Posted on 08/01/2010 8:21:27 PM PDT by FromLori
Says It Employed Wikileaks Informant
A semi-secret government contractor that calls itself Project Vigilant surfaced at the Defcon security conference Sunday with a series of revelations: that it monitors the traffic of 12 regional Internet service providers, hands much of that information to federal agencies, and encouraged one of its "volunteers", researcher Adrian Lamo, to inform the federal government about the alleged source of a controversial video of civilian deaths in Iraq leaked to whistle-blower site Wikileaks in April.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.forbes.com ...
That kinda makes me wish Free Republic was an SSL (https://) encoded site for all.
Yes especially with the current government!
I monitor them too, especially for price, coverage, and service. And I am 6m times as stealthy as any government contractor as no one would ever suspect from my lifestyle choices that I comparison shop for deals.
From the comments area below, Chet responds to the article:
“Andy,
You did a pretty decent job given the wide ranging topics and the time frame.
1. BBHC Global LLC is an NGO classified as a “Not Just for Profit” entity.
2. BBHC runs several sub-divisions that are “for-profit” but they are all contracts staffed by 1099 subcontractors. BBHC has no employees including its current managing member Steven Ruhe.
3. Project VIGILANT is a science-based project on Attack Attribution and all of our members are volunteers. So in both this and the above where you say “work” I have no issue - but “employee” is neither accurate or true.
4. The ISP’s we work with were solicited by us to provide to them a tool that looks for packages coming into, or from its own clients that is indicative of NMap and other well defined non-user tools. We know we don’t see client data because what we are looking for is the use of scanning tools. So to characterize us as monitoring ISP’s is not accurate. No one gave me the time to explain myself and I had a dozen people throwing questions to me at the same time, many of them leading questions.
5. We have one (1) subcontract to a primary contractor to the government. We do happen to continue to bid on Federal Contracts that cover the topic of attribution or the related areas of that. We are a CCR registered defense contractor, but we are pretty pour to date of landing any contracts. So your headline is really really misleading.
6. In your last paragraph you again say we employee people. I will trade you - please use “volunteers” and I will tell you that more than one ex-NSA person donates time to this cause.
7. If you would like to, I would love to provide you additional information as long as you are willing to make sure that you verify your sources. You did not do what I had to do as a reporter - call the person and say - is this what you said?
Be Well,
Chet”
ping
Wow I didn’t even look at the comments thanks Forbes is a pretty liberal site so I guess I should have suspected the reporting.
Wow.... paid to surf porn.... good work if you can get it :)
What is that supposed to mean?
Government contractors paid to sit and surf all day,, what do you think they are really going to do???????
Oh I get it now thanks!
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