Political Irony

© Lee Judge

Mike Huckabee said on Monday that abortion is the most important political issue — more important than the economy, jobs, the deficit, wars, etc.

If the whole HBGary Federal fiasco wasn’t bad enough, there is more bad news coming out of their leaked emails.

It turns out that one of HBGary’s “products” is sophisticated software to allow public opinion to be manipulated. The software allows a small number of hired employees to impersonate a large number of fictitious citizens who then inundate social media sites.

Are you seeing widespread outrage against some political issue on Twitter, Facebook, or other social media site? That outrage can easily be manufactured and paid for, while appearing to be coming from a grassroots uprising. Have you seen a blog post that reveals something unflattering about some powerful institution, only to see a swarm of commenters show up making ad hominem attacks and unsubstantiated accusations against the blogger?

As the HBGary Federal CEO puts it:

To build this capability we will create a set of personas on twitter, blogs, forums, buzz, and myspace under created names that fit the profile ( satellitejockey, hack3rman, etc. ). These accounts are maintained and updated automatically through RSS feeds, retweets, and linking together social media commenting between platforms. With a pool of these accounts to choose from, once you have a real name persona you create a Facebook and LinkedIn account using the given name, lock those accounts down and link these accounts to a selected # of previously created social media accounts, automatically pre-aging the real accounts.

The software creates a large number of “personas” who appear to be real people but are really sockpuppets.

This is a well-known propaganda technique called “Bandwagon” that takes advantage of people’s strong need to go along with the crowd. When a politician says something like “The American People are speaking out against healthcare / illegal immigrants / etc.” they are trying to convince you that there is a consensus about some issue and that you should join that consensus.

What is really frightening is that companies like HBGary, Berinco, and Palantir — who are supposed to be computer security firms — are building sophisticated software like this whose sole purpose is to lie to you, to attack opinions their clients don’t like, and distort reality. And even more frightening is that our own government is using the same software.

Is Matt Taibbi the only real investigative journalist left in America? It isn’t like there isn’t plenty to investigate. In another of his brilliant but deeply disturbing articles, Taibbi shows how Wall Street bankers steal Billions of dollars, and even when caught red handed face essentially no penalties at all. At worse, they receive a joke of a fine — far less than the money they stole — which they then pay using shareholder money instead of their own.

How do they get away with this? How about because the SEC and Justice department lawyers are often former executives of the very companies they are supposed to be investigating. Or that when a government auditor tries to just investigate (not even prosecute) wrongdoing, they are summarily fired. Even when the bankers are openly bragging about their rip-offs.

This is not a partisan issue. Even Obama is deeply in bed with Wall Street — Goldman Sachs one his top private campaign contributor, his economic transition team was headed by a Citigroup executive, and an executive of JP Morgan Chase is his new chief of staff. How likely is someone to go after criminal activity at Chase when they own $7.7 million in Chase stock?

In his final paragraph, Taibbi sums up the issue that to me is of paramount importance. When the system is blatantly tilted in favor of the rich and powerful then “this whole American Dream thing recedes even further from reality”. When success is defined more by cronyism instead of good old ideas and hard work, then everyone suffers.

Unfortunately, I don’t expect the corporate-owned, profit-driven mainstream media — Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, or even Keith Olbermann — to give much attention to this story.

UPDATE: Cenk Uygur has a summary of the whole mess, including an interview with Matt Taibbi:

Dick Cheney presenting Donald Rumsfeld with the “Defender of the Constitution” award. Seriously.

And if that isn’t ironic enough, both Cheney and Rumsfeld were booed by conservatives during the presentation.

I’m so confused.

Here’s an interesting twist to the story about HBGary Federal, the computer security firm whose computers were hacked into recently. The larger story involves WikiLeaks, Paypal, Amazon, Bank of America and others — you can read more about it here.

The twist is that the techniques that were used to hack into HBGary Federal were run-of-the-mill hacking techniques using well-known exploits and techniques. This is ironic, because HBGary Federal is a computer security firm, and one of the most well known in the business. They work with the NSA and Interpol. They offer products and services to stop exactly the kind of attacks to which their own site was vulnerable.

Initial entrance to their site was through an SQL injection attack, something that was done to this blog site a while ago and which I’ve subsequently protected against. But HBGary’s website was vulnerable to this kind of attack. They also didn’t secure their passwords properly, so their passwords were insecure. Their top corporate officers used passwords that were too short and easy to crack. And the same passwords that were used on their insecure website were also used on their other computers, so once the hackers broke into their web server, they could access any machine they wanted. The hackers also took advantage of a server operating system security flaw that allowed them to gain superuser privileges — even though that flaw was well known and had been fixed last year, but HBGary Federal had not bothered to install the patch yet.

It is awfully embarrassing when one of the top computer security firms has their systems broken into, but even worse when it is revealed that it didn’t even take that much work or sophistication to break into them. Techniques available to any kid with an internet connection worked just fine. HBGary knew all about this kind of problem, but didn’t protect themselves.

The moral of this story has good news and bad news. The good news is that it would not have been that hard for HBGary Federal to have protected themselves from this attack if they had followed their own advice. This gives hope to the rest of us who want to make our systems more secure. The bad news is that they didn’t follow their own advice.

A report released yesterday by a government watchdog group says that politicians in New York are more likely to leave office because of ethical or criminal misconduct than by losing an election. In fact, in the last six years, the number of government officials who left office due to scandal tripled over the previous six years.

The most common reasons for politicians in NY leaving office are retirement or taking a job in the private sector, but even so, as the research manager for the report put it “One would think in a democracy, electoral defeat would be the major reason for a change in representation in the legislature.”

In response, the NY legislature is considering ethics legislation. Doh!

© John Sherffius

Just a few days after the Iran government praised the protesters in Egypt, they got their own protests, which they promptly tried to suppress.