For at least two years, the U.S. has been conducting a secretive and immensely sophisticated campaign of mass surveillance and data mining against the Arab world, allowing the intelligence community to monitor the habits, conversations, and activity of millions of individuals at once. And with an upgrade scheduled for later this year, the top contender to win the federal contract and thus take over the program is a team of about a dozen companies which were brought together in large part by Aaron Barr - the same disgraced CEO who resigned from his own firm earlier this year after he was discovered to have planned a full-scale information war against political activists at the behest of corporate clients.
http://wiki.echelon2.org:8090/wiki/Romas/COIN
According to a Project PM announcement, here are some of the 'classified intelligence' details about Romas/COIN (Odyssey) with capabilities to monitor and automatically analyze millions of conversations, and then secretly store a wide range of personal data. It appears as if even Apple, Google, and Disney's Pixar were trying to be brought aboard to help out in this mass surveillance apparatus.
Altogether, then, a successful bid for the relevant contract was seen to require the combined capabilities of perhaps a dozen firms - capabilities whereby millions of conversations can be monitored and automatically analyzed, whereby a wide range of personal data can be obtained and stored in secret, and whereby some unknown degree of information can be released to a given population through a variety of means and without any hint that the actual source is U.S. military intelligence. All this is merely in addition to whichever additional capabilities are not evident from the limited description available, with the program as a whole presumably being operated in conjunction with other surveillance and propaganda assets controlled by the U.S. and its partners.Here's the team players:
- TASC (PMO, creative services)
- HB Gary (Strategy, planning, PMO)
- Akamai (infrastructure)
- Archimedes Global (Specialized linguistics, strategy, planning)
- Acclaim Technical Services (specialized linguistics)
- Mission Essential Personnel (linguistic services)
- Cipher (strategy, planning operations)
- PointAbout (rapid mobile application development, list of strategic partners)
- Google (strategy, mobile application and platform development - long list of strategic partners)
- Apple (mobile and desktop platform, application assistance -long list of strategic partners)
- We are trying to schedule an interview with AT&T plus some other small app developers.
Two days after a briefing requirement meeting, the servers of HBGary and HBGary Federal were hacked by a small team of Anonymous operatives in retaliation for Barr's boasts to Financial Times that he had identified the movement's "leadership;" 70,000 e-mails were thereafter released onto the Internet. Barr resigned a few weeks later.
