Wikileaks Wasn't The Only Operation HBGary Federal, Palantir And Berico Planned To Defraud

by Mike Masnick, Techdirt
Feb. 11, 2011

By now the exposed plan of HBGary Federal, Palantir and Berico to attack Wikileaks and its supporters through fraud and deception, in order to help Bank of America, has been discussed widely. However, the leaked HBGary Federal emails suggest that this sort of plan involving these three companies had been used elsewhere. Apparently the US Chamber of Commerce had approached the same three firms to plan a remarkably similar attack on groups that oppose the US Chamber of Commerce.

That leaked plan (embedded below) includes a similar plan to create fake documents and give them to these groups to publish, with the intent of "exposing" them later, to raise questions about their credibility.

That giant US companies and lobbyist organizations are interested in underhanded, dirty tricks is no surprise (though, there's no evidence that either BofA or the CoC agreed to these proposals). However, as Glenn Greenwald (a key target in the original proposal for BofA) explains, what's really troubling is the chummy relationship between these organizations and the US government. The US government is supposed to protect people from frauds perpetrated by big companies. But the evidence here suggests that the federal government was pretty closely connected to all of this.

The reason HBGary Federal, Palantir and Berico were even talking to BofA in the first place was because BofA contacted the Justice Department to ask what to do about Wikileaks, and the Justice Department turned them on to the law firm of Huntoon and Williams, who was instrumental in arranging both of these proposals.

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