“Political systems serve economic systems. A capitalist economy is based on inequality and scarcity. Some portions of the society will have more than they need and others will not have enough. Such inequality requires a security state to control those who do not have enough so that they do not try to rise up and make demands.”

– from the mission statement of PopularResistance.org

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“When you talked to people outside the [anti-Vietnam War]

movement about what the FBI was doing, nobody wanted to believe it.”

– Keith Forsyth, one of the activists who exposed the FBI’s

COINTELPRO (counterintelligence program) crimes

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“COINTELPRO is alive and well.”

– Tom McNamara, CounterPunch magazine,

January 21, 2013

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“Think government surveillance is no big deal?

Talk to these victims of police stalking.”

– Scott Shackford, Reason magazine,

September 28, 2016

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Current reporting from protests in Seattle, LA, Portland, etc.

Occupied Seattle

Chad Loder

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Overview

Based on Google Trends data, the term “ gang stalking ” began appearing among online searches circa 2005. Coincidentally or not, that was during the post-9/11 expansion of America’s national security state activities, which included illegal domestic mass surveillance by the NSA, the use of torture at black site prisons by the CIA, the militarization of police departments, etc. In any case, an extensive review of relevant published news reports and other information suggests that the term “gang stalking” – and most, but not all, online references to it – is disinformation from the U.S. intelligence community, intended to obfuscate the nature of a set of real tactics sometimes referred to in the security industry as “disruption” operations – as in, disruption of the life of an individual targeted by public and/or private security operatives. It has nothing to do with criminal gangs – that’s the disinformation part. It does involve stalking though – intense, long-term surveillance and harassment, involving varying levels of criminality.

Most famously, the methods were used by communist East Germany’s Stasi (state police), who referred to the strategy as Zersetzung (German for “decomposition” or “corrosion” – a reference to the severe psychological, social, and financial effects upon the victim). Some self-proclaimed victims have described the process as “no-touch torture” – because the tactics generate minimal forensic evidence.

Tactics include – but are not limited to – slander, blacklisting, “mobbing” (intense, organized harassment in the workplace), “black bag jobs” (residential break-ins), abusive phone calls, computer hacking, framing, threats, blackmail, vandalism, “street theater” (staged physical and verbal interactions with minions of the people who orchestrate the stalking), harassment by noises, and other forms of bullying. In some cases, the harassment escalates to physical violence.

As for the scope of such activities in the US or other nations, I have no specific information or guesses. This website does contain links, however, to most of the important published English language news reports related to this subject – through 2018 anyway. For reasons I try to address in my accompanying analysis, it seems clear that some of the published media reports – and most of the websites about this topic – are disinformation. Their existence suggests that this form of police state social control is at least widespread enough that an effort is being made to discredit claims about its existence. The disinformation goal is to associate all reports of such crimes with conspiracy theory idiocy – rather than associating them with the well-documented history of crimes by rogue spy agencies, police agencies, and private security firms in America, dating back to the 19th century.

Stalking by corrupt cops, spies, and security goons is not only unethical, it’s also illegal under both federal and state law. It clearly violates, for example, the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unwarranted searches, the Sixth Amendment, which guarantees the right to a trial, and the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments.” Such operations also violate similar laws in state constitutions. In addition, “stalking” is specifically prohibited by the criminal codes of every state in America.

A full discussion of this form of crime – including an archive of published news reports – appears on the What is “Gang Stalking?” page of this site.

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December 6, 2018

Politico’s account of a “private spy ring”

Zach Dorfman’s article this week at Politico recounts an example of a private spy network in which local and federal law enforcement officials were feeding information to a private, right-wing political organization. Dorfman provides some historical context:

“Private spy rings can be traced back all the way to the 1920s,” says Darren Mulloy, a professor of history at Wilfrid Laurier University and an expert on radical political and social movements, “or even back to [Allan] Pinkerton’s detective agency at the end of the 19th century.” The tradition picked up during the 1950s, Mulloy says, reportedly with the likes of anticommunist groups like the American Security Council and the John Birch Society.

Such groups “perpetuated conspiracies by gathering so-called intelligence in an effort to discredit people to try and link them to grand and dastardly schemes,” Seth Rosenfeld, author of Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power, told me. “So, whether it was a communist conspiracy then, or a ‘deep state’ plot now, these are attempts to undermine people who are dissenting from the powers of the moment.”

In 1979, a congressman, Larry McDonald, established an organization called Western Goals, as “his own private intelligence agency.”

…McDonald was a militant cold warrior and talented zealot who built his own mini-deep state—a foundation that worked with government and law enforcement officials to collect and disseminate information about supposed subversives.

… According to contemporary news reports, individuals working for local or federal law enforcement would provide Western Goals with derogatory—and potentially illegally acquired—intelligence information about perceived radicals or groups.

Apparently, the spying continued after it was exposed and banned:

In January 1983, the Los Angeles Times reported that a veteran officer with the LAPD’s intelligence-gathering arm named Jay Paul was found to be illegally storing 180 boxes of LAPD materials running 500,000 pages in length, including confidential files, in a garage behind his wife’s law office in Long Beach. The files—political dossiers about individuals and groups such as civil rights organizations—weren’t supposed to exist anymore; a 1975 city law had required the destruction of six tons of these types of records.

Note to journalists: If you’re hoping to get at the truth about America’s illegal domestic spying and stalking, don’t assume you can get there from your laptop. You can’t submit a FOIA request to learn what’s stored in the garage of a friend of a member of a law enforcement intelligence unit.

Dorfman’s piece is an interesting read; however, it doesn’t address an essential question – namely, what is the current scope of such spying – legal and illegal – by corrupt local and federal law enforcement personnel, the 17 federal intelligence agencies, and the numerous private security-intelligence firms?

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December 7, 2018

State-run media coverage of Bush’s death

News accounts of the death of George H.W. Bush last week showed the chasm of difference between reporting on CIA-related matters by the establishment news media – almost unanimously worshipful of Bush – and accounts by independent, real journalists. In the latter group is Russ Baker, whose 2008 book Family of Secrets explores, among other things, Bush’s history as an apparent CIA asset years before he was chosen to head that agency. Baker is a widely published journalist – The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, etc. – and he was a contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review; however, the corporate press mostly avoids discussing his book. Here is the author’s recent comment on that:

Journalist Barrett Brown’s tweet on Sunday, about Russ Baker’s book:

In addition to ignoring Baker’s well-researched and well-written book, most of the major news media coverage following Bush’s death gave minimal attention to the former CIA director’s central role in the Iran-Contra operations – and the subsequent cover-up. Similarly, “Operation Condor” was not a big topic of discussion for talking heads as they lamented the passing of our great leader. An example of what the establishment press avoids worrying the common folk about was published today at The Intercept:

Bush was at the CIA during the height of Operation Condor, an international “kidnap-torture-murder apparatus” run by six Latin American dictatorships and coordinated by Washington. In an Operation Condor plot carried out in October 1976, Chilean secret police assassinated former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and American Ronni Moffitt with a car bomb in Washington, D.C. Bush misled an FBI investigation about Chile’s responsibility.

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August 22, 2018

Watching the watchers

Concerns about America’s “deep state” are on the rise. Monday’s broadcast of Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News is worth noting, as an example. Beginning at 13:05 are three segments about current threats to American democracy – threats of domestic origin.

I would describe the main points this way:

(1) US intelligence agencies essentially have no real oversight or accountability.

(2) Major corporate news outlets, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, sometimes lie on behalf of the spy agencies – such as the DOJ. Often the deception takes forms such as deliberate mischaracterizations and lies of omission.

(3) Increasingly-aggressive censorship on internet platforms, and unseen changes to search algorithms, by technology corporations pose an obvious threat to free speech – for both the left and the right – in the modern version of the public square.

Note: If the above YouTube video link becomes inactive, the show can also be viewed at the Fox News site.

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April 30, 2020 – The segment touching upon point #3 above concerns Alex Jones’s banishment from YouTube for peddling nonsense. Although some of the expressed concerns about the spread of false information by charlatans like Jones are legitimate, the bigger concern for establishment media owners is the one mentioned today by journalist Matt Taibbi; it relates to point #2 above.

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August 21, 2018

Chris Hedges on the collapse of empire

Evaluating the plausibility of claims and concerns about illegal spying and harassment by government and private security-intelligence industry goons requires considering the nature of the larger political ecosystem in which the activities are allegedly occurring. One such critique of American power was offered on Saturday, when consumer advocate and progressive activist Ralph Nader interviewed journalist Chris Hedges, on Nader’s weekly public radio show. Both men share the increasingly widespread view that America is essentially a corporate oligarchy and a militaristic empire, and that the nation is showing the signs of decay which such corrupt power structures engender: social pathologies, infrastructure neglect, extreme inequality, illegal domestic spying, the militarization of policing, etc.

One of the theorists who has influenced Hedges’ views on the corrupt nature of America’s politics is Sheldon Wolin (1922—2015), a writer and a politics professor at Princeton University. Here is Hedges, in a 2015 article at truthdig:

…Wolin lays bare the realities of our bankrupt democracy, the causes behind the decline of American empire and the rise of a new and terrifying configuration of corporate power he calls “inverted totalitarianism.”

…Inverted totalitarianism is different from classical forms of totalitarianism. It does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader but in the faceless anonymity of the corporate state. Our inverted totalitarianism pays outward fealty to the facade of electoral politics, the Constitution, civil liberties, freedom of the press, the independence of the judiciary, and the iconography, traditions and language of American patriotism, but it has effectively seized all of the mechanisms of power to render the citizen impotent.

As a war correspondent, Hedges – a Pulitzer prize winner and recipient of an Amnesty International award for humanitarian journalism – has witnessed state violence around the world, and, by his own acknowledgement, has been radicalized by what he has seen. He was also, essentially, forced to resign from The New York Times, for speaking honestly, in public, about the moral and strategic idiocy of the Iraq War.

Similarly – and Hedges alludes to this briefly in the interview, Ralph Nader got on the bad side of America’s corporate power structure, and was treated accordingly. The segment starting at 15:16 describes the backlash against activists, including, for example, the blacklisting of Noam Chomsky by The New York Times. The “Powell Memo” mentioned is this part refers to a confidential memorandum written in 1971 by Lewis Powell, two months before he was nominated as a US Supreme Court Justice. Some Wikipedia excerpts:

“The memo called for corporate America to become more aggressive in molding society’s thinking about business, government, politics and law in the US.”

“It was based in part on Powell’s reaction to the work of activist Ralph Nader, whose 1965 exposé on General Motors, Unsafe at Any Speed, put a focus on the auto industry putting profit ahead of safety, which triggered the American consumer movement. Powell saw it as an undermining of Americans’ faith in enterprise and another step in the slippery slope of socialism.”

“The Powell Memorandum…became the blueprint of the rise of the American conservative movement and the formation of a network of influential right-wing think tanks and lobbying organizations, such as The Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)…”

Another response to Ralph Nader’s efforts took a form more familiar to some readers of this website. Here is a description from Legal Affairs (November-December 2005):

“GM hired a detective to investigate Nader, tapping his phones and even hiring prostitutes in an attempt to trap him in a compromising situation. Nader sued for invasion of privacy, and an opinion by the New York Court of Appeals extended the reach of tort law to cover “overzealous surveillance.” GM eventually settled, and Nader said he used the proceeds, some $290,000, to start the pro-consumer Center for Study of Responsive Law.”

Chris Hedges’ strategic advice for Americans includes supporting an independent political party. As he sees it, the Democratic Party is hopelessly corrupted by its ties to corporate and deep state interests, as evidenced, for example, by its rigging of the presidential primary to favor Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. Hedges also suggests, plausibly, that Sanders is incapable of leading serious reform anyway, because the senator fails to acknowledge that democratic socialism (like libertarianism) is incompatible with the agenda of the national security state.

Hedges also advises that effective political resistance requires making face-to-face personal contacts – not just digital contacts – to build local power bases. Readers of Hedges will know that he also advocates non-violent civil disobedience, as was used effectively during the civil rights movement.

Although Hedges, as usual, paints a dark picture, he observes that a “collapse” isn’t necessarily bad; it might even be essential.

“I don’t think the collapse of empire is necessarily a negative. At this point, empire has become a deeply destructive force not only for our own country but globally. We see with endless warfare – seventeen years of warfare now in the Middle East – the inability of the corporate state to deal in a rational way with climate change or restrict or control the financial institutions that have become completely predatory and have already reconfigured the United States into an oligarchy, where it becomes impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs or Citibank or Raytheon or any of these other large corporations.”

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Update – For anyone interested in Chris Hedges’ critique of neoliberalism, I recommend all three of these recent videos:

Hedges’ appearance on the Canadian public broadcast station, TVOntario – Sept. 12, 2018. A copy of it on YouTube has been viewed more than a million times.

Hedges’ speech at Seattle University – Oct. 8, 2018

Jimmy Dore’s interview of Hedges – Oct. 15, 2018

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August 20, 2018

TSA’s spying on Americans is “potentially illegal”

As Jana Winter at The Boston Globe reported on July 28th, Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents are spying on some remarkably non-threatening Americans. Perhaps America’s bloated security-intelligence industry faces a relative shortage of actual criminals and terrorists, so regular Americans are having to fill the gap. In any case, some of the spying on airline passengers might be more than just creepy; it might be against the law.

“Experts on civil liberties called the Quiet Skies program worrisome and potentially illegal.”

Senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, Hugh Handeyside, was quoted in the article:

“These revelations raise profound concerns about whether TSA is conducting pervasive surveillance of travelers without any suspicion of actual wrongdoing,”

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley was also quoted:

“If this was about foreign citizens, the government would have considerable power. But if it’s US citizens — US citizens don’t lose their rights simply because they are in an airplane at 30,000 feet,” Turley said. “There may be indeed constitutional issues here depending on how restrictive or intrusive these measures are.”

Some excerpts from a July 31st interview at Democracy Now! with the reporter who broke the story:

Jana Winter: “We know that since March, thousands of ordinary Americans, who are not under any investigation or on any watchlist, have been followed by teams of armed air marshals from the moment they get to the airport, through the flight and up until they record the license plate number of the vehicle that picks them up in their arrival city. And they write down minute-by-minute details of everything they do—if they go to the bathroom, if they change clothes, if they, as you said, touch their face, and anyone they interact with, and details about what kind of phone they have. Were they on the phone? Were they having a conversation? Were they texting? What were they reading? Are you on a computer? What type of computer? And also, is that an iPhone? What color is the case? It’s a huge amount of information, and there are still a lot of questions.”

Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman asked whether the TSA bumps people from their flight reservations, so its agents can sit close to their surveillance targets:

Goodman: What happens if the plane is fully booked? Do the air marshals knock people off out of their seats to sit next to their suspect?

Winter: Oh, absolutely…Once I found out the details of this, I of course thought, “Oh, wow! Is this why we get bumped from planes all the time, even if we’ve booked well in advance?” And the answer to that is not a hundred percent, I certainly wouldn’t say, but, yes, they bump people from flights every single day to sit near the person who they are targeting, who in this case is someone who has no reason to be followed.

As reported in The Boston Globe article, even some of the air marshals are “worried that they’re being ordered to carry out a program that may not be legal.”

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July 31, 2018

Is the founder of McAfee being “gang-stalked” by the feds?

John McAfee, the wealthy computer programmer and founder of the famous anti-virus software which bears his name (although the firm was later acquired by Intel), reportedly claims that he is the target of intense surveillance and harassment by federal agents. One source of this assertion is a May 15th article by Simon Golstein, at Finance Magnates – a website about financial trading news and research. Describing an account conveyed to him by a technical advisor of McAfee, Rob Loggia, Golstein wrote that McAfee says he is being “gang-stalked.”

“According to a man called Rob Loggia, curator of website Loggia on Fire, McAfee’s house is being gang-stalked. Cars have been entering the cul-de-sac in which it is situated before turning around and leaving without making a stop – this is happening on an “almost daily” basis. The McAfee security team has, of course, run the licence plates and found that the identities to whom they are registered are fake.”

In the context of the Finance Magnates article, it’s unclear whether the term “gang-stalked” is a quote, or a paraphrasing of what Loggia said. Either way, it’s interesting to see another appearance of the phrase in the media. Presumably, such reports should be of interest to people concerned about corruption, abuses of power, and lack of oversight in America’s massive and secretive security industry. For some reason, that slang term for what people in the security-intelligence business sometimes call “disruption” operations has entered the public discourse, even if it’s mostly at the margins of the press. Whatever the facts associated with McAfee’s particular claim, Americans – given their nation’s history with such issues – ought to be curious about the scope of illegal spying and harassment by local Law Enforcement Intelligence Units (LEIUs), federal intelligence agencies, and private security agents.

The article doesn’t cite any publicly available evidence to support the allegations about overt surveillance; however, disruption operations by security professionals don’t generate a lot of easily-captured forensic proof. Conceivably, as McAfee apparently asserts, his activities – as both an investor and activist – related to cryptocurrency have drawn negative attention from the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC), and the feds have decided to send him a message.

Cryptocurrency resides in a legal grey area, because it inherently poses potential challenges for governments wishing to closely monitor – for taxation and surveillance purposes – the flow of money. Its opaque nature means that cryptocurrency can be exploited by criminals, but also by activists resisting corrupt, powerful governments and corporations, anywhere in the world. For both reasons, cryptocurrency is of great interest to intelligence and law enforcement agencies – regardless of whether those agencies are mostly legitimate, mostly corrupt, or somewhere in between, as in the U.S.

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July 6, 2018

The curious case of the Fentanyl flyers

When high-profile organizations and individuals call attention to unethical and illegal activities in the security and intelligence industry, it creates public relations problems for that industry. A good example is the campaign described in the June 13th posting below. Another is the support by professional athletes of the Black Lives Matter movement. Sometimes the damage is countered by apologist politicians and a friendly corporate press. Social media corporations also help by purging messages which are deemed excessively radical.

Some types of unwanted exposure get handled differently, though. Among the simplest and most effective ways to mitigate the damage from revelations, claims, and criticisms about corruption in the surveillance and policing business is to spread disinformation to discredit and marginalize those criticisms and allegations. Especially helpful, from the perspective of a subset of employees in the security industry, are efforts to associate all discussion of “disruption” operations (extreme harassment by public and/or private security thugs) with being stupid, paranoid, and dangerous.

In reality, no one who is familiar with the clandestine activities of the security-intelligence business, and who is being honest with you, would deny that some government agents and private security operatives sometimes engage in long-term, undercover surveillance that’s combined with relentless, but mostly-inconspicuous, harassment. Links posted on this site feature several non-disputed, published news reports and official communications which refer to such matters. Call the practice what you want; differences of opinion and speculation among informed professionals on this subject would involve the structure and scope of such operations, not whether they exist.

Occasionally, as with the FBI’s COINTELPRO scandal, systematic crimes perpetrated by law enforcement agents and their private associates get exposed. The COINTELPRO revelations, though, required some exceptionally brave and clever citizens breaking into an FBI office and stealing secret files. In between such rare events – the Pentagon Papers was another – the public is mostly in the dark. But sometimes, things start to appear on the fringe of the media – curious references to “organized stalking” and such. And you have to wonder.

Some observations about leaflets: Because of their physical (non-digital) nature, (a) leaflets get noticed by the recipients, and (b) their distribution is difficult to interfere with inconspicuously. Further, because of First Amendment protections traditionally associated with leafleting, suppression of that form of speech can also be legally difficult. Consequently, paper and ink, even in the modern digital world, can be a perfect means to convey information about corruption. Although the scale of distribution – and the cost – is small, it’s highly disruptive.

Judge for yourself whether such motives and concerns were the source of what happened – or was staged – last week in Houston, Texas. Keep in mind that the website you’re now reading – like the website in this story – includes flyers intended to be printed and distributed to discourage, through public exposure, criminal harassment by corrupt cops and corrupt private security investigators.

Even without the benefit of social media promotion or commercial support, the website you’re now reading has been visited more than half a million times. Perhaps some people would be happy to see this site – and its tactical advice, such as advocacy of spreading flyers – discredited by associating it with a ridiculous disinformation website.

TV news reports on June 26th (KPRC Houston, Channel 2 and KRIS Corpus Christi, Channel 6), indicated – initially – that someone (or several people) had apparently distributed some flyers laced with Fentanyl – a drug far more powerful than morphine, and associated with numerous overdose deaths. The toxic flyers had been placed on approximately a dozen vehicles parked on the street, outside a Harris County sheriff’s station at 601 Lockwood Drive.

According to the apparently-official version of what happened, the notion that the flyers were laced with Fentanyl arose when a sergeant at the scene reported that she was feeling “light-headed.” She was taken to a hospital to get checked out. The initial reports were vague on how sheriff’s officials determined the toxic nature of the flyers, and about the medical treatment.

Aaron Barker and Jacob Rascon at KPRC Houston:

“The sergeant removed one of the flyers from her windshield and later began feeling light-headed, according to Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez. She started driving herself to a hospital, but pulled over when she started feeling sick. A lieutenant met her and drove her to the Houston Northwest Medical Center.”

A website called “Targeted Justice” is the apparent origin of the flyers (the flyers can be printed from that website). This is their Twitter page. The document seems to feature diagrams of mind-control ray guns or something. If you’re interested, you can probably download it from them (whoever they are). The official photo of the flyers (below) was provided to the press, and posted on KPRC’s website with this caption: “Deputies released these images of flyers that they said were placed on some vehicles at a Harris County Sheriff’s Office facility June 26, 2018, in Houston.”

My initial reaction to this photo was this: Given America’s massive post-9/11 security spending binge, why do Harris County detectives have to take their evidence photos using a cell phone made in 2002? Maybe we should we hold a bake sale to raise money, so they can better equip themselves. On second thought, though, I decided that the image is appropriately obscure, given the whole nature of this incident.

A second observation about this story: A street in front of a sheriff’s office is a remarkably bold choice of location to anonymously place strange leaflets. The Google Maps street view of the address seems to confirm the unlikeliness of the area as a venue for radical pamphleteers. Also, the flyers were reportedly distributed in the middle of the day (approximately 1 pm, according to a June 29th update from KHOU Houston, Channel 11). If someone other than a cop had been there, milling about in very close proximity to the government vehicles parked there, that person would have appeared suspicious even if he or she were not distributing flyers about ray guns and such.

Another thought I had upon seeing this news: Since, in effect, we were being invited to believe that someone – or several people – apparently attempted to poison American law enforcement personnel – in an attack which also involved the distribution of strange flyers, presumably, the FBI is all over this – you know, because of that whole “terrorism” thing. Although the reporting made no mention of any federal agencies, I presumed we would hear something soon.

In the meantime, as reported on June 28th by KTRK Houston, Channel 13, the Harris County Sheriff’s Office responded promptly to the grave new threat posed by the Fentanyl-laced flyers. They tweeted the above photo of the flyer, on the day of the incident, with the following message:

KTRK reporter Marla Carter – past whom nothing gets – also recognized the severity of the danger:

The tough part for investigators is that it could have been anyone who printed and passed out these flyers. The only clues on the flyers themselves may be fingerprints. “Someone could have died. The fact it is now being used against officers is a game-changer,” said Harris Co. Pct. 1 Constable Alan Rosen.

Several other local law enforcement agencies are trying to stay on top of the game by arming officers with Narcan, an emergency treatment used for opioid overdoses.

The encounter with Fentanyl can be deadly even if found on a flyer and absorbed through the skin.

The same news report noted that “Targeted Justice” (whatever that actually is) acknowledged authoring the flyer, but denied any involvement in the leafleting in Houston:

The organization listed on the flyers, Targeted Justice, says it had nothing to do with incident. They believe that the flyers were printed off of their website.

So that might have ruled out a few possible suspects, but the dangerous pamphleteer remained unknown. Don’t worry though, because – surprise! – it turned out that the Fentanyl was fictional. A news update from KTRK Houston, Channel 13, on Friday, June 29th:

“After warning the public about flyers potentially tainted with the opioid Fentanyl, the Harris County Sheriff’s Office now confirms lab tests showed no signs of the drug.

“The Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences tested 13 flyers and found all of them came back negative.”

“…In addition to testing the 13 flyers, the lab also tested clothing items, and blood and urine samples collected from the sergeant. Those tests also were negative for the drug.”

Here’s some additional good news: If you live in Houston, don’t worry about the technical skills of your law enforcement officers. The KTRK article helpfully explains that the mistake didn’t arise from professional incompetence (or the fact that the whole matter appears to have been staged), but rather, from “an abundance of caution.” I find it difficult to read that phrase without hearing it in George Carlin’s sarcastic voice.

The odd phenomenon of countless vague, paranoia websites, of which “Targeted Justice” is an example, is chronicled in detail in several places on the site you’re now reading. The trend ought to seem curious, by the way. Apparently, these websites sort of sprang up out of nowhere, and have proliferated like mushrooms, despite never being interesting – let alone credible. Did something get into the water supply?

Here’s a tip-off that someone is trying very hard to appear crazy. The image below is from the “Who to follow” section of Targeted Justice’s Twitter page. The glowing brain image is essentially an icon for “I’m a nut!”



Alternatively, an actually-crazy person is still at large, wandering around Houston and maybe distributing more flyers. Remember: this is also someone who can approach a sheriff’s station, for example, distribute pamphlets (or whatever), and depart unseen, in the middle of the day, like some kind of ninja. From the June 29 KTRK report:

“The sheriff’s office has not questioned any persons of interest in the case, and no criminal charges have been filed.”

For private citizens in America, the lesson of this story is that some security-intelligence officials appear to have concerns about the potentially disruptive effects of flyers which call attention to illegal surveillance and harassment.

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July 6, 2018

The Pursuance Project

Most readers of this website are already familiar with the journalist and activist, Barrett Brown, who has done valuable reporting on the lying, crimes, and abuses of power in America’s public and private policing, spying, and incarceration agencies. Brown’s accounts of his interactions with the FBI, the Justice Department, and the Bureau of Prisons are both entertaining and informative.

Currently, Brown is part of a team of people developing open source encrypted software – called Pursuance – to enable individuals to form networks for sharing information and collaborating to “pursue” common goals. The system is being designed, from the ground up, as a platform which would be well-suited for activists and journalists who expect government and corporate operatives to attempt to infiltrate and subvert their projects. This four-minute video explains the basic concept of Pursuance.

Very possibly, Pursuance – or something like it at some point – could help to partly level the playing field between citizens and corrupt enforcement personnel. First, though, the project needs funding. Brown’s Kickstarter campaign to launch his Pursuance Project has just one week remaining to reach its goal. If you can afford to help, please make a donation.

Update (July 16, 2018)

Shockingly, the fund drive for Pursuance did not receive a lot of corporate news media attention; nevertheless, on Saturday (one day before the deadline), Pursuance reached its Kickstarter goal. In fact, donations exceeded the goal by $5,000. Barrett Brown’s response on Twitter was cautiously optimistic: “Soon the globe shall be wreathed in chaos.”

The comment was a reference to the way Brown was characterized in a news report on National Public Radio (NPR). Here is Brown’s full account – posted last week – of the NPR profile.

Some news sources have been more helpful, and more accurate. Last month, for example, Tim Kushing at Techdirt briefly described the structure and objectives of the Pursuance approach to crowdsourcing the exposure of corruption and the organizing of political activism, as conceived by Barrett Brown. Kushing’s conclusion:

“This sounds very much like Brown wants to get back to the work he was doing before the federal government interrupted his life with trumped-up charges. More journalism, more collaborations, and a suite of tools to keep those who view investigative journalism as threatening locked out of the process.”

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June 13, 2018

UK’s police spies get some unwanted publicity

photo in The Guardian, June 13, 2018

Some associates of the UK’s security-intelligence profession take a dim view of people calling attention to the nature of their undercover activities. Maybe it’s because some of the practices – such as the infiltration of citizens’ personal lives – are the sort of creepy, police state tactics that were used by the Stasi. A cosmetics chain, Lush, started a poster and social media campaign on June 1st which was critical of the UK’s police spies. Then its stores were visited by some folks who probably didn’t look like their usual customers. Rob Evans at The Guardian today: “Lush…said its shop staff had been intimidated by former police officers.”

Evans notes that “critics” of Lush’s campaign “have been accused of going into stores and intimidating staff to make them take down the posters.”

And Lush did suspend their campaign after the first week, explaining that they had safety concerns for their staff, as reported on Monday by Ian Griggs at PR Week.

“Lush announced on Friday that it had suspended its window campaign, which aims to highlight the issue of undercover police overstepping the mark to infiltrate the lives of activists – the subject of a Home Office-backed inquiry – citing the safety of its staff.”

Political pressure was also being directed at Lush:

“The campaign was suspended after a week of criticism – from police forces, senior politicians and members of the public – that it was anti-police.”

To their credit, the folks at Lush resumed their protest campaign today. Again, Rob Evans, at The Guardian:

The cosmetics chain Lush has resumed its poster campaign highlighting the misconduct of undercover police officers who infiltrated political groups.

Lush removed an initial version of its campaign poster from displays at its 104 stores last Thursday after it said its shop staff had been intimidated by former police officers. The campaign was criticised by the home secretary, Sajid Javid, and others as being anti-police and insulting to police officers.

On Wednesday, a new poster was installed in shop windows. Without a photograph, the text draws attention to how undercover police spied on more than 1,000 political groups while “infiltrating lives, homes and beds of citizens for 50 years”.

As explained in the PR Week article, Lush has conducted its campaign in partnership with a group called “Police Spies Out Of Lives (PSOOL).”

[PSOOL] claimed police forces, including the Met [London’s metropolitan police force], had previously acknowledged that people’s human rights had been violated during the course of its work.

The spokesperson said: “The only people who thought the Lush campaign was controversial are police and their friends. In the face of well-deserved criticism, the police have closed ranks rather than admit there was a problem.”

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November 21, 2017

Harvey Weinstein’s goon squad

Ronan Farrow’s recent article in The New Yorker (November 6, 2017) reports on some clandestine operations by enforcers in the private security-intelligence business. Movie producer Harvey Weinstein, who stands accused of multiple incidents involving sexual harassment or assault, apparently employed – via his lawyers – an Israeli private investigations firm, Black Cube, which is run by former Mossad agents, to do his dirty work – namely, silencing his sex abuse victims through spying and intimidation.

Services offered by Black Cube include several forms of professional lying:

…“Avatar Operators” specifically hired to create fake identities on social media, as well as “operations experts with extensive experience in social engineering.”

(“Social engineering” refers to the psychological manipulation tactics used by undercover agents.)

More serious, though, is the psychological terrorism experienced by the victims, such as the three women Farrow refers to here:

Since the allegations against Weinstein became public, Lubell hasn’t slept well. She told me that, although she knew that Weinstein “was a bully and a cheater,” she “never thought he was a predator.” Lubell has wondered if she should have known more, sooner.

After a year of concerted effort, Weinstein’s campaign to track and silence his accusers crumbled. Several of the women targeted, however, said that Weinstein’s use of private security agencies deepened the challenge of speaking out. “It scared me,” Sciorra said, “because I knew what it meant to be threatened by Harvey. I was in fear of him finding me.” McGowan said that the agencies and law firms enabled Weinstein’s behavior. As she was targeted, she felt a growing sense of paranoia. “It was like the movie ‘Gaslight,’ ” she told me. “Everyone lied to me all the time.” For the past year, she said, “I’ve lived inside a mirrored fun house.”

Among the important points illustrated by Harvey Weinstein’s case is the one expressed in the tweet below, by Emily Nussbaum. Claims and suspicions about illegal spying – even when they are legitimate – tend to be viewed skeptically by people unfamiliar with the security-intelligence business.

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October 7, 2017

Criminality and deniability at the CIA

Author Douglas Valentine had some interesting things to say about the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in an interview published last month at CounterPunch. Valentine has written three books about the spy agency. The publisher’s webpage for the latest of these books – The CIA as Organized Crime – features this quote from former CIA officer and whistle-blower, John Kiriakou:

“Doug Valentine courageously takes us inside some of the CIA’s most shameful extralegal operations, exposing everything that is wrong with an intelligence service gone rogue. He is a sentinel of the public interest, and his book is a public service. I, for one, wouldn’t want to live in a country that didn’t have patriots like Doug Valentine.”

Some excerpts from the CounterPunch interview:

Douglas Valentine:

The CIA sets up proprietary arms, shipping, and banking companies to facilitate the criminal drug trafficking organizations that do its dirty work. Mafia money gets mixed up in offshore banks with CIA money, until the two are indistinguishable.

…The CIA doesn’t do anything it can’t deny. Tom Donohue, a retired senior CIA officer, told me about this.

Let me tell you a bit about my source. In 1984, former CIA Director William Colby agreed to help me write my book, The Phoenix Program. Colby introduced me to Donohue in 1985. Donohue had managed the CIA’s “covert action” branch in Vietnam from 1964-1966, and many of the programs he developed were incorporated in Phoenix. Because Colby had vouched for me, Donohue was very forthcoming and explained a lot about how the CIA works.

…Donohue said the CIA doesn’t do anything unless it meets two criteria. The first criterion is “intelligence potential.” The program must benefit the CIA; maybe it tells them how to overthrow a government, or how to blackmail an official, or where a report is hidden, or how to get an agent across a border. The term “intelligence potential” means it has some use for the CIA. The second criterion is that it can be denied. If they can’t find a way to structure the program or operation so they can deny it, they won’t do it.

…Everything the CIA does is deniable. It’s part of its Congressional mandate. Congress doesn’t want to be held accountable for the criminal things the CIA does.

…Most people have no idea what cops really do. They think cops give you a speeding ticket. They don’t see the cops associating with professional criminals and making money in the process. They believe that when a guy puts on a uniform, he or she becomes virtuous. But people who go into law enforcement do so for the trill [sic] of wielding power over other people, and in this sense, they relate more to the crooks they associate with than the citizens they’re supposed to protect and serve. They’re looking to bully someone and they’re corrupt. That’s law enforcement.

The CIA is populated with the same kind of people, but without any of the constraints. The CIA officer who created the Phoenix program, Nelson Brickham, told me this about his colleagues: “I have described the intelligence service as a socially acceptable way of expressing criminal tendencies. A guy who has strong criminal tendencies but is too much of a coward to be one, would wind up in a place like the CIA if he had the education.” Brickham described CIA officers as wannabe mercenaries “who found a socially acceptable way of doing these things and, I might add, getting very well paid for it.”

…The CIA dedicates a huge portion of its budget figuring how to select, control, and manage its own work force. It begins with instilling blind obedience. Most CIA officers consider themselves to be soldiers. The CIA is set up as a military organization with a sacred chain of command that cannot be violated. Somebody tells you what to do, and you salute and do it. Or you’re out.

…In exchange for signing away their legal rights, they benefit from reward systems – most importantly, CIA officers are immune from prosecution for their crimes. They consider themselves the Protected Few and, if they wholeheartedly embrace the culture of dominance and exploitation, they can look to cushy jobs in the private sector when they retire.

The CIA’s executive management staff compartments the various divisions and branches so that individual CIA officers can remain detached. Highly indoctrinated, they blindly obey on a “need to know” basis. This institutionalized system of self-imposed ignorance and self-deceit sustains, in their warped minds, the illusion of American righteousness, upon which their motivation to commit all manner of crimes in the name of national security depends. That and the fact that most are sociopaths. [Emphasis added.]

When asked whether he considers the CIA to be “an enemy of the American people,” Valentine said this:

Yes. It’s an instrument of the rich political elite, it does their dirty business.

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August 28, 2017

Street fights

In his column yesterday at truthdig, journalist Chris Hedges made this point about the recent violence between “Antifa” and “alt-right” protesters:

“Street clashes do not distress the ruling elites. These clashes divide the underclass. They divert activists from threatening the actual structures of power. They give the corporate state the ammunition to impose harsher forms of control and expand the powers of internal security.”

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August 20, 2017

CIA whistle-blower John Kiriakou on torture settlement

Former CIA analyst John Kiriakou discusses last week’s settlement in the lawsuit against two well-paid psychologists who helped form a CIA torture program:

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I know the ACLU is very happy. I know that one of the victims said he was very happy and that he felt that justice was served, but I actually am disappointed in this settlement for a number of reasons. First of all, the decision is sealed, so we really don’t know if justice has been served. We don’t know what the terms of the agreement are. We don’t know if there is any kind of deterrent that has been written into the decision. The fact that it’s not public, it seems to me at least in part defeats the purpose. Second, Mitchell and Jessen, the two CIA contractor psychologists who were the defendants in this case, were indemnified by the CIA in 2001. Even though they were sued, the CIA paid for their attorneys. The CIA is paying for their settlement. The CIA is paying for everything.

When I say the CIA is paying for it, I mean that you and I are paying for it. The American taxpayers are paying for it, so there’s no actual hurt to Mitchell and Jessen. And third, this trial, had it gone to trial, would have exposed CIA documents related to the torture program that we otherwise will never have access to. We’re going to lose that now. Whatever didn’t come out with the Senate torture report and could have come out with this case will not come out. We’ll just never know what the truth is behind this case.

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August 20, 2017

Presidential politics and the deep state

Whatever your views of our current president – or his opponent in last year’s election, for that matter – if you are concerned about illegal spying and harassment by government and corporate security-intelligence agencies, you should welcome the increased attention given in America’s news media, to the “deep state” concept. More public awareness of the actual nature of America’s power structure could make it more difficult to abuse surveillance and policing powers.

For anyone unfamiliar with the topic, the core point of the deep state analysis is made, for example, in this October 2014 article in The Boston Globe, which described the views of Tufts University political scientist Michael J. Glennon:

Though it’s a bedrock American principle that citizens can steer their own government by electing new officials, Glennon suggests that in practice, much of our government no longer works that way. In a new book, “National Security and Double Government,” he catalogs the ways that the defense and national security apparatus is effectively self-governing, with virtually no accountability, transparency, or checks and balances of any kind. He uses the term “double government”: There’s the one we elect, and then there’s the one behind it, steering huge swaths of policy almost unchecked.

Here are a few notable examples of attention given to the deep state this year:

January 10, 2017 – Richard Engel, MSNBC

Richard Engel appears about two minutes into this five-minute video clip, and gives a serious assessment of the presidential intelligence briefings which were apparently held to undermine Trump’s presidency at the outset, in response to Trump’s rhetorical transgressions against the deep state. My take on what Engel says is this: Essentially, the US intelligence chiefs paid a visit to Trump’s shop, and said to him: “Lovely administration you’ve got here. It’d be a shame if anything happened to it.”

“Richard Engel, NBC News chief foreign correspondent, talks with Rachel Maddow about a report that Donald Trump and President Obama were briefed on unverified claims that Russia has compromised Trump with a cache of incriminating or scandalous material. Duration: 5:10”

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January 11, 2017 – Matt Drudge, Twitter

A tweet by Matt Drudge explicitly raised the basic question – namely, whether the US intelligence agencies are “corrupt.”

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January 25, 2017 – Seymour Hersh, as quoted by Jeremy Scahill, The Intercept

Scahill :

Hersh also questioned the timing of the U.S. intelligence briefing of Trump on the Russia hack findings. “They’re taking it to a guy that’s going to be president in a couple of days, they’re giving him this kind of stuff, and they think this is somehow going to make the world better? It’s going to make him go nuts — would make me go nuts. Maybe it isn’t that hard to make him go nuts.” Hersh said if he had been covering the story, “I would have made [John] Brennan into a buffoon. A yapping buffoon in the last few days. Instead, everything is reported seriously.”

Few journalists in the world know more about the CIA and U.S. dark ops than Hersh. The legendary journalist broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, the Abu Ghraib torture, and secret details of the Bush-Cheney assassination program.

…Hersh also said he is concerned about Trump and his administration assuming power over the vast surveillance resources of the U.S. government. “I can tell you, my friends on the inside have already told me there’s going to be a major increase in surveillance, a dramatic increase in domestic surveillance,” he said. He recommended that anyone concerned about privacy use encrypted apps and other protective means. “If you don’t have Signal, you better get Signal.” [Emphasis added.]

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March 10, 2017 – Jason Hirthler, CounterPunch

Hirthler’s core allegation:

“The enveloping of the president in a cacophony of innuendo is likely a collaborative effort between the Justice Department, the National Intelligence Agency, the CIA, and crucially, the mainstream press.”

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March 30, 2017 – William Binney and Ray McGovern, CounterPunch

William Binney is a former National Security Agency official. Ray McGovern is a retired CIA analyst.

“Either he can acquiesce to or fight against a Deep State of intelligence officials who have a myriad of ways to spy on politicians (and other citizens) and thus amass derogatory material that can be easily transformed into blackmail.

“…The reality is that EVERYONE, including the President, is surveilled. The technology enabling bulk collection would have made the late demented FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s mouth water.

“Allegations about the intelligence community’s abuse of its powers also did not begin with Snowden. For instance, several years earlier, former NSA worker and whistleblower Russell Tice warned about these “special access programs,” citing first-hand knowledge, but his claims were brushed aside as coming from a disgruntled employee with psychological problems. His disclosures were soon forgotten.”

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June 8, 2017 – Robert Parry, Consortium News

Robert Parry – an investigative journalist who has written for Associated Press, Newsweek, etc. – makes the case that much of the investigating, leaking, and news reporting involving the Trump administration is essentially a “soft coup” by the deep state.

…most of the nation’s top news executives and much of its political elite share the opinion that Trump’s presidency must be ended and a more traditional chief executive installed.

But no one in authority wants to acknowledge that a “soft coup” is in the works because that would make America look like a banana republic to the world. It also could infuriate Trump’s 63 million voters who might take exception to this sort of “deep state” veto of a duly certified election.

So, what that means is that the planned removal of Trump will be a deliberate process cloaked in high-minded legal principles and much talk about the rule of law.

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August 5, 2017 – Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept

Greenwald explains that deep state activities are plainly involved in our current presidential politics. I recommend reading the entire article.

“FROM THE START of Trump’s presidency, it was clear that the permanent national security power structure in Washington was deeply hostile to his presidency and would do what it could to undermine it. Shortly before Trump was inaugurated, I wrote an article noting that many of the most damaging anti-Trump leaks were emanating from anonymous CIA and other Deep State operatives who despised Trump because the policies he vowed to enact — the ones American voters ratified — were so contrary to their agenda and belief system. Indeed, they were even anonymously boasting that they were withholding secrets from Trump’s briefings because they decided the elected president should not have access to them.

“…No matter how much of a threat one regards Trump as being, there really are other major threats to U.S. democracy and important political values. It’s hard, for instance, to imagine any group that has done more harm, and ushered in more evil, than the Bush-era neocons with whom Democrats are now openly aligning. And who has brought more death, and suffering, and tyranny to the world over the last six decades than the U.S. national security state?”

August 5, 2017 – Glenn Greenwald, Twitter

Greenwald responds to a skeptic:

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July 12, 2017

ACLU sues U.S. Justice Dept. to expose spying policies

A lawsuit filed last month by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) seeks to force the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to reveal some of the federal government’s policies on secret surveillance. Specifically, the ACLU wants to know how the government views its constitutional obligations regarding (a) the use of evidence obtained through secret surveillance, and (b) notifying individuals whose communications have become the target of government surveillance.

The ACLU filed the lawsuit after the DOJ declined to provide that information when the ACLU asked for it by means of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Here is the origin of the lawsuit, as described in the complaint:

“On February 6, 2017, Plaintiffs submitted a Freedom of Information Act request (the “Request”) to DOJ seeking records related to the government’s official policy on the use of evidence obtained through secret surveillance and its duty to notify individuals whose private communications the government has seized and searched.

“…DOJ’s failure to release responsive records is of particular public concern because the Request pertains to the expanding use of secret electronic searches—including surveillance of Americans’ phone calls and emails under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”) and the Wiretap Act (“Title III”). In total, the government conducts hundreds of thousands of secret wiretaps and other searches under FISA and Title III each year. Many of these searches are conducted without warrants or individualized court approval, but are instead conducted under Section 702 of FISA, a highly controversial surveillance law that is currently the subject of intense legislative and public debate.

“The government’s searches under FISA and Title III are generally invisible to the individuals whose privacy they impact. Unlike traditional searches of a person’s home, electronic searches rarely leave any sign, and thus individuals whose privacy has been invaded are entirely dependent on the government’s provision of notice. For this reason, the government’s policies concerning when it must disclose surveillance implicate the privacy interests of numerous Americans, who are often unable to challenge the lawfulness of government searches without proper notice.

“As described below, DOJ has a track record of failing to inform individuals about the surveillance of their communications even when notice is expressly required by law. Accordingly, the public interest in the release of the DOJ policy documents at issue is Substantia.” [Emphasis added.]

Commentary by Anna Diakun on the ACLU’s website also explains some of the core concerns behind the lawsuit. Here are some excerpts:

“How would you know if the federal government had been electronically spying on you? Short answer: You probably wouldn’t.

“Today, the ACLU sued the Justice Department to find out more about the circumstances under which the government thinks it can spy on Americans without telling them. This challenge seeks important information about a spying statute whose renewal is currently up for debate in Congress.

“The answer to the question above should be simple: When the government invades your privacy — whether by searching your home, your car, your emails, or anything else — it should give you notice of that intrusion unless it has a compelling reason for delay. You see it on television all the time: When the police search a house, they show a warrant or leave one behind at the scene. The individual whose privacy is at stake knows there was a search and what was taken. This isn’t just to amp up drama — it’s a constitutional requirement.

“… It’s worth noting, however, that the federal government has a long history of abusing its surveillance powers. And as the amount of digital data has expanded, the amount of surveillance has exploded, too. So has the secrecy and the absence of accountability surrounding electronic searches. These searches are conducted under various laws, but they have one thing in common: Individuals rarely find out that their private emails, internet chats, or documents stored in the cloud have been searched.

“The vast majority of Americans surveilled under Section 702 will never be criminally prosecuted, so they will never know that the government has been secretly watching them. And without definitive proof that the government spied on them, individuals have an incredibly difficult time challenging the government’s spying in court.” [Emphasis added.]

Full credit to the ACLU for pursuing this issue. Filing a professionally-drafted FOIA request, followed by a credible lawsuit when the US intelligence agency involved – in this case, the DOJ – predictably tries to dodge the request, is an unrealistic option for most victims of illegal spying. Americans could use a lot more such advocacy in defense of their rights these days – especially on issues involving secret activities by public and private agencies in the security-intelligence business.

Arguably, such advocacy – and investigative journalism – is needed even more for uncovering criminality and abuses of power among private security-intelligence firms and local police department Law Enforcement Intelligence Units (LEIUs), since those entities are not (directly) reachable by FOIA requests. Moreover, private contractors and local agencies – to say nothing of informal networks that include current and former enforcement and intelligence personnel – might be far less likely to be internally compromised by whistle-blowers.

Also deserving of notice is a reminder in Anna Diakun’s ACLU blog posting: Searches – of a car or a residence, for example – require a warrant. One implication of this is that if you are the victim of what journalists and investigators often call “black bag jobs” (break-ins perpetrated to gain information or to terrorize the victim, or both – rather than for simple burglary), and you did not receive a search warrant, then what was done to you was probably very illegal, regardless of who the perpetrators and their accomplices were.

This also has serious implications for any “civilian” who participates – for whatever motives – in illegal spying and harassment orchestrated by corrupt public or private security operatives. Breaking and entering, for example, is – at a minimum – illegal trespassing. And in many cases, it’s a more serious crime. Furthermore, if such actions are part of an organized set of unauthorized spying and harassment activities, they also constitute stalking – which is expressly forbidden by the criminal codes of every state in America.

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July 4, 2017

Keeping America safe by killing journalists

One of the drawbacks to publicly calling for the assassination of journalists and whistle-blowers is that the targets of the threats are the kind of people who will tell others about what you have said. And, outside of the political class, not everyone is impressed by efforts to shield governments and corporations from public scrutiny. A lobbyist and Democratic party operative in Florida, Evan Ross, is learning this, after tweeting the following comment about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange:

“[Assange] and his buddy Edward Snowden both deserve to meet their maker. I’d be happy to pull the trigger on both of those too [sic].”

Assange responded to Ross’s brave display of patriotism by quoting Ross’s comment, and tagging it #tolerantliberal. The tweets there also include calls for Assange’s head from other establishment apologists. An article by Jerry Iannelli published today by the Miami New Times provides a good summary of the twitter exchange and its political implications.

“The spat exposes the divide between centrist, hawkish liberals who support the security state and military-industrial complex, and those to Ross’ left, who point out that Snowden is a whistleblower no different from Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers to news outlets in the 1970s. Ross’ comments are sure to upset populists within the local party, who maintain that mainstream Democrats have moved too far right in the past few decades.”

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June 7, 2017

Barrett Brown’s Q & A on reddit

Yesterday, journalist Barrett Brown (see preceding posts) participated in an “AMA” (Ask Me Anything) exchange on reddit. Here are some excerpts.

On the future of journalism…

mdaniels231:

In one of your recent D Magazine articles you noted “But most of all, I realized that journalism will not be enough to save this country.” – can you elaborate on that Barrett? and also what does this mean about the future of your journalism? Thanks!

Barrett Brown:

Journalism is still necessary, but in a nation like the U.S. where the bulk of the citizenry is either fascist or unwilling to do their part to oversee the vast machinery of state that we support through our taxes and which inflicts vast harm at home and abroad, we’re going to need a class of people who make up for the failures of the rest of the country. You can get a sense of what I mean by this by looking through the pursuance presentation [explained below]; this is a framework that is intended to expand into a new and viable force by which to challenge systems from without.

Something along those lines, drawing upon the new ability of humans to collaborate in ways never before possible, is going to happen at some point anyway. We think this is the time to try it.

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On the prosecutorial enthusiasm that was directed at him…

draftstyle:

What’s your theory as to why the book was thrown at you in particular? Specifically, who do you figure made that decision and why?

Barrett Brown:

That’s best demonstrated by the original search warrants, in which a grand jury was presented with spurious info to justify ongoing surveillance of my activities. Those are still sealed, but the eventual search warrant for the raid, which Michael Hastings posted on Buzzfeed, shows they were concerned with our investigations into the DOJ and FBI’s criminal allies, such as HBGary Federal, and the site on which we compiled our research, echelon2.org (now moved). Here’s that warrant. [The link is to an article by the late Michael Hastings.]

Basically, as explained in several of the better articles, such as those by Glenn Greenwald, Christian Stork, and the like back in 2013 or so, the DOJ and FBI wanted me away from the internet for as long as possible, and pursued over a dozen charges they later had to drop in order to try to do that.

FBI officials get high-paying jobs with these sorts of companies when they leave public “service;” DOJ had been embarrassed by its connection to the companies we’d kept digging into; and they know full well that they can do most anything without real consequences.

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On the entities to which he owes court-ordered restitution…

DroneLover:

How much do you still owe in restitution? Any chance of getting that reversed? It really pisses me off that you owe money to an entity I consider evil.

Barrett Brown:

I owe something like $870,000 to several corrupt organizations, including Stratfor, which spied on Bhopal activists on behalf of Union Carbide and cooperates with the FBI and Coca-Cola against lawful U.S. activists, among other things. No, the judge has already ruled and we can’t appeal.

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On recommended reading about the deep state…

Alasb:

What books about COIN and political repression (past and present) and about useful countermeasures and “security culture” would you recommend, if any?

Barrett Brown:

The Burglary and The Devil’s Chessboard. Most of all, read anything by Peter Dale Scott, the former diplomat and Berkley professor who carefully documented a great deal of the amorphous security culture from the early ’60s to recent years, mostly in regards to JFK and Southeast Asian drug running by CIA affiliates.

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On the Anonymous movement…

kazzie-ch:

What do you think of Anonymous these days?

Barrett Brown:

I’m not sure that it even really exists in any measurable form anymore, at least as compared to 2011, when the NSA chief felt the need to drum up paranoia about its capabilities and it was a driving force behind opposition to the intelligence community’s expanding, unchecked powers. As you can see from the pursuance project, I’m more interested now in using process-based frameworks, where roles and duties can be clearly defined and agreed upon (and also less visible to intelligence contractors and other members of the state-corporate criminal class). There were a number of problems with how Anonymous operated, even aside from the FBI infiltration, and it’s best at this point to think more in terms of moving the ball forward rather than trying to restore the past.

More on the Anonymous movement…

Teridax_Cx:

Do you think Anonymous still has any political/social relevance in 2017, and if not what would it take (if anything) for it to become relevant again?

Barrett Brown:

I don’t, frankly. That could change, but as I told someone else, what’s needed now is something that can expand and serve as a serious counter against the powerful without burning out in a flash of chaos and disagreement. The pursuance system [see below] will be a mechanism for conducting civic affairs in such a way that everyone has the same clearly-defined rights to operate, to invent, to rise according to their talents and dedication; although Anonymous was allegedly something along those lines, the reality is that some people controlled the mediums, such as IRC servers, where much of the important work was conducted. That’s just one of several fatal flaws Anonymous had – the conflict between its stated nature and its actual nature, and a lack of a mechanism for settling disagreements.

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On Brown’s crowd-sourced journalism projects…

[In 2009, Barrett Brown organized an online crowd-sourced analysis of hacked emails from private security firms; it was called “Project PM.” Currently, he’s working with others to develop a comprehensive system, “Pursuance,” to enable activists and journalists to more easily, effectively, and securely organize and manage group projects, such as those seeking to expose crimes by corporate and government security-intelligence personnel.]

robertogreen:

are you going to revive project PM?

Barrett Brown:

Not as such, but we’ll be running a “pursuance,” as entities under the pursuance system are known, that will continue much of the same work of documenting the intelligence sector, private and public.

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May 23, 2017

Assange on the information war

Binoy Kampmark, in a piece at CounterPunch this week, describes the status of WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange:

The continuing struggle, one between the guerrilla warriors of the information and transparency movement pitted against the abuses of the Deep State, will continue. As will the barnacle determination of Assange in occupying that little bit of Ecuador in Knightsbridge. “The proper war,” promised Assange, “is just commencing.”

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May 22, 2017

More notices about stalking in Guilford, Connecticut

A recent police blotter, in Guilford, CT, lists some incidents which suggest that someone there wants to call attention to the issue of illegal spying and harassment. Apparently, someone has been sending “gang stalking (harassment) letters” to multiple addresses in Guilford. This is not the first time such activity has been reported there. In June 2014, for example, the distribution of flyers about “gang stalking” (disruption operations) in Guilford was reported by the Hartford Courant newspaper. For news links about similar leafleting incidents reported across the nation, see the end of the June 10th, 2016 posting, on this website.

Apart from noting the time and place of the events, the recent incident reports – quoted below – lack any details, but their existence suggests that the issue of disruption operations is a serious concern for the person sending the flyers/letters, and for some of the recipients.

Thursday, April 27

Complaints about a [sic] gang stalking (harassment) letters were investigated at 95 North Street at 4:39 p.m., 46 Dover Court at 5:18 p.m., and 103 Golden Hill Drive at 6:36 p.m.

Friday, April 28

Complaints about gang stalking (harassment) letters were investigated at 88 Half Mile Road at 6:24 p.m. and 62 Half Mile Road at 7:06 p.m.

Monday, May 1

A complaint about a gang stalking (harassment) letter was investigated at 425 North River Street at 10:03 a.m.

Last year’s police blotter in Guilford also included a few incidents worth noting:

Sunday, November 13

Harassment via “gang stalking” was investigated at 274 Church Street at 6:16 p.m.

Sunday, November 20

Harassment via a “gang stalking” letter placed in a mailbox was investigated at 35 George Street at 9:57 a.m.

Regarding the final entry: Anyone distributing flyers and letters should remember that only US postal carriers can place items in mailboxes. (Mailing anonymous letters, however, is completely legal.)

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May 12, 2017

A glimpse of America’s corrupt spying and enforcement industry

Journalists Barrett Brown and Glenn Greenwald appeared on Democracy Now! today to discuss Brown’s recent harassment by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons (see the post below), and its implications for journalism and democracy. Anyone with an interest in secret abuses of power by the federal government and its corporate clients – and how such abuses are covered (or not covered) by the mainstream press – should watch this 25-minute segment.

No serious analysis of the reporting on “disruption operations” – intense harassment and stalking crimes by private and government security-intelligence thugs in the U.S. – can begin without an understanding of “the highly secretive world of private intelligence and military contractors” (Democracy Now! host, Amy Goodman), and “this incredibly opaque and powerful faction [of government agencies and corporations]” (Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Glenn Greenwald).

Barrett Brown’s case – including the contents of the hacked emails at the center of the case – provides a rare glimpse behind the curtain of America’s security-intelligence business. It ought to make Americans curious about what else is happening there.

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May 5, 2017

The feds are not through with Barrett Brown

Barrett Brown – the journalist whose full story is the subject of the preceding post – was rearrested last week, and detained for four days, before his lawyer pressured the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to release him. Initially, the BOP asserted that Brown’s media appearances – such as the interviews he had scheduled with VICE and PBS – violated the terms of his early release from prison, but the agency backed off when Brown challenged them by means of a good lawyer.

On the face of it, the arrest had no legitimate legal basis, and the BOP knew it. Brown’s inclination to expose criminality and abuses of power by U.S. intelligence agencies and private intelligence-security firms – as well as his reporting on misconduct by the Bureau of Prisons itself – presumably is viewed unfavorably by some members of the spying and enforcement industry; it’s easy to imagine that this might have played a role in the decision to rearrest the journalist – for doing journalism. As Brown puts it, what took place was an example of the “de facto extra-legal power” wielded by America’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

Since, by releasing Brown, the BOP implicitly acknowledged that they were in the wrong when they rearrested him, not all the details of the matter will be of great interest to some readers. Several parts of Brown’s account, however – posted on Tuesday at D Magazine – deserve consideration. Here, for example, is Brown on the problem of reporters who are too stupid, too lazy, or too cowardly (or some combination of those traits) to recognize and expose criminality by intelligence and law enforcement personnel:

“The BOP, like all U.S. “law enforcement” and intelligence agencies, depends for its continued de facto extra-legal powers on a press corps that is largely incapable of sorting through facts, that is easily distracted, and that cannot even be depended upon to defend its own rights, nor the rights of individual journalists.”

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December 18, 2016

Journalist Barrett Brown released from prison

Barrett Brown, an award-winning journalist (a National Magazine Award winner in the “Columns and Commentary” category, and a New York Press Club journalism award winner), humorist, and former unofficial spokesman for the Anonymous movement, was released from federal prison last month, after four years in detention for acts related to his role in the exposure of emails hacked from the private security-intelligence firms, HBGary and Stratfor, in 2011. The emails exposed the use of counterintelligence schemes by private contractors.

Jeremy Hammond, the activist hacker who stole the Stratfor emails and gave them to WikiLeaks, remains in prison, serving a ten-year sentence. In a 2013 interview with the Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist, Chris Hedges, Hammond gave this explanation of the motive behind the hacking:

“I targeted information security firms because they work in secret to protect government and corporate interests at the expense of individual rights, undermining and discrediting activists, journalists and other truth seekers, and spreading disinformation.”

Hedges wrote this of Hammond’s punishment:

“The [ten year] sentence was one of the longest in U.S. history for hacking and the maximum the judge could impose under a plea agreement in the case. It was wildly disproportionate to the crime—an act of nonviolent civil disobedience that championed the public good by exposing abuses of power by the government and a security firm. But the excessive sentence was the point. The corporate state, rapidly losing credibility and legitimacy, is lashing out like a wounded animal. It is frightened. It feels the heat from a rising flame of revolt. It is especially afraid of those such as Hammond who have the technical skills to break down electronic walls and expose the corrupt workings of power.”

Unfortunately for America’s intelligence-security organizations (public and private), Barrett Brown is as talented with words as Jeremy Hammond is with computers, and – unlike most of the people Brown exposes – he has a sharp sense of humor. While incarcerated, he wrote a dozen or so very funny essays for D Magazine, (“D” for Dallas, Texas – where Brown was born), such as this one, from June of last year. He has since been hired by the The Intercept, for which he has written another nine articles so far, all of which can be seen here. A good example of his writing is this account of prison life. Although it is not the main point here, Brown’s commentary should be of interest to anyone who is curious about the nature of incarceration in America, a country which imprisons its citizens at a higher rate than any other nation.

Although Brown served much less time than Hammond will, he initially faced a potential prison sentence of 105 years, partly because the charges originally brought against him by the FBI, but later dropped, included identity theft and fraud – based upon the fact that the hacked emails to which Brown had posted a link contained credit card information. He was eventually sentenced to five years and three months (prosecutors had argued for eight-and-a-half years), but was granted an early release for good behavior. Brown has also been ordered to pay $890,000 in restitution.

Brown acknowledged responding foolishly when the feds were investigating him for his indirect association with the hacked emails. Seeking Brown’s sources, the FBI obtained a search warrant for his laptop computer, which was at Brown’s mother’s house, and – apparently to put pressure on Brown – they charged his mother with obstruction of justice. Brown responded by uploading a YouTube video in which he angrily threatened one of the FBI agents. Brown was charged with making the threat, interfering with the search warrant, and being “an accessory after the fact in the unauthorized access to a protected computer.”

Whatever one’s judgments of the actions of Brown and Hammond (or, for that matter, the handling of the cases by the FBI and federal prosecutors, and the sentences imposed upon the two men), the Stratfor and HBGary emails revealed interesting things about the practices of America’s shadowy and well-connected private security-intelligence industry. This article by Kit O’Connell, published last year, describes some of the issues – such as collusion between America’s corporate spies and government agents:

“The emails revealed that Stratfor gathers intelligence on behalf of private corporations while also sharing sensitive information with local and federal law enforcement. For example, the company spied on The Yes Men for Dow Chemical, after the activists publicly humiliated Dow on behalf of survivors of the 1984 Bhopal, India, disaster that killed thousands. At the same time, Stratfor collaborated with the Texas State Troopers to infiltrate Occupy Austin during the first months after the group’s formation in October 2011.”

“…[The emails] exposed a portion of the American surveillance state that’s normally both invisible and entirely immune to accountability.” [Emphasis added.]

Indeed, the emails provided a glimpse of a slimy ecosystem of mercenary spooks who perform counterintelligence dirty work for powerful corporate clients, such as Bank of America and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Not surprisingly, the matter received relatively little attention from mainstream corporate news media outlets – despite critical implications about free speech issues (Brown initially faced serious charges associated with merely posting a link to material that had already been leaked).

Some alternative media sources recognized that the case involved important issues though, and they published interesting articles on the case. A September 2013 piece in Rolling Stone, for example, provided an excellent overview of Barrett Brown’s life, career, personality, and the main facts of the case which sent him to prison.

Among other things, the article highlights the important role of journalists who understand that scandalous behavior in America’s security industry is not easily uncovered, and that independent journalists such as Brown – in addition to whistle-blowers, and anarchist computer hackers, such as Hammond – play an important role in exposing the moral and legal transgressions. Brown, for example, organized an effort – Project PM – to sort, analyze, and share the huge amount of information that was leaked (he was not involved in the email hacking itself).

Alexander Zaitchik, at Rolling Stone:

Once the hackers who broke into HBGary’s servers discovered that Barr [HBGary’s CEO] was basically a clown, they abandoned pursuit. “There were tens of thousands of e-mails and no one wanted to go through them,” says an Anonymous associate who observed the HBGary hack. “Everyone was like, ‘We’re not even going to dump these, because there’s no point.’”

Brown disagreed. When the hackers posted the e-mails on a BitTorrent site, he used Project PM to organize the pain­staking work of collating and connecting the dots to see what picture emerged.

“Nobody was reading more than a couple of the e-mails before getting bored,” says the Anonymous associate. “But Barrett has this strangely addictive and journalistic kind of mind, so he could stare at those e-mails for 10 hours. He’d be sitting alone in the HBGary channel, yelling at everyone, ‘You’ve got to pay attention! Look at the crap I found!’” Brown quickly drew in some 100 volunteers to help him trawl through and make sense of the e-mails.

The HBGary cache offered one of the fullest looks ever at how corporate-state partnerships were targeting groups they considered subversive or inimical to the interests of corporate America.

…Brown’s case is a bellwether for press freedoms in the new century, where hacks and leaks provide some of our only glimpses into the technologies and policies of an increasingly privatized national security-and-surveillance state. What Brown did through his organization Project PM was attempt to expand these peepholes. He did this by leading group investigations into the world of private intelligence and cybersecurity contracting, a $56 billion industry that consumes 70 percent of the U.S. intelligence budget. [Emphasis added.]

One of the best accounts of the whole affair was published three months earlier. A June 2013 article in The Nation, by Peter Ludlow, examined the critical facts about the corporate spies, the activists who exposed them, and the disturbing implications for Americans’ legal rights posed by the numerous private security-intelligence agencies which operate with no real oversight.

Some essential points are quoted below, but Ludlow’s excellent article deserves to be read in its entirety by anyone interested in reports of organized stalking (also called “disruption operations”). Although the article doesn’t mention the issue of stalking, it provides a well-written and useful context for understanding the nature of the spying business in the U.S., which – in turn – is critical to assessing the plausibility of claims about stalking crimes by federal and state government intelligence agencies, law enforcement intelligence units (intelligence-gathering units within police departments), and private security-intelligence contractors.

Among the implications of the scandals exposed by Hammond and Brown is this: private security-intelligence firms in the U.S. (which are largely staffed by former government agents) apparently feel safe launching counterintelligence plots – even against high-profile journalists and high-profile organizations, such as Glenn Greenwald and WikiLeaks (spreading lies to discredit them, as explained below), so you can imagine how little they might worry about harassing – on behalf of their rich corporate clients – low-level targets who lack the connections, resources, and tactical skills to easily resist, identify, and expose the perpetrators.

Also revealed in the hacked emails were disinformation schemes – systematic lying. As everyone who follows national politics in America knows, that subject has been much-discussed recently – both by those who genuinely oppose “fake news,” and by those who disseminate it. Several good examples of the former, incidentally, have been published recently by CounterPunch, such as this one – which helpfully reminds readers that some major establishment news entities, such as The Washington Post have a history of getting caught serving as disinformation conduits for the CIA.

As I argue elsewhere in this website, lying of the sort exposed in the HBGary emails is, apparently, a core element of organized stalking crimes. Specifically, the emails revealed plots to exploit online “personas” (sometimes called “sock puppets”) to spread lies. Again, this is consistent with most of the online information (disinformation, actually) in “organized stalking” websites, comments, and videos. (Most discussions of this topic on the Web are suspiciously similar in the particular ways that they seem to be intentionally non-credible.)

Also worth noting is that at least one of the private counterintelligence operations exposed by Jeremy Hammond and Barrett Brown had connections with one of the U.S. government’s 17 intelligence agencies – namely, The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). When Bank of America expressed concerns about WikiLeaks’ claim of possessing a large cache of the bank’s documents, the DOJ advised the bank to contact the powerful law firm of Hunton and Williams, and specifically, an attorney there who represented the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Apparently, a plan was hatched to undermine the reputation of WikiLeaks by discrediting the most prominent journalist who defended that news outlet, Glenn Greenwald.

Peter Ludlow, in his article for The Nation, described some of what followed:

In November 2010, Hunton and Williams organized a number of private intelligence, technology development and security contractors—HBGary, plus Palantir Technologies, Berico Technologies and, according to Brown, a secretive corporation with the ominous name Endgame Systems—to form “Team Themis”—‘themis’ being a Greek word meaning “divine law.” Its main objective was to discredit critics of the Chamber of Commerce, like Chamber Watch, using such tactics as 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 US Chamber Watch cannot be trusted with information and/or tell the truth.” 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.” The leaked e-mails showed that similar disinformation campaigns were being planned against WikiLeaks and Glenn Greenwald.

Among the groups occasionally associated with reports of organized stalking and other illegal domestic counterintelligence activities in America are the counterintelligence agencies of the three branches of the U.S. military. The book CHAMELEO by Robert Guffey (OR Books, 2015), for example, documents a stalking operation by agents of the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS). Such activities are consistent with the history of such agencies. During the Vietnam War, for example, U.S. Army counterintelligence agents – in addition to the FBI – were caught spying on American protesters. Some of the HBGary emails suggest that these agencies also engage in spreading disinformation online. Presumably, the prospective client for the following proposal was the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations (OSI).

Ludlow:

Separate from the plan to target Greenwald and WikiLeaks, HBGary was part of a consortia that submitted a proposal to develop a “persona management” system for the United States Air Force, that would allow one user to control multiple online identities for commenting in social media spaces, thus giving the appearance of grassroots support or opposition to certain policies.

As noted in the Rolling Stone article, when Barrett Brown realized that the documents hacked from HBGary were too numerous for him to analyze by himself, he organized a group of volunteers to help. Ludlow described the effort this way:

“Under Brown’s leadership, the initiative began to slowly untangle a web of connections between the US government, corporations, lobbyists and a shadowy group of private military and information security consultants.”

Even now, more than five years after the computer hacks, the secret, unethical – and possibly illegal – activities discussed in the huge trove of stolen emails has not received the wide attention it deserves. For that matter, although it’s probably unlikely, there might even be some important information in the stolen emails that has not yet been uncovered: The HB Gary hack yielded tens of thousands of emails, and the Stratfor hack reportedly involved several million emails. Just to state the obvious, though: Presumably, much of the communication associated with the most serious crimes perpetrated (officially and unofficially) by current and former security agents (public and private) are not being documented in ways that are likely to be exposed by hacking, subpoenas, Freedom of Information Act requests, and the like.

In any case, Barrett Brown might be able to shed some more light on these matters, now that he has been released from prison. Brown’s reports from behind bars – several of which credibly documented violations of federal policies by employees and managers in the U.S. Bureau of Prisons (BOP) – apparently generated retribution against him, including violations of his rights to communicate, and the illegitimate imposition of solitary confinement. As journalist Kevin Gosztola noted, the treatment Brown received from the BOP was similar to the special treatment of John Kiriakou – the former CIA analyst and whistle-blower. Last year, Tim Rogers, editor of D Magazine, posted Barrett Brown’s statement about that.

Although most of Brown’s writings as a prisoner revolved around his experiences as an inmate, the final dispatch he wrote before his release – published in October by The Intercept, included details of the scandals whose exposure led to his incarceration. Brown explicitly – and without fear of contradiction – referred to the private spying he helped reveal, as a “conspiracy.” Not surprisingly, he discovered that some intelligence-security firms, really don’t want to have their activities exposed to the public:

I did get to indirectly gum up the works at Endgame Systems, which, though one of the four firms involved in Themis’s proposed operations against journalists and activists, managed to avoid being mentioned in most of the press coverage that followed the original exposure of the plot. You see, Endgame’s execs had insisted in one particular email thread that its name never appear in any Themis operational materials, explaining that the nature of the firm’s central activities was such that any public scrutiny would lead to disaster, and that this was a particular concern of their partners. Other emails ended up working against it, though, as I was able to pique the interest of Bloomberg Businessweek by forwarding this hilariously sinister “NO ONE MUST EVER KNOW” exchange to a contact I had there. A few months later, the magazine ran a long feature on Endgame revealing its ability to seize control of computers across the world and that it was offering this service to unknown customers outside of the U.S. government. This in turn prompted sufficient discomfort that the firm had to stop doing this, or at least claim to have stopped. Perhaps that’s why Endgame Systems was listed on my search warrant — and never mentioned again in a single other filing by the government in my case.

Anyone who wades through public news reports and attempts to sort out – even partially – the various government and private security-intelligence organizations which sometimes engage in counterintelligence activities – and “disruption” operations methods (i.e., “organized stalking”) in particular – will discover that the surveillance and harassment tactics are apparently associated with a variety of players in America’s huge web of security entities. In addition, it becomes apparent that those entities are often connected – both formally and informally – with each other. In the emails obtained by Jeremy Hammond and reported upon by Barrett Brown, those intersections between federal intelligence agencies, private security-intelligence contractors, and the wealthy corporate clients whose interests are served by both are clear.

Barrett Brown:

… the chief enemy I’d made was apparently the Department of Justice — because when Team Themis was exposed, the emails revealed that the whole indefensible conspiracy had been set in motion by the DOJ itself, which had made the necessary introductions when Bank of America came to the agency looking for advice on how to go after WikiLeaks. There were no known consequences for anyone at the DOJ; a congressman’s calls for an official inquiry were shot down by Lamar Smith, the relevant committee chair, who proclaimed that the DOJ itself should handle any investigation. Whether the DOJ took Smith’s advice and investigated itself for secretly arranging a corporate black ops partnership is unknown. Rather, it was my head that was to roll, in retaliation for my efforts to keep the story alive in articles I continued to write for The Guardian as well as for my occasional successes in causing difficulties to Themis participants like Endgame and the intelligence contracting industry as a whole, which regularly hires ex-government officials at high salaries and thus has a working relationship with most federal agencies.

WikiLeaks – which is presumably the news outlet most despised by those who believe that the actions of powerful governments and corporations should be concealed from the public – has posted the emails exposed by Hammond and Brown online. This press release about those emails was published by WikiLeaks on November 29th – the day Brown was released from prison.

Much of the harassment associated with organized stalking is clearly illegal (breaking and entering, wiretapping, slander, threats, and such). Some of it, though – such as certain acts of “overt surveillance” might be legal – or at least reside in a grey area of legality, despite the fact that stalking, in general, is prohibited by the criminal codes of all fifty states. In the same way, some of the activities of private security-intelligence firms exposed by Jeremy Hammond and Barrett Brown probably involve varying degrees of criminality and unethical behavior. In any case, the operatives and their clients are, to some extent, above the law, as a practical matter, since (a) they generally operate in secrecy, (b) by contracting and subcontracting, corporations and government agencies can delegate their dirty work, (c) private companies cannot be investigated by Freedom of Information Act requests, and (d) the clients sometimes have connections to the U.S. Justice Department.

Peter Ludlow, in his article in The Nation, precisely identified the core point:

“Some journalists are now understandably afraid to go near the Stratfor files. The broader implications of this go beyond Brown; one might think that what we are looking at is Cointelpro 2.0—an outsourced surveillance state—but in fact it’s worse.”

“…While the media and much of the world have been understandably outraged by the revelation of the NSA’s spying programs, Barrett Brown’s work was pointing to a much deeper problem. It isn’t the sort of problem that 