Update1:

OK. I went over to Cryptome to see what former Wikileaks cofounder John Young thinks of this Vigilant agency story. I can’t always figure out whether Young is being facetious or serious in some of his off-the-cuff remarks on the site.

But this is what I saw posted:

Project Vigilant Is A Fraud

“The job of the Chief Scientist is to “call bullshit” when someone has an idea that will never work.” Chet Uber, Project Vigilant

Based on this material retrieved from Google cache, Project Vigilant is a fraud. The recent stories about Chet Uber recruiting volunteer Internet spies at Defcon, bragging about having 600 volunteers and advising Adrian Lamo to inform on Bradley Manning have been based on public relations hyperbole.

This material shows:

1. It has no physical address, no proof of legal existence, no assets, no evidence it is governmentally authorized to steal personal and business data, and to train and criminally direct volunteers to steal personal and business data around the world for ostensible government use.

2. No evidence that the stolen personal and business data is provided to governments in compliance with law governing such data.

3. Personal information on volunteers is being harvested for undisclosed purposes by offering a pretentious training and vetting process to ostensibly assure protection of national security secrets around the globe, with claims that federal agencies like the State Deparment will be involved. No qualifications to train in or handle national security secrets are offered.

4. Unpaid services by volunteers are being solicited under guise of patriotism to avoid or minimize financial accounting, salaries, insurance and health benefits, taxation and government oversight.

5. Notable persons have been induced to legitimate Project Vigilant by allowing their names to be used, or used without their permission or knowledge.

6. A plan to enlist children as spies.

7. In January 2010 there were no “fully vetted” volunteers.

8. Most of the project’s officer and advisory positions remain unfilled; the positions appear to be bogus.

9. Mission statements and categories of activities are empty boilerplate.

Along with this post is a google cache of Vigilant which I’m not linking here, but you can find at his site. I’m not posting it mainly because I don’t understand its import and am not even sure I understand what Young is saying about Vigilant…

ORIGINAL POST

This darn Wikileaks affair gets stranger and stranger..

Note: Greenwald describes a Fed spy agency that has its fingerprints over the outing of Bradley Manning, the alleged whistleblower who leaked the Afghan documents to Wikileaks.

He takes this  link at its face value, something I’m not sure is warranted. To me, the connection suggests that there’s much more to Wikileaks than meets the eye. Besides, I don’t see how you can object to the disappearance of privacy from the net, which Greenwald laments, and then support Wikileaks. Assange talks out of both sides of his mouth on the issue, as I’ve noted.

The  WL  model is part and parcel of the problem. And no, WL did not “reveal” the extent of domestic espionage. It confirmed it. That’s quite a different thing.

Altogether strange.

Just like the bizarre food-fight between Wikipedia and the FBI over the reproduction of the FBI seal on the Wikipedia site. Personally, I think someone in intel thought that one up yesterday to divert some of the  public glare from Wikileaks‘ fight with the Fed (assuming it’s not staged in some way) in the direction of Wikipedia.

[Update at 2:49PM: After I blogged this this morning around 9 AM, David Kramer at LRC blog a couple of hours later suggests, more benignly, that the FBI mistook Wikipedia for Wikileaks…so I’m adding that interpretation here as another possibility. I admit I have a jaded eye].

I’m in two minds about Wikileaks. But I’m pretty sure Wikipedia is compromised badly.

Glenn Greenwald, via Lew Rockwell:

Uber is the Executive Director of a highly secretive group called Project Vigilant, which, as Greenberg writes, “monitors the traffic of 12 regional Internet service providers” and “hands much of that information to federal agencies.” More on that in a minute.  Uber revealed yesterday that Lamo, the hacker who turned in Manning to the federal government for allegedly confessing to being the WikiLeaks leaker, was a “volunteer analyst” for Project Vigilant; that it was Uber who directed Lamo to federal authorities to inform on Manning by using his contacts to put Lamo in touch with the “highest level people in the government” at “three letter agencies”; and, according to a Wired report this morning, it was Uber who strongly pressured Lamo to inform by telling him (falsely) that he’d likely be arrested if he failed to turn over to federal agents everything he received from Manning.

So, while Lamo has repeatedly denied (including in his interview with me) that he ever worked with federal authorities, it turns out that he was a “volunteer analyst” for an entity which collects private Internet data in order to process it and turn it over to the Federal Government.  That makes the whole Manning case all the more strange:  Manning not only abruptly contacted a disreputable hacker out of the blue and confessed to major crimes over the Interent, but the hacker he arbitrarily chose just happened to be an “analyst” for a group that monitors on a massive scale the private Internet activities of American citizens in order to inform on them to U.S. law enforcement agencies (on a side note, if you want to judge what Adrian Lamo is, watch him in this amazing BBC interview; I’ve never seen someone behave quite like him on television before).

In terms of what they mean for the Manning case, those revelations require a lot more analysis, but I want to focus on the much more important aspect of these revelations:  namely, what Project Vigilant does as well as the booming private domestic espionage industry of which they are a part.  There’s very little public information about this organization, but what they essentially are is some sort of vigilante group that collects vast amount of private data about the Internet activities of millions of citizens, processes that data into usable form, and then literally turns it over to the U.S. Government, claiming its motive is to help the Government detect Terrorists and other criminals.  From the Forbes report:

According to Uber, one of Project Vigilant’s manifold methods for gathering intelligence includes collecting information from a dozen regional U.S. Internet service providers (ISPs). Uber declined to name those ISPs, but said that because the companies included a provision allowing them to share users’ Internet activities with third parties in their end user license agreements (EULAs), Vigilant was able to legally gather data from those Internet carriers and use it to craft reports for federal agencies. A Vigilant press release says that the organization tracks more than 250 million IP addresses a day and can “develop portfolios on any name, screen name or IP address.”

They’re tracking 250 million IP addresses a day, compiling dossiers, and then turning them over to federal agencies — with the ability to link that information to “any name.”  As this June, 2010 article from the Examiner — one of the very few ever written about the group — put it:

Project Vigilant has been operating in near total secrecy for over a decade, monitoring potential domestic terrorist activity and tracking various criminal activities on the Web. In a series of exclusive interviews with some of the group’s leaders, it’s clear that the people doing this work are among the most sophisticated and experienced experts in today’s rapidly moving world of Internet security.”