."
These asterisks to the "amounts" added double salt: "Price is based on the amount of effort required ... price is based on the amount of badly secured data to be dumped, which in this case was a substantial figure ... no security in place, no effort for intrusion needed."
http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/20 ... -addresses
by Plutonia » Mon Jul 11, 2011 8:35 pm
by justdrew » Mon Jul 11, 2011 8:46 pm
by Plutonia » Mon Jul 11, 2011 9:02 pm
justdrew wrote:wow, that joe black idiot is one hell of an idiot.
by Plutonia » Tue Jul 12, 2011 1:54 am
Pentagon Contractor Helped Write Its Own Armored-Truck Deal
Spencer Ackerman July 11, 2011
How badly did the Pentagon want special trucks that could protect against insurgent bombs? So badly that it let the contractors responsible for providing them essentially write their own contracts.
That’s one of the conclusions from a Pentagon inspector general’s report released late Monday (.pdf) into a contract to provide logistics and maintenance work on Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles (MRAPs) worth nearly half a billion dollars. The line between contractor and government vendor became so porous that officials “increased the risk for potential waste or abuse on the contract,” the inspector general wrote.
Getting the resilient MRAPs into Iraq and Afghanistan was a top priority for former Defense Secretary Robert Gates. That urgency led some officials at the Army’s Contracting Command and the Joint Program Office-MRAP into a too-cozy relationship with Jacobs Technology and its subcontractor SAIC, which won a $193.4 million award for logistics services on the MRAPs in November 2007.
In a reversal of how contracting is supposed to work, the inspector general finds that Jacobs/SAIC employees “directed Government personnel in Iraq,” ordering them to report to the contractor team and not government officials. In another case, a battalion commander with the 402nd Army Field Support Brigade allowed a contractor employee to assist in reprimanding an unnamed Defense Department official for an unspecified infraction, another no-no. “[C]ontractor employees appeared to be directing the day-to-day operations of DoD personnel,” the inspector general finds.
But the coup de grace came in 2009, ahead of the re-up of the contract. The contractors’ Army partners and the Joint Program Office “worked together to prepare the contract requirement” for the successor to the MRAP bid, a deal worth $285.5 million that ended in May. Shockingly, that contract went to SAIC, too.
“The contractor’s performance of these functions violates the two underlying principles in the acquisition process: preventing unfair competitive advantage and preventing the existence of conflicting roles that might bias a contractor’s judgment,” the inspector general writes.
Yet the report doesn’t assess how much cash, if any, was wasted as a result. Nor does the inspector general recommend any punishment more punitive than sending contracting officials back to training on “inherently governmental functions and organizational conflicts of interest requirements.”
Government watchdogs were stunned at the MRAP audit results. “We were allowing a company to help write contract requirements for a contract that it was bidding on — and it ended up winning the contract!” says Nick Schwellenbach, lead investigator for the Project on Government Oversight. “The contractor could have stacked the deck in its favor, steering the contract towards a worse deal for the taxpayer.”
How could this have happened? In order to get the MRAPs into the warzones swiftly, the inspector general finds that JPO MRAP made SAIC employees middlemen between the overall head of the MRAP program and its deputies in Iraq and Kuwait. “This structure gave the contractor authority over DoD employees, which enabled the contractor to perform inherently governmental functions and allowed organizational conflicts of interest,” the inspector general writes.
It’s not been the greatest moment for oversight in military contracting. Late last year, the Defense Department restricted its own ability to review conflicts of interest on big contracts after an industry freakout. And this is right as the Pentagon’s top gear-buyer bangs the table about making contractors pay if their programs go over budget.
Of course, if the contractor is really the one in charge, the government doesn’t have much leverage. “The buyer-seller relationship is turned on its head when the company that is working for the government can discipline the government’s own employees,” Schwellenbach says, after reminding that “the government hires contractors to work for it.” How old-fashioned.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/07 ... nd-loaded/
NYC mayor demands $600M refund on software project
Contractor SAIC should reimburse New York in full for the troubled CityTime software project, says Mayor Michael Bloomberg
...
The recent indictment of SAIC's leader project manager on the CityTime job, Gerard Denault, as well as the guilty plea to criminal charges made by SAIC systems engineer Carl Bell, who designed the software, are "extremely troubling and raise questions about SAIC's corporate responsibility and internal controls to prevent and combat fraud," he added. Denault and Bell were charged with were charged with taking kickbacks, wire fraud and money laundering.
Also recently indicted were Reddy and Padma Allen, a couple who head up New Jersey systems integrator TechnoDyne, which was SAIC's primary subcontractor on the CityTime project. Federal authorities allege that the Allens and others conducted an elaborate overbilling and kickback scheme that siphoned millions of dollars from the project.
Federal authorities have also contended that SAIC had received a whistleblower complaint about the project as far back as 2005, Bloomberg said in the letter. "It is unclear what SAIC did at that time to investigate these serious allegations."
...
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/0 ... efund.html
by Plutonia » Thu Jul 21, 2011 12:43 pm
Anonymous & Lulz Security Statement
Hello thar FBI and international law authorities,
We recently stumbled across the following article with amazement and a certain amount of amusement:
http://www.npr.org/2011/07/20/138555799 ... us-hackers
The statements made by deputy assistant FBI director Steve Chabinsky in this
article clearly seem to be directed at Anonymous and Lulz Security, and we are
happy to provide you with a response.
You state:
"We want to send a message that chaos on the Internet is unacceptable,
[even if] hackers can be believed to have social causes, it's entirely
unacceptable to break into websites and commit unlawful acts."
Now let us be clear here, Mr. Chabinsky, while we understand that you and
your colleagues may find breaking into websites unacceptable, let us tell
you what WE find unacceptable:
* Governments lying to their citizens and inducing fear and terror to keep
them in control by dismantling their freedom piece by piece.
* Corporations aiding and conspiring with said governments while taking
advantage at the same time by collecting billions of funds for
federal contracts we all know they can't fulfil.
* Lobby conglomerates who only follow their agenda to push the profits
higher, while at the same time being deeply involved in governments around
the world with the only goal to infiltrate and corrupt them enough
so the status quo will never change.
These governments and corporations are our enemy. And we will continue to
fight them, with all methods we have at our disposal, and that certainly
includes breaking into their websites and exposing their lies.
We are not scared any more. Your threats to arrest us are meaningless to
us as you cannot arrest an idea. Any attempt to do so will make your
citizens more angry until they will roar in one gigantic choir. It is our
mission to help these people and there is nothing - absolutely nothing - you
can possibly to do make us stop.
"The Internet has become so important to so many people that we have to
ensure that the World Wide Web does not become the Wild Wild West."
Let me ask you, good sir, when was the Internet not the Wild Wild West? Do
you really believe you were in control of it at any point? You were not.
That does not mean that everyone behaves like an outlaw. You see, most
people do not behave like bandits if they have no reason to. We become bandits
on the Internet because you have forced our hand. The Anonymous bitchslap rings
through your ears like hacktivism movements of the 90s. We're back - and we're
not going anywhere. Expect us.
http://pastebin.com/RA15ix7S
by Plutonia » Wed Jul 27, 2011 12:41 pm
ThomasRHart Thomas Gerhardt
Fun Fact: As of this moment, based on its market cap value of 43.60 billion , @ebay [PayPal's parent co] lost 1.308 billion dollars. Ooooops. #OpPayPal
1 hour ago Favorite Retweet Reply
A message to PayPal, its customers, and our friends
Dear PayPal, its customers, and our friends around the globe,
This is an official communiqué from Anonymous and Lulz Security in the name of AntiSec.
In recent weeks, we've found ourselves outraged at the FBI's willingness to arrest and threaten those who are involved in ethical, modern cyber operations. Law enforcement continues to push its ridiculous rules upon us - Anonymous "suspects" may face a fine of up to 500,000 USD with the addition of 15 years' jailtime, all for taking part in a historical activist movement. Many of the already-apprehended Anons are being charged with taking part in DDoS attacks against corrupt and greedy organizations, such as PayPal.
What the FBI needs to learn is that there is a vast difference between adding one's voice to a chorus and digital sit-in with Low Orbit Ion Cannon, and controlling a large botnet of infected computers. And yet both of these are punishable with exactly the same fine and sentence.
In addition to this horrific law enforcement incompetence, PayPal continues to withhold funds from WikiLeaks, a beacon of truth in these dark times. By simply standing up for ourselves and uniting the people, PayPal still sees it fit to wash its hands of any blame, and instead encourages and assists law enforcement to hunt down participants in the AntiSec movement.
Quite simply, we, the people, are disgusted with these injustices. We will not sit down and let ourselves be trampled upon by any corporation or government. We are not scared of you, and that is something for you to be scared of. We are not the terrorists here: you are.
We encourage anyone using PayPal to immediately close their accounts and consider an alternative. The first step to being truly free is not putting one's trust into a company that freezes accounts when it feels like, or when it is pressured by the U.S. government. PayPal's willingness to fold to legislation should be proof enough that they don't deserve the customers they get. They do not deserve your business, and they do not deserve your respect.
Join us in our latest operation against PayPal - tweet pictures of your account closure, tell us on IRC, spread the word. Anonymous has become a powerful channel of information, and unlike the governments of the world, we are here to fight for you. Always.
Signed, your allies,
Lulz Security (unvanned)
Anonymous (unknown)
AntiSec (untouchable)
http://pastebin.com/LAykd1es
by hanshan » Wed Jul 27, 2011 12:50 pm
Plutonia wrote:Today:ThomasRHart Thomas Gerhardt
Fun Fact: As of this moment, based on its market cap value of 43.60 billion , @ebay [PayPal's parent co] lost 1.308 billion dollars. Ooooops. #OpPayPal
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Yesterday:A message to PayPal, its customers, and our friends
Dear PayPal, its customers, and our friends around the globe,
This is an official communiqué from Anonymous and Lulz Security in the name of AntiSec.
In recent weeks, we've found ourselves outraged at the FBI's willingness to arrest and threaten those who are involved in ethical, modern cyber operations. Law enforcement continues to push its ridiculous rules upon us - Anonymous "suspects" may face a fine of up to 500,000 USD with the addition of 15 years' jailtime, all for taking part in a historical activist movement. Many of the already-apprehended Anons are being charged with taking part in DDoS attacks against corrupt and greedy organizations, such as PayPal.
What the FBI needs to learn is that there is a vast difference between adding one's voice to a chorus and digital sit-in with Low Orbit Ion Cannon, and controlling a large botnet of infected computers. And yet both of these are punishable with exactly the same fine and sentence.
In addition to this horrific law enforcement incompetence, PayPal continues to withhold funds from WikiLeaks, a beacon of truth in these dark times. By simply standing up for ourselves and uniting the people, PayPal still sees it fit to wash its hands of any blame, and instead encourages and assists law enforcement to hunt down participants in the AntiSec movement.
Quite simply, we, the people, are disgusted with these injustices. We will not sit down and let ourselves be trampled upon by any corporation or government. We are not scared of you, and that is something for you to be scared of. We are not the terrorists here: you are.
We encourage anyone using PayPal to immediately close their accounts and consider an alternative. The first step to being truly free is not putting one's trust into a company that freezes accounts when it feels like, or when it is pressured by the U.S. government. PayPal's willingness to fold to legislation should be proof enough that they don't deserve the customers they get. They do not deserve your business, and they do not deserve your respect.
Join us in our latest operation against PayPal - tweet pictures of your account closure, tell us on IRC, spread the word. Anonymous has become a powerful channel of information, and unlike the governments of the world, we are here to fight for you. Always.
Signed, your allies,
Lulz Security (unvanned)
Anonymous (unknown)
AntiSec (untouchable)
http://pastebin.com/LAykd1es
PayPal is attempting damage control by removing the option to close accounts from the account holders menu options, though I did it through the "email us" menu options.
Mercedes Haefer charged for ddosing Paypal:
FBI Exposes The Terrifying Face Of "Anonymous": http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/ ... ous-748293
by Plutonia » Wed Jul 27, 2011 1:14 pm
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