Everybody knows that if you torture people you don't get good information. It was never about that. Disappearing people and putting them into orange jumpsuits, and into legal black holes and waterboarding them and freezing them and killing detainees was about signaling to the rest of world that you can not challenge or stand up to American power, because if you do, we will respond without constraints, and there is nothing anybody can or will do about it. It was about creating a climate of repression and fear to deter any would-be dissenters or challengers to American power. And that is what this war on whistleblowing and this war on Wikileaks is about as well.
DriveTime is asking the Arizona federal district court to let it do discovery to flush out any Intellectual Ventures ties to Lodsys. DriveTimes says they "strongly suspect, as do others, that Lodsys is a spin-off and the alter ego of a company called Intellectual Ventures ("IV"), known as "patent troll public enemy #1." ... apart from the Intellectual Venture angle, DriveTime makes a reasonable argument that Lodsys has entered the state of Arizona for the purpose of soliciting licensing transactions and, thus, should be subject to Arizona courts. ... [and that ] Lodsys will find it difficult to establish that it has any true ties to Texas, given that there is simply a vacant office there in a building complex that appears to cater to such shell companies.
More white washing of HBGary and Aaron Barr.
I would have loved the opportunity to convey a few misunderstandings about me. ... I am, to use a phrase that Richard Thieme popularized at this year’s show, a “world as grey” kind of person.
This is the guy who targeted union organizers, journalists and others on behalf of the US Chamber of commerce. They also developed root kits for users of Microsoft Office and astroturf tools to subvert public debate. Glenn Greenwald, a target of the spying, is well worth reading.
Corporate hacker Aaron Barr draws inspiration from Maxim magazine for his fake persona army. ... In presentations obtained by ThinkProgress from the e-mail dump detailing the tactics potentially used against progressives, HBGary Federal floated the idea of using “fake insider personas” to infiltrate left-leaning groups critical of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s policies. As HBGary Federal executive Aaron Barr described in several emails, his firm could work with partner companies Palantir and Berico Technologies to manipulate fake online identities, using networks like Facebook, to gain access to private information from his targets.
From other reports we know group promised to cause conflict and mistrust in the targeted groups.