Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 4th Amendment, energy costs, gas prices, Mark Udall, oil production, Randy Udall, Wyden
“Our people want to know why the flood of new domestic crude oil isn’t lowering prices at the pump,” said Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. “There is no question that the lower oil costs are not getting through to Americans’ wallets.”
via Senators Grill Refiners Over High Prices Amid Oil Boom – Bloomberg.
If Wyden is this clueless about energy — what “lower oil costs”? — it does not give a fellar confidence that he is an effective guardian of civil liberties (Wyden is on the Senate Intelligence Committee which is supposedly a check on the executive branch’s surveillance fetish). Is he just trying to get someone from the industry to admit the truth, or is he really that out of it.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 4th Amendment, Berico, Chamber of Commerce, Endgame Systems, false documents, freedom hating super weasels, Greenwald, NSA, Palantir, PRISM, Team Themis
Freakin sockpuppets are everywhere these days.
Team Themis (a group that included HBGary and the private intelligence and security firms Palantir Technologies, Berico Technologies and Endgame Systems) was effectively brought in to find a way to undermine the credibility of WikiLeaks and the journalist Glenn Greenwald (who recently broke the story of Edward Snowden’s leak of the N.S.A.’s Prism program), because of Greenwald’s support for WikiLeaks. Specifically, the plan called for actions to “sabotage or discredit the opposing organization” including a plan to submit fake documents and then call out the error. As for Greenwald, it was argued that he would cave “if pushed” because he would “choose professional preservation over cause.” That evidently wasn’t the case.
Team Themis also developed a proposal for the Chamber of Commerce to undermine the credibility of one of its critics, a group called Chamber Watch. The proposal called for first creating a “false document, perhaps highlighting periodical financial information,” giving it to a progressive group opposing the Chamber, and then subsequently exposing the document as a fake to “prove that U.S. Chamber Watch cannot be trusted with information and/or tell the truth.”
(A photocopy of the proposal can be found here.)
In addition, the group proposed creating a “fake insider persona” to infiltrate Chamber Watch. They would “create two fake insider personas, using one as leverage to discredit the other while confirming the legitimacy of the second.”
Psyops need not be conducted by nation states; they can be undertaken by anyone with the capabilities and the incentive to conduct them.
The hack also revealed evidence that Team Themis was developing a “persona management” system — a program, developed at the specific request of the United States Air Force, that allowed one user to control multiple online identities (“sock puppets”) for commenting in social media spaces, thus giving the appearance of grass roots support. The contract was eventually awarded to another private intelligence firm.
via The Real War on Reality – NYTimes.com.
Industrialized Cyclist Notepad 