Wikileaks, Bank of America, Anonymous, US Government, Espionage
Discovered this political video, via wikileaks's tweet:
EXPOSED: Attack on Wikileaks
I was wondering, who is the blonde woman in the video. Of “firedoglake.com”?? What kinda name is that? How she seems to know so much. Can we trust her?
That blonde woman in the video, is Jane Hamsher. She was born in 1959, so, aged 51. Ten years older than me. Amazing. She's very cute. I thought she's 30ish. She must have had a very healthy life style. You know how some people just have this youngish feel? It's all over the way they talk, their smiles. Camille Paglia is also like that. [see Camille Paglia: Modern Sex Goddess]
Here's some quote about her from Wikipedia:
Jane Hamsher (born July 25, 1959) is an American film producer, author, and blogger best known as the author of Killer Instinct, a memoir about co-producing the 1994 movie Natural Born Killers with Don Murphy and others, and as the founder and publisher of the politically progressive blog FireDogLake (2004 to the present). With Murphy, she also co-produced the subsequent films Apt Pupil (1998), Permanent Midnight (1998), and From Hell (2001). A contributor to The Huffington Post, she posts also in other liberal Websites and political magazines, such as AlterNet and The American Prospect.
Funny, she is the co-producer of the movie Natural Born Killers. (1994) Buy at amazon That film is a violent gory critique of the media. I loved it. (not for the faint of heart)
Wikileaks, Bank of America, Anonymous, US Government, Espionage
Now, if you are wondering what they are talking about in the video… it's a very complex political thing. The following article gives a summary.
More facts emerge about the leaked smear campaigns By Glenn Greenwald. At http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/02/15/palantir
Read the first 6 paragraphs, if you are so inclined.
It took me about 4 hours to read this and ~10 other related articles. If you don't follow politics, then a basic summary is that Bank Of America, and US Government, are plotting underhand tactics to smear Wikileak and its supporters, including hiring “security firms” (i.e. hackers), with things such as submitting false documents, creating false identities on social media, data mining social network, etc.
Anyway, if you are a programing geek, there's a quite a bit of interesting thing going on in this incident. The guy who started this all, is Aaron Barr. He's a top executive of security firm HB Gary Federal. He tried to find out the identities of the Anonymous (group), thru hacking activities. (remember, that the Anonymous have made news in past few years, including fighting with Scientology.) So, Anonymous fought back. They hacked into HB Gary Federal site, defaced its front page, and got access to some 50k emails, and put it on the web. Now, here's the important part. These 50k emails, turns out, contains explosive info, among them is that Bank Of America, and few other companies, including US Government, are plotting against Wikileak using questionable means. Several political news sites dug into the emails, and uncovered various things. (e.g. N Y Times, Forbes, The Huffington Post, Reason, Salon, all are reporting it, as it unfolds.) (many of the involved parties are making public responses. e.g. Bank Of American denies it, some other major security firms severed relationship with HB Gary Federal, etc.)
The Show for Tech Geekers
As a programing geek, the interesting part is the fight between Aaron Barr and the Anonymous Group. Aaron, according to reports, seems to be this smartass hotshot. He seems to think that he can find the identities of the Anonymous group. He tried to infiltrate by data mining facebook, creating multiple fake accounts and hang on IRC, telling his programer to create a malicious version of the DDOS-attack software (Low Orbit Ion Cannon), and bragged to the press that he found the identities, and is meeting FBI to peddle the info. (according to the video, the security firms are singing to tune of $200k/month for their dirty work) Of course, this doesn't sit well with the Anonymous. It's quite amazing how The Anonymous is able to break into the site, get the emails, rather quickly. Also broke into Aaron's twitter and iPod, published his address, income, social security number. This stuff is better than a espionage thriller. A thorough account is in the following article, from arstechnica.com:
How one man tracked down Anonymous—and paid a heavy price By Nate Anderson. At http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/how-one-security-firm-tracked-anonymousand-paid-a-heavy-price.ars/
Following is a screenshot of the hacked website left by Anonymous.
