cryptogon.com news – analysis – conspiracies

August 11th, 2012

Via: Public Intelligence:

Hacked emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor have shed light on a global suspicious activity surveillance system called TrapWire that is reportedly in use in locations around the world from the London Stock Exchange to the White House. The emails, which were released yesterday by WikiLeaks, provide information on the extent and operations of a system designed to correlate suspicious activity reports and other evidence that may indicate surveillance connected with a potential terrorist attack.

A proprietary white paper produced by TrapWire, formerly called Abraxas Applications, describes the product as “a unique, predictive software system designed to detect patterns of pre-attack surveillance.” In an interview from 2005 with the Northern Virginia Technology Council, the CEO of Abraxas Corporation Richard “Hollis” Helms says the goal of TrapWire is to “collect information about people and vehicles that is more accurate than facial recognition, draw patterns, and do threat assessments of areas that may be under observation from terrorists.” Fred Burton, the CEO of Stratfor, describes Trapwire in an email from November 2009 as “a technology solution predicated upon behavior patterns in red zones to identify surveillance. It helps you connect the dots over time and distance.”

Documents submitted with Abraxas’ initial trademarking of TrapWire, describe the system as utilizing “a facility’s existing technologies (such as pan-tilt-zoom [PTZ] cameras) and humans (security personnel, employees, and neighbors)” to collect data which is then “recorded and stored in a standardized format to facilitate data mining, information comparison and information sharing across the network.” TrapWire “standardizes descriptions of potential surveillance activity, such as photographing, measuring and signaling” and then shares “threat information” across the network to track potential correlations across other locations on the network.

One thing that makes TrapWire a particularly interesting company is that its president, chief of operations and director of business development are all former employees of the Central Intelligence Agency.