Greenwald: I Didn’t Even Know Snowden’s Name Until He Was In Hong Kong

[Hissyspit]

72. Thank you for all that lack of substance.

By the way, I've been here 10 years, reading Greenwald's blog for almost as long, and following his Twitter account for almost as long.

It's not so much Greenwald I care about as people here making shit up and using fallacious arguments like "if he got a lawyer, he is guilty of something."

I can't imagine why Greenwald would want a lawyer:

http://www.guardiannews.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/24/surveillance-us-national-security

In early January, email messages from HBGary Federal show plans for a meeting with Booz Allen Hamilton, apparently regarding Barr's plans against WikiLeaks and Anonymous. At this point, no one was buying Barr's scheme – even as he bragged to the Financial Times, on 4 February 2012, that he had used Facebook, Twitter and other social media to identify the "leaders" of Anonymous.

Barr believed that had piqued the interest of the "FBI, the Director of National Intelligence, and the US military". In fact, it had merely made him a marked man: two days later, as Wired reported, Anonymous "took down [HBGary Federal's] website, stole his emails, deleted the company's backup data, trashed Barr's Twitter account and remotely wiped his iPad." For his part, Brown created Project PM, "a crowd-sourced wiki focused on government intelligence contractors" to delve through the tens of thousands of emails taken from HBGary Federal's servers.

A critical element in the story concerns the fact that, according to one of the leaked emails, the companies were hoping that "if they can show that WikiLeaks is hosting data in certain countries it will make prosecution easier." The hacked emails also revealed, Forbes reported, that Barr was hoping to sell the information on Anonymous members to the FBI. The fact that Barr was stoking interest among security agencies with a dossier of supposed Anonymous members containing incorrect names meant that innocent people might have been jailed if he had succeeded in his scheme.

Barr resigned and HBGary Federal was subsequently shuttered. But the story doesn't end there. In July 2011, the Anonymous-linked "AntiSec" raided Booz Allen Hamilton and made off with 90,000 emails. One allegation that emerged from the cache was that BAH had been working with HBGary Federal "to develop software that would allow for the creation of multiple fake social media profiles to infiltrate discussion groups and manipulate opinion on the sites and discredit people, as well as to match personas online with offline identities."

Within days of the Team Themis scandal, Palantir issued a statement announcing that it was cutting ties with HBGary Federal and issued an apology to Greenwald.