*For every one of these schemes that blows up in public, there's a thousand of 'em that never see the light of day.
*If you're Glenn Greenwald, you might be getting kind of upset about being extralegally targeted by bank hacktivists with those much-persecuted Wikileaks hacktivists.
http://www.salon.com/news/wikileaks/index.html?story=/opinion/greenwald/2011/02/11/campaigns
(...)
"But after learning a lot more over the last couple of days, I now take this more seriously – not in terms of my involvement but the broader implications this story highlights. For one thing, it turns out that the firms involved here are large, legitimate and serious, and do substantial amounts of work for both the U.S. Government and the nation's largest private corporations (as but one example, see this email from a Stanford computer science student about Palantir).
"Moreover, these kinds of smear campaigns are far from unusual; in other leaked HB Gary emails, ThinkProgress discovered that similar proposals were prepared for the Chamber of Commerce to attack progressive groups and other activists (including ThinkProgress). And perhaps most disturbing of all, Hunton & Williams was recommended to Bank of America's General Counsel by the Justice Department – meaning the U.S. Government is aiding Bank of America in its defense against/attacks on WikiLeaks.
"That's why this should be taken seriously, despite how ignorant, trite and laughably shallow is the specific leaked anti-WikiLeaks proposal. As creepy and odious as this is, there's nothing unusual about these kinds of smear campaigns. The only unusual aspect here is that we happened to learn about it this time because of Anonymous' hacking. (((That's the weird part. These guys would be pocketing checks right now if they hadn't bragged in earshot of Anonymous. I'd be guessing there are no more heavy-dudes in Anonymous than there are in Wikileaks, which would mean maybe half a dozen core guys and 60,000 followers. It's like going out to beat up a nameless Tunisian street-vendor and finding out that the flames off his carcass have toppled a regime.)))
"That a similar scheme was quickly discovered by ThinkProgress demonstrates how common this behavior is. (((Somebody could do with a lesson in the FBI and the Civil Rights Movement here – American leftists getting briskly pitchforked off the public stage is not exactly unprecedented.)))
The very idea of trying to threaten the careers of journalists and activists to punish and deter their advocacy is self-evidently pernicious; (((although not very new, viz Spiro Agnew))) that it's being so freely and casually proposed to groups as powerful as the Bank of America, the Chamber of Commerce, and the DOJ-recommended Hunton & Williams demonstrates how common this is. These highly experienced firms included such proposals because they assumed those deep-pocket organizations would approve and it would make their hiring more likely. (((It's even weirder when Dan Rather gets hounded off the TV by no-budget grass-roots pyjamahideen.)))
"But the real issue highlighted by this episode is just how lawless and unrestrained is the unified axis of government and corporate power. I've written many times about this issue – the full-scale merger between public and private spheres – because it's easily one of the most critical yet under-discussed political topics. Especially (though by no means only) in the worlds of the Surveillance and National Security State, the powers of the state have become largely privatized. There is very little separation between government power and corporate power. Those who wield the latter intrinsically wield the former. The revolving door between the highest levels of government and corporate offices rotates so fast and continuously that it has basically flown off its track and no longer provides even the minimal barrier it once did. It's not merely that corporate power is unrestrained; it's worse than that: corporations actively exploit the power of the state to further entrench and enhance their power. (((Well... not really. Corporations don't have any power any more. Financiers have all the power. It's about the guys who own the corporations, it's not the "corporations." Just look where the money went. You think corporate employees are powerful people today? You can be "corporate" as all get-out and have no job security. You're a schmoe in a suit.)))
"That's what this anti-WikiLeaks campaign is generally: it's a concerted, unified effort between government and the most powerful entities in the private sector (Bank of America is the largest bank in the nation). (((Don't forget those Swedish feminists – they look plenty American corporate, too.)))
"The firms the Bank has hired (such as Booz Allen) are suffused with the highest level former defense and intelligence officials, while these other outside firms (including Hunton & Williams and Palantir) are extremely well-connected to the U.S. Government. The U.S. Government's obsession with destroying WikiLeaks has been well-documented. And because the U.S. Government is free to break the law without any constraints, oversight or accountability, (((That's cause it's WAR!! Permanent Condition Orange!))) so, too, are its "private partners" able to act lawlessly. That was the lesson of the Congressional vesting of full retroactive immunity on lawbreaking telecoms, of the refusal to prosecute any of the important Wall Street criminals who caused the 2008 financial crisis, and of the instinctive efforts of the political class to protect defrauding mortgage banks.
(((Okay, yeah, that's pretty caustic from ol' Glenn there, and who can blame him when there's K-Street Men in Black conspiring against him and having their email dumped right on his desk. But you wanna read something really scarifying? Check out this TomDespatch guy, describing Cairo and Tunisia as the American Empire's 1989. See, it's not enough to have a superpower that's crooked, kleptocratic and sclerotic – they're also helpless and repeatedly blindsided by events!)))
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175351/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_goodbye_to_all_that/
(((The covert struggle here is quite amazing.)))
https://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/02/anonymous/#more-23593
