Chamber of Commerce's lawyers use dirty tricks and sploits to target progressives

I don't know if any of you are following the Chamber of Commerce/BofA/HBGary/Themis story, but $#!& just got real.

ChamberLeaks: Plan Solicited By Chamber Lawyers Included Malware Hacking Of Activist Computers

Last Thursday, ThinkProgress revealed 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’s political opponents, including ThinkProgress, the Change to Win labor coalition, SEIU, StopTheChamber.com, MoveOn.org and others. The lawyers from the Chamber’s 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.

As ThinkProgress has reported, the proposals — created by military contractors Palantir, Berico Technologies, and HB Gary Federal, collectively known as “Team Themis” — were discussed at length with the Chamber’s lawyers over the course of several months starting in October of 2010. The core proposals called for snooping on the families of progressive activists, creating phony identities to penetrate progressive organizations, creating bots to “scrape” social media for information, and submitting fake documents to Chamber opponents as a false flag trick to discredit progressive organizations.

In addition to the Team Themis plans that ThinkProgress and other outlets have reported on, a closer look at the proposals show that the firms had planned to use exploits to steal information from the Chamber’s opponents, or worse. On November 2, HB Gary 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 here). One presentation (click here to download) boasted of HBGary Federal’s capabilities in “Information Operations,” a military contractor term for offensive data extraction techniques typically reserved for use against terrorist groups. The slide includes sections on “Vulnerability Research/Exploit Development” and “Malware Analysis and Reverse Engineering.” View a screenshot below:

Whole thing is here:  http://thinkprogress.org/2011/02/17/chamberleaks-malware-hacking/

So true!  What I find most unsettling is a) this plan to plant a false document with a progressive group and then discredit it, which is what many people (including me) believe Karl Rove did to Dan Rather; and b) the personal and online stalking of individuals.  This is like right out of a paranoiac's worst fantasies.  And I think what's clear is that these guys are not unique.  A huge industry has sprouted up around these elite power-consolidating PR and law firms. 

Colbert has been so great lately while I feel like the Daily Show has been pandering in weird ways.  Last night, Colbert had Glenn Greenwald on to talk about the HBGary situation and flashed an Anonymous mask: http://bit.ly/e8fZSz  Brilliant.

Et tu, Canada?  I guess the trolls on Mediaite need a northern component.