The first time I heard the phrase ‘deconfliction team‘ was when it came out that the NSA was using online gaming forums, like those of the World of Warcraft (WoW), to identify people who hold anti-government views.
Somewhere in Maryland, circa 1989…
Apparently, the NSA has so many gamers trolling WoW, that they need an oversight team to make sure that none of the different operations interfere with each other. That oversight group is called a ‘deconfliction team’.
My post today is about what happens when deconfliction teams fail. In 2011, one such disaster occurred when Palantir Technologies collided with Glenn Greenwald.
Palantir Technologies was founded by Peter Thiel, the millionaire Facebook investor and ex-PayPal CEO whose homosexuality was forcibly outed by Nick Denton’s Gawker.com. Palantir got its start-up money from Thiel’s firm, Founders Fund, as well as the CIA’s private technology investment firm In-Q-Tel. Unsurprisingly, Palantir’s main business is data collection and analysis for the US Intelligence Community.
What that means, readers, is that Palantir does the heavy data lifting for US Intelligence clients. Palantir knows the spying methods, but not necessarily the overarching spying strategy or anything else about intelligence operations that Palantir was not hired to help with. Palantir ‘needs to know’ very little.
So… way back in 2011, Palantir was at best on the peripheral edge of a deconfliction team’s radar. Couple that with Palantir’s red-blooded hunger for profit anywhere, anyhow, and you have the perfect deconfliction storm.
Everything went pear-shaped the day Wikileaks claimed to have stolen data from one of Bank of America’s executives. The data was said to contain embarrassing and incriminating information on BoA. (Subsequent developments cast a lot of doubt over the meaning of this data ; it also seems that part of this data was deleted the following August by ex-Wikileaker Daniel Domsheit-Berg, whose theatrical behavior aggravated tensions amongst Wikileaks members. )
BoA responded by trying to get a jump on the Wikileaks hackers: they hired a flashy lawyer (Hunton and Williams), who in turn tried to peddle the services of Palantir Technologies/ HB Gary/Berico Technologies. According to The Tech Herald:
Palantir would take care of network and insider threat investigations. For their part, Berico Technologies and HBGary Federal would analyze WikiLeaks.
This is where the fireworks really start, because Palantir put together a presentation on how they would “take care of” the insider threat, which involved targeting Glenn Greenwald in particular. Let me stress that Palantir called out Glenn Greenwald by name as a fair-weather friend of Wikileaks. Here’s a slide from Palantir’s presentation to BoA:
The start of a tradition in leaked slide shows? :)
Depending on who you ask, Palantir’s proposal was either released to Crowdleaks.org or hacked free by Anonymous, and the whole ugly mess came out. HP Gary took the fall for Palantir, Berico and the lawyers: HP Gary was split in half, one half folded, the other got bought my Man Tech International.
How did Glenn Greenwald respond to the knowledge that the CIA’s data-intelligence Death Star had been trained on his chest? Glenn found it all “hard to take seriously”. You’re one cool customer, Glenn!
And did Palantir Technologies take the usual corporate route: clam up and call a crack team of lawyers? No. Palantir co-founder Alex Karp made a special, personal statement to Glenn apologizing for Palantir’s behavior and severing profitable contacts with HP Gary.
Palantir’s plot targeted other journalists too, even though Karp didn’t feel it necessary to make special apology statements to them: James Ball (The Guardian), Jennifer 8. Lee (The New York Times), Daniel Mathews (The Telegraph, Forbes, The Times). Notice any employment patterns in this list?
What I believe happened with Palantir/Greenwald is the mother of all ‘deconfliction’ FUBARs. Fortunately for Langley, the mainstream media is so complicit that nobody ‘credible’ dug too deeply.
Things start to smell even worse when you look into the background of HP Gary, the fall-guy-company. HP Gary was a data analysis firm which focused on serving the US Federal Government (through its offices in Bethesda, MD and Washington D.C.) The firm was started by Greg Hoglund, a regular Black Hat presenter, whose hobby was exploring the World of Warcraft online network. In 2005, he wrote about Blizzard’s WoW spy program, ‘The Warden’, which monitored data on gamers’ PCs: everything from emails sent to programs executed. What Blizzard was doing is similar to what the NSA can do through ‘backdoors’ in software. Back in 2005, the Electronic Freedom Foundation thought Hoglund was pretty cool.
One week before the ‘Targeting of Greenwald’ broke (and one day after Arron Barr, an HP Gary colleague who published data on Anonymous members in the FT), HP Gary was attacked by Anonymous so ferociously that Hoglund’s wife Penny had to call Anonymous and beg them stop. Hi. This is Mrs. Hoglund. Yes. I guess there’s been some trouble at school… I laugh, but Mrs. Hoglund’s outreach worked.
So, readers, Greg Hoglund was an expert on the World of Warcraft networks who was willing to work with CIA buddies. We learned later, of course, that the NSA was using WoW networks to watch possible future ‘terrorists’. Perhaps professional game trolling was Hoglund’s gig after HP Gary folded?
What about Glenn? Like any good media operative, he set about using this opportunity to his advantage, honing the same righteous indignation and factual casualness that would make him famous two years later after the Snowden Leaks:
Given my involvement in this story, I’m going to defer to others in terms of the reporting. But — given the players involved and the facts that continue to emerge — this story is far too significant to allow to die due to lack of attention. Many of the named targets are actively considering commencing civil proceedings (which would entail compulsory discovery) as well as ethical grievances with the relevant Bar associations. As the episode with Palantir demonstrates, simply relying on the voluntary statements of the corporations involved ensures that the actual facts will remain concealed if not actively distorted. The DOJ ought to investigate this as well, but for reasons I detailed on Friday, that is unlikely in the extreme. Entities of this type routinely engage in conduct like this with impunity, and the serendipity that led to their exposure in this case should be seized to impose some accountability. That this was discovered through a random email hack — and that these firms felt so free to propose these schemes in writing and, at least from what is known, not a single person raised any objection at all — underscores how common this behavior is.
This rant came on February 15th 2011, four days after Glenn got his personal apology from Alex Karp– so when Glenn wrote that screed he knew he was safe and smelt blood in the water. Fast forward a few years: Glenn’s now working for the guy who owns Thiel’s ex-employer, PayPal. Small world.
Given that part of Palantir’s strategy was to feed weak-minded journalists false information to discredit them, I’m not surprised that Glenn ignored Snowden’s emails for so long before Laura Poitras lead him by the nose back to Cinncinatus@lavabit@CryptoPartyWiki.
Find slides at The Tech Herald.
Consider Daniel Domscheit-Berg’s antics around the Bank of America information in light of point one on that slide. Bank of America is one of the major US banks, which have a long history of cooperating with US intelligence. I’ve heard these financial institutions described as “revolving doors” for organizations like the CIA, Citibank being the most notorious.
Veteran Tor watchers will note that Palantir thought Wikileaks’ servers’ position in Sweden made them more vulnerable… not surprising, seeing as the Swedes are partners to the US Department of Defense’s Tor Project.
Wrap Up: Edward Snowden, operator of one of the largest Tor exit nodes, chose Glenn Greenwald, the guy CIA-partner Palantir won’t touch, to ‘out’ his trove of leaks. A trove of leaks that you’ll never read.
You know, it’s weird, but I don’t think Ed’s cute anymore.
