the barry doesn't fall far from the shrub...,
2011-02-12 13:00:47
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defense budget "cuts"...,
2011-02-15 16:35:22
spies like us:
Glenn Greenwald really has my sympathies: he gets out of the hospital just in time to find out that he was the target of a bumbling conspiracy hatched by the largest financial institution in the country, only to be rescued from their clutches when the conspiracy is cracked wide open by the inventors of the LOLCat.
It'd almost drive a guy paranoid if it wasn't so fucking funny.
Anyway, the long and short of it: Wikileaks has a bunch of incriminating internal documents from Bank of America, so the Department of Justice - rather than taking any interest in the criminal activities of Bank of America, which is hardly surprising at this point - gives Bank of America legal advice, which is to hire three security firms (Palantir Technologies, HBGary Federal, and Berico Technologies) to research legal attacks on Wikileaks. The firms sit on this egg for a bit and decide that what they really need to do is undermine Wikileaks' public support, so they start planning to undermine, blackmail, and attack various journalists and free speech activists, as well as the inventors of the lolcat, who had organized some small denial of service attacks against various businesses that broke their contracts with Wikileaks.
The super spies at HBGary, running conspiracies within conspiracies, collect a bunch of ginned up information on, well, somebody, or something, then brag to the press about how they're going to rid the internets of lolcats forever when they sell that information to the FBI, and so the next day their network is hacked, the conspiracy exposed, the ginned up information they were going to sell to the FBI published in full by the hackers, along with everything else that wasn't bolted down, in all likelihood destroying their firm commercially, and so Glenn Greenwald is safe (for now!) from the twisted plots of international finance, or something.
Hollywood would be so lucky to have gold plated shit like this fall out of the sky, now that plodding dramas about software engineers are winning Oscars. Is Peter Sellers still alive? Is he still available for work?
