In this  Herald Instant Classic © interview, we talk with Andrew Auernheimer (aka weev) about his white supremacist politics, his work for the Daily Stormer website, the Kek/Trump political agenda, and his involvement in the pepe the frog meme-storming of Hilary Clinton’s campaign.

Pepe and Hillary have words

For readers that have not followed the recent dust-up between the Clinton campaign and the alt-right some background may be in order. Hillary Clinton recently gave a speech about the alt-right, in which she remarked that half of Trump’s supporters belonged in “basket of deplorables.” Shortly thereafter, the Clinton campaign posted an article on its website, in which it made reference to Pepe the frog, insisting that the green frog was not innocent, but antisemitic, and her campaign called out the Trump campaign for using the Pepe meme. This was echoed by Rachel Maddow, but a number of media outlets subsequently mocked the Clinton campaign for this claim, including the New York Post, which ridiculed her on its website, saying “In 2016, a presidential candidate declared war on a cartoon frog.” However, as devoted Herald readers know, in the Hall of Mirrors ™, things are not always as they seem.

In this story, weev gives Uri the inside scoop on all the pepemancy and explains how pepe was converted from a harmless meme into a plague of frogs for the Clinton campaign. According to weev, the operation was largely driven by the crew at the Daily Stormer, and the goal was to troll the Clinton campaign into saying something ridiculous.

We took thousands of kids, trained them in basic graphics, got them bullying journalists with custom Pepes. There was this one girl that would constantly get Pepes raping her dismembered corpse every day. Basically we explicitly targeted journalists and Hillary campaign staffers relentlessly. We drove these people insane, a plague of frogs was upon them for a year, and suddenly they are screaming in public about a cartoon frog, and looking like fucking morons.

In this interview, weev takes us into that op, and expands a bit on the pro-Kek, pro-Trump, alt-right politics driving the operation. As we will see, while Pepe himself may be harmless, the political agenda behind his weaponization is less so.

Urizenus: Hello weev, the last I heard, you were on the lam in former Yugoslavia or maybe Beruit or possibly the Ukraine. Where are you these days if I may ask?

weev:  Kharkov

Urizenus:  What is Kharkov?

weev:  It is the capital of the Kharkov oblast, in east Ukraine

Urizenus:  Ah, do you like it there?

weev:  Yeah.  A steak in the city's best steakhouse, as good as Ruth's Chris or Mortons, is $5

Urizenus:  So how would you describe your current projects/activities… if there is an umbrella description?

weev:  Reestablishing global white supremacy.

Urizenus:  Why did you choose that particular project?

weev:  Because blacks have supremacy in Lagos and Asians in Shanghai and whites are uniquely being deprived of their homelands in a global plot to exterminate them from the Earth.  The former president of France Sarkozy is on video stating that miscegenation is mandatory and that if people don't do it coercive state force would be used to make sure it happens. Then he imported a horde of murderous rapists.

Urizenus:  Let me step back a bit. When did it become your actual project?  How old were you?

weev:  Dunno, young. 14, 15

Urizenus:  Did your recent experience in prison reinforce these beliefs?

weev:  No I was a dedicated public white nationalist far before I went to prison. I didn't need prison to see the obvious truth that whites are uniquely deprived of their lands in a scheme to end European style liberties forever.

Urizenus:  “Deprived of their lands”... It seems like white Europeans have more land than they started with at the moment.

weev:  What are you talking about?

Urizenus:  Well, the western hemisphere comes to mind.

weev:  America has a nigger president and is controlled by Jews. So is all of Western Europe. Your assertion that whites have more is laughable. It's utterly absurd on its face. Whites used to be 25% of the world. Now we're 8% and only 2% of that is fertile white women.

Urizenus:  well, you know, having grown up in the great plains it seemed like we were doing better than the native Americans.

weev:  Native Americans are Asiatic and there are knives of French flint that predate their arrival to the north American continent as well as plenty of legends of the light skinned people those savages murdered when they arrived – moon-eyed people, cloud people, etc. Regardless, "native" Americans have a higher standard of living than they would ever have been capable of without us so they can eat a big pile of shit with the rest of the nonwhite animals, we reclaimed our continent and they better be happy with our generosity.

Urizenus:  “we reclaimed our continent.” ok, so then you admit that white people possess the entire North American continent

weev:   No. Jews do. Whites DID possess it at one point. We have been dispossessed of our lands by sociopathic criminals incapable of maintaining or creating the civilization we built and it's time for those fucking kikes to be taught a lesson and we're just about there; the pogrom is on full schedule and I cannot fucking wait to see the brains of their infants stomped out onto the pavement.  Gonna be so fun to rape their daughters and kill their sons in front of them.

Urizenus:  so... when people say you are just trolling with the racism and anti-semitism you say...what?

weev:  I am just trolling

Urizenus:  What does that mean

weev:  What is trolling?  Trolling goes to the heart of what it is to be European.  There were older words for it… flyting, senna, polemic.  Do you know what flyting and senna are?

Urizenus:  I think a lot of people *used* to think you didn't believe what you were saying.  You were just doing it to get a rise out of people.

weev:  I am doing it to get a rise out of people.  That is the whole point of flyting and senna and polemic

Urizenus:  *just* is the operative word.  Meaning you didn't believe it.  The question is, do you believe what you are saying?

weev: Do I believe that whites are being subject to genocide?

Urizenus:  Yes.

weev:  Do I believe that Jews and blacks kidnapped me from my home and tortured me? 

Urizenus:  Yes.

weev:  These aren't beliefs.  These are facts.  If you deny these things, you are a liar.

Urizenus:  “kidnapped you from your home”.  Are you talking about being arrested?

weev:  Yes.  Now, these people are going to fucking pay. Jews and niggers are going to pay.  We are going to systematically kill large volumes of them and we're going to laugh because they have it fucking coming.

Urizenus:  do you ever worry that you might have trolled yourself into being a racist?

weev:  Oh no, racist!!!  Take my livelihood, rob me, make me a slave, JUST DONT CALL ME A RACIST. Fact:  the slur, racisti, was coined by the Jew Leon Trotsky in his "History of the Russian Revolution" in a hateful rant about "Slavophiles" and "Teutonic jackasses".  That's why blacks are never punished for systematic violence against whites. The majority of interracial violence is black on white.  Not just in the past century, but in totality.  Millions of Slavic slaves taken to Africa, All systematically killed over centuries.  No living white descendants.  2 million from south Europe alone.  Anyways…point being…"racist" is an anti-white slur.

Urizenus:  Now that I have some clarity on your current political views I'd like to pivot to a discussion of the alt-right movement and your involvement with it, if any.

weev:  Sure

Urizenus:  Would you identify in any way with the movement?

weev:  Sure. I mean, the alt-right is anything to the right of or more authoritarian than Breitbart. I am certainly somewhat to the left of paleoconservatism, I am quite centrist but I am a believer in racial nationalism, which generally makes me on the alt-right spectrum but I am a white supremacist.

Urizenus:  So which alt-right blog do you identify with most?  Daily Stormer?

weev:  Daily Stormer, yes, I am a regular contributor there and I help them a lot on the logistical end.  It is by far the most impactful site.  It has more traffic than all the others combined.  

Urizenus:  Help them how?

weev:  I scale the website, keep it running, etc., anything technical/logistical I do. It serves 3 million unique people.

Urizenus:  do they pay you?

weev:  I do all my work for the movement pro bono.  Generally the readers compensate me significantly. I am not sure what spectrum of my donations come from Stormer as it is all Bitcoin and has no notes attached.

Urizenus:  Can I ask how much you get in donations in a typical month?

weev:  A few hundred dollars. Enough to live.

Urizenus:  What is your take on the rise of Pepe?

weev:  It was a glorious effort. I mean we did classes…all sorts of stuff.

Urizenus:  Did classes?  What does that mean?

weev: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARYWTq_x9N4

Pepemancy 1 (Adolf Hitler School of Meme Magic)

We took thousands of kids, trained them in basic graphics, got them bullying journalists with custom Pepes.  There was this one girl that would constantly get Pepes raping her dismembered corpse every day.  Basically we explicitly targeted journalists and Hillary campaign staffers relentlessly.  We drove these people insane, a plague of frogs was upon them for a year, and suddenly they are screaming in public about a cartoon frog, and looking like fucking morons.

Urizenus:  Who is 'we'?

weev:  Daily Stormer was doing the classes, the how-tos.  Zeiger and Anglin at Daily Stormer were primarily responsible for just relentlessly bullying journalists and professional political insiders with Pepe. Nonstop Pepe.  The plague of frogs has definitely hit peak, we gotta work on developing the locusts next.

Urizenus:  So there was actually a discussion of the form:  "I know what.  Let's bombard everyone with dark Pepe memes"?

weev:  There didn't even need to be a discussion. It's obvious that journalists need to be bullied and it's also obvious that you need a consistent signature. Back when we used to break people on teleconferences we'd always like, get shittons of stuff delivered to their house and it would always have a two-liter of Coke.  Just fucking days of endless deliveries night and day, always a two liter Coke.  They'd disconnect their doorbells.  Then we'd just have someone outsider of their house, two-liter of coke in hand.  They were afraid of a two-liter bottle of coke by the time we were done.

Urizenus: So it was just random that pepe was chosen? It could have been one of the My Little Ponies?

weev:  No it was not RANDOM that pepe was chosen. It was MEME MAGIC. God you people are dumb.  Whoever heard of a plague of my little ponies?

Urizenus:  The ponies frighten me to the core.

weev:  Yes well, there is no magic in MLP.

Urizenus:  But ok, it could have been Jiminy Cricket

weev:  no

NO

Urizenus:  …cuz, plague of locusts…

weev:  NO THE FROGS CAME FIRST

Also…praise Kek.  We worship Kek.  That is a serious thing

Urizenus:  There has been much liberal blog writing about the origins of Kek.  What do you think of it?

weev:  I think that I can feel the warm glow of the black sun wash over me.  We're going to bring darkness to the earth.

Urizenus:  I don't know what that means.

weev:  you've never heard of the black sun? seriously?

Urizenus:  I've seen the pictures, but I don't know what to expect when it happens.  What will my day be like when the black sun covers my world?

weev:  I don't know.

Urizenus:  So why do we want that to happen?

weev:  You might not ever see it. You might not notice.  I, however, feel the glow.

Urizenus:  What does it feel like?

weev:  Victory.

Urizenus:  Does it smell like napalm?

weev:  Not yet.

Urizenus:  Are you involved in the presidential campaign?

weev:  Everyone is involved in the presidential campaign.  This campaign is a work of art. It encompasses our whole civilization. None will be spared from Kek's glory.

Urizenus:  What is the nature of your involvement?

weev:  Well, I mostly promote esoteric Kekism and exoteric white supremacism.

Urizenus:  What does esoteric Kekism have to do with Donald vs. Hillary?

weev:  Everything and nothing.

Urizenus:  That is vague.

weev:  Kek is a god ascendant.  Ancient gods are returning to the earth. Kek, Wotan, … they're here among us again.

Urizenus:  I'll get back to Kek. Let's focus on the election for a minute.  Are you supporting Trump now?

weev:  I am supporting Kek. I am supporting Wotan. I am supporting rebirth of the West

Urizenus:  Well, who does Kek want to be president?

weev:  TRUMP

Read the tweet: https://twitter.com/rabite/status/478967913270226945

June, 2014.  See how Kek delivers us prophecy? 365 days before Trump announced.  We had a whole year head start to make memes.

Urizenus:  but in supporting Trump, how much of that is just because you want to watch everything burn?

weev:  No.  We want the west great again.  America included.

Urizenus:  How is Trump going to accomplish this?

weev:  Have you ever seen rodelinda? https://www.youtube.com/embed/Akusa8kG0YQ

Andreas Scholl - Handel - Rodelinda - Aria - Dove sei

This is what we fight for.

Urizenus:  You fight for Rodelinda?

weev:  What about the Women of Eger

You ever seen that?  They held the south wall as the Islamic horde tried to destroy them.  Rocks, hands, kitchen knives… Can you imagine how fucking brave our forefathers and mothers were?  How much they sacrificed for our people to have lands and culture of our own? The Jews have tried to fuck with that.  And they are going to pay.  They are going to dearly pay.  But the white race will not die.  It will rise to a glory and height like never before.

Urizenus:  And you think Trump is going to accomplish this???

weev:  nah.  Not yet.  But he's a step in the right direction

Urizenus:  So... trump is like baby steps for you.

weev:  It's not exactly a baby step in the overton window.  It's basically thrown the thing open.  And if he loses, oh man, quick path to victory--a harder one, but a quicker one.  Revolts everywhere… racial holy war.

Urizenus:  Are you on the hunt for a new Hitler?  or do you think one will arise organically?

weev:  Nobody needs to hunt.  Listen, there are a thousand Hitlers.  "Let's kill Hitler!" -- what a fucking dumb kike fantasy.

Urizenus:  Do you have any sense of the breadth of your movement?  Is it limited to /pol/ or is it broader, in your view?

weev:  Stormer has 3 million unique monthly viewers.  That's like, a major metro daily.  I am barely on pol, only 4pol these days, and only during happenings.

Urizenus:  So let's talk about Kek.  Egyptian deity.  Which means He’s an African deity.

weev:  Listen, He's darkness.  He's the god of darkness.  Darkness is all encompassing and timeless.  We're using the Egyptian deity because Egyptian and Levantine polytheism terrifies the shit out of Jews. 

Urizenus:  Have you read Black Athena by Martin Bernal? All of Western Culture was stolen from Africa by the Greeks. Stolen. Black. Culture.

weev:  If you think niggers are so great, move to Africa.  You can easily live among niggers.

Urizenus:  I'm talking about Greek architecture, Greek philosophy, Greek gods…all taken from Africa.

weev:  This is hilariously untrue.

Urizenus:  No.  Fact.  Where would the Pythagoreans be without the Egyptians?

weev:  Lol, okay go live among niggers if you think they are so intelligent.  Don't know why you're around us whites.

Urizenus:  I don't have to.  When I read Plato I am reading work with its origins in Africa.

weev:  I myself never want to live around niggers.

Urizenus:  St. Augustine.  Straight up black.

weev:  lollllll  God you have been brainwashed.  It's pretty sad to see.

It's ok…I myself am going to live in white society.  I like white people.

Urizenus:  No... *you* have been brainwashed and we know how it happened.

weev: How did it happen, Peter.

Urizenus:  They call me Uri.

weev:  Please explain to me how it happened.

Urizenus:  19th century German historians tried to erase the black source of western culture.

weev:  lollll

Urizenus:  Even Plato knew about the black origin of his philosophy.  Remarked on it.

weev:  I don't care. I want to live among whites. I want white people to have independent nations of their own. I don't mind blacks having that.

Urizenus:  I'm not saying you should care.  I'm just saying your culture is black.

weev:  lol sure.

Urizenus:  I guess white culture would be druid culture or something. But it wouldn't be grounded in Greek and Roman thought and art.

weev:  Blacks will never make something like this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WX83BSR0mug

Philippe Jaroussky - Vedro con mio diletto - Vivaldi

They have their own culture and that's great.  It's for them.

Urizenus:  No... you are soaking in black culture when you read Keats and Yeats and Plato.

weev:  looool

Urizenus:  Kek is out of deepest Africa.  Well up the Nile.  He's a Nubian god

weev:  He's darkness.  Darkness is eternal.

Urizenus:  It’s all a cosmic joke.  You are a vehicle for the rebirth of Africa

weev:  Great.  I do intend to help Africa.  Africa definitely needs rebirth as well.  Ever since whites abandoned its management it has been shit.

Urizenus:  Yeah, I hear they really miss King Leopold of Belgium.

weev: Oh yeah, the Congo STILL has people that eat each other in it but it's totally Leopold's fault it all went to shit.

Urizenus:  I have a horrifying thought for you. Have you noticed the similarity between "kek" and "cuck"?

weev:  Lol

Urizenus:  What if Kek is a meta-troll looking to turn you all into cucks?

weev:  Man you are really stretching here.

Urizenus:  No, I think the reasoning is solid.

weev:  omg, we are so cucks reclaiming our civilizations and knocking out the political establishments that took them from us.

Urizenus:  Or are you?  Dude, it could be a path to cuckdom.  Kek works in mysterious ways, as you are forced to admit.  The innocent green frog, a mole in the alt-right movement, delivering an army of white cucks to mother Africa

weev:  I would be very happy if all the cucks were sent to Africa.  They would be too; living amongst the niggers they love so much.  It would be win-win.

Urizenus:  The point is that you would be one of them.

weev:  I'm definitely pretty far away from Africa. And my passport has become significantly less useful because some diffusions are on it now.  So I am definitely staying here in a lily-white land of gorgeous Slavic women.  Great ballet.  You wouldn't believe how good the ballet is here.

Why does everyone hate my video?

Strategic blunder is probably the best description of the last week's decision to publish Jessica Tozer's 30 minute interview with General Keith Alexander on YouTube. What were they thinking?

After the strangely-edited video was placed in the free-fire zone of open public YouTube ratings, the General has been subjected to continuous withering enemy fire from viewers. Apparently  Keith "collect-it-all" Alexander's vision of NSA unconstitutional blanket surveillance is not popular. As of this writing, the video has 247 "likes" and 14,889 dislikes. 

Doesn't Alexander have someone in PR to advise against this sort of doomed propaganda social media outreach? With a 98% downvote rating, the NSA will need more than a oddly-staged video with narco-ambient background music to persuade the public.

Or is this part of an effort to throw Alexander under the bus? Cowboy Keith seems to have some enemies in the security establishment based on a recent less-than-complimentary piece in Foreign Policy. A convenient scapegoat might be useful to distract the public from deeper systemic issues.

Alexander poses with his co-star: a yellow extension cord

Even after putting aside the motivation for the video, I was left with questions. It would be interesting to know why someone couldn't find a better chair for the General Alexander to perch on for this video. I understand Alexander enjoys the Star Trek motif at Fort Belvoir's "Information Dominance Center", but his chair in this video is less than impressive.

I'd also like to know why yellow extension cord on the floor is effectively a co-star in the video. The yellow power cord appears frequently as the camera pans back and the editors try to vary the scene without ever showing Ms. Tozer speaking.

YouTube voting irregularities?

Despite an overwhelmingly negative reaction from YouTube viewers, a certain amount of paranoia has been evident in the comments, along with some odd fluctuations in the voting. If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear - unless you are critical of the current regime.

time to rally the Booz Allen contractors for more upvotes?

While it was recently announced that Gen. Alexander is planning to retire from the NSA next year, and despite the undeniable allure of the private security contractor revolving door, we can hope that the General can find time to join forces with Rebecca Black to sing a "Friday" duet.

Just think of the YouTube ratings they could achieve.

I realized something was terribly wrong when The Herald's electronic press fell *out of sync* with the soothing retro-euro-disco thump of Daft Punk's Random Access Memories playing in the editorial offices.

Normally the technical staff are careful to avoid harshing the mellow of the writers, but now the clatter of the press was fighting a winning battle against the sound of a Moog module synced to the click track in "Giorgio by Moroder". I didn't even want to think about what might happen by the time "Get Lucky" rolled around.

A familiar voice could be heard yelling "THIS SHIT WILL NOT STAND!" from the machine room as a mob of enraged engineers chanted

WTF? NSA?
WTF!! NSA!!
GIMPED ELLIPTIC CURVE CYPTO?
NO FUCKING WAY!!!

The chaotic cacophony of enraged engineers completely overwhelmed Daft Punk when the door opened and the mob spilled into the offices brandishing cross-compilers, git repos, malformed packets, Macbook Pros, and carpal tunnel wrist braces - the tools of their trade.

I put down the copy of Vanity Fair I had been reading. A tall black-clad figure marched across the newsroom and slammed an iPad on my desk, nearly upsetting my glass of coconut water. "Did you see this shit, Pix?"

Smiling sweetly, I asked, "Is there something wrong, Mark?", then glanced at the iPad and frowned. Mark McCahill - one the the Herald's technical staff - had been reading The Guardian again.

I was eventually able to shoo the other engineers back to work with the promise that I would talk to McCahill and see if there might be a coherent story for Herald readers - but I had my doubts.

We'd been through this scene before. Over the summer, as whistleblower Edward Snowden's leaks corroded what little remaining credibility the Obama regime might have, the engineers grew increasingly angry. Strangely enough, most engineers want to build systems that benefit society, believe in the rule of law, and even take constitutional privacy protections seriously. Who knew?

The best approach calm the situation seemed to be an interview, so I invited the ponytailed binary boy to have a seat.

Pixeleen Mistral: So what is it this time?
Mark McCahill: The NSA and GCHQ have been intentionally gimping the crypto standards for the Internet, strong arming IT vendors into releasing products with security-defeating backdoors, and running man-in-the middle attacks. This sort of thing destroys the foundations of trust and commerce on the Internet. It is so bad that Bruce Schneier - one of the gods of cryptography - sent out the bat signal last week. Bruce is calling for the November IETF internet standards meeting to hold an emergency session to figure out how to fix what the NSA has broken. It's time to take the Internet back.

Pixeleen Mistral: Well everybody knows that the NSA spies.
Mark McCahill: Sure, but we now know unethical engineers and out of control government agencies have been doing what we had suspected - intentionally weakening the security systems the internet uses. And they did this so they can spy on everyone, everywhere via the sort of dragnet surveillance that requires building enormous data centers at great expense. The only people that benefit from this are power freaks in the government, their contractors, and corrupt politicians that approve NSA overreach and are rewarded with campaign contributions from the contractors. This is the sort of positive feedback loop of corruption that Lawrence Lessig has been warning about for years.

Pixeleen Mistral: Why do you think they are doing that?
Mark McCahill: Arrogance combined with stupidity. The NSA assumed that nobody would find the backdoors they introduced - a very dangerous assumption given how poorly they protect their secrets. I'd like to see the risk analysis the NSA did when they started down this path - if they even bothered. Based on what I have read about NSA leader 'Cowboy' Keith Alexander, cost/benefit analysis is just not how he rolls. I can't even begin to guess what this will cost the USA's I.T. industry in lost sales. So chalk it up to delusional leadership. Take a look at Tom Englehardt's "And Then There Was One" piece - it explains a lot about the political dementia of the USA.

Pixeleen Mistral: Ok I can see the arrogance part, but where is the stupidity?
Mark McCahill: The NSA doesn't even know exactly which documents Snowden took, which is obvious because each time the NSA denies something, the denial is shown to be a lie by the next leak. Seems like the NSA have weak internal security, doesn't it? Aren't they supposed to be good at this sort of thing?

The head of the NSA - General Keith Alexander - says he is going to use automation to get rid of 90% of the 1000 system administrators the NSA has to prevent another Edward Snowden-style leak. If they can really automate systems that much, why haven't they done so already? Was cowboy Keith worried about upsetting the gravy train for NSA contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton? Sounds to me like the NSA has way too much money to throw around. This looks like a bad case of outsourcing and consultants run wild.

Pixeleen Mistral: How so?
Mark McCahill: A classic failure mode for I.T. projects occurs when you bring in "visionary" consultants who then expand the scope of the project to build a bigger empire and run up more billable hours.

Foreign Policy has a great story about how Alexander rose to power and built his empire. Foreign Policy says Alexander hired a Hollywood set designer to make his Fort Belvoir "Information Dominance Center" look like the bridge of the starship Enterprise from Star Trek to impress members of congress when they came through on tours. Sound familiar?

Pixeleen Mistral: Sounds like those Justice League Unlimited guys who were spying their way through Second Life a few years ago. I've got a picture here somewhere...

Would Keith Alexander would approve of the JLU command center? yes.

Mark McCahill: They wanted to connect the dots too, didn't they? That Foreign Policy article has a great passage that raises questions about how effective Alexander's dragnet surveillance fetish really is in 'fighting terrorism':

When he ran INSCOM and was horning in on the NSA's turf, Alexander was fond of building charts that showed how a suspected terrorist was connected to a much broader network of people via his communications or the contacts in his phone or email account.

"He had all these diagrams showing how this guy was connected to that guy and to that guy," says a former NSA official who heard Alexander give briefings on the floor of the Information Dominance Center. "Some of my colleagues and I were skeptical. Later, we had a chance to review the information. It turns out that all [that] those guys were connected to were pizza shops."

…

A retired military officer who worked with Alexander also describes a "massive network chart" that was purportedly about al Qaeda and its connections in Afghanistan. Upon closer examination, the retired officer says, "We found there was no data behind the links. No verifiable sources. We later found out that a quarter of the guys named on the chart had already been killed in Afghanistan."

Pixeleen Mistral: i c
Mark McCahill: Are Keith Alexander and his boss James Clapper competent at anything other than empire building? You really should read that Foreign Policy profile of Alexander. Check out the money quotes about Alexander and Heath - his semi-tame techie sidekick:

"Heath was at Alexander's side for the expansion of Internet surveillance under the PRISM program. Colleagues say it fell largely to him to design technologies that tried to make sense of all the new information the NSA was gobbling up. But Heath had developed a reputation for building expensive systems that never really work as promised and then leaving them half-baked in order to follow Alexander on to some new mission.

"He moved fairly fast and loose with money and spent a lot of it," the retired officer says. "He doubled the size of the Information Dominance Center and then built another facility right next door to it. They didn't need it. It's just what Heath and Alexander wanted to do." The Information Operations Center, as it was called, was underused and spent too much money, says the retired officer. "It's a center in search of a customer."

...

"There's two ways of looking at these guys," the retired military officer says. "Two visionaries who took risks and pushed the intelligence community forward. Or as two guys who blew a monumental amount of money."

Pixeleen Mistral: So what is next?
Mark McCahill: Well, the NSA will have a hard time offering any advice to standards committees - who would trust them now? A lot of effort will go into re-doing the security and privacy underpinnings of the Internet, now that we know the spy agencies are completely out of control. 

In terms of technical strategy, since the NSA is treating the public as an adversary, look for serious work on privacy and anonymity-preserving standards designed for anyone to use. I'd love to see robust IPSec and TOR built into everyone's home WIFI router.

Pixeleen Mistral: what do you say to readers who are skeptical that the NSA and spy communities are a problem?
Mark McCahill: The best response is something Glenn Greenwald said a while ago. Google 'the Church committee, FBI, and Martin Luther King" and tell me what you find. 

Pixeleen Mistral: what have I missed? Is there anything else you want to share with the Herald readers?
Mark McCahill: It's been real Pix, and now I see what Urizenus meant about being 'self-identical'.

Pixeleen Mistral: I know what you mean - now can you get back to the machine room and get that press back in sync? Get Lucky is going to start playing any minute, and I have stories to write.
 

In a recent article here in the Herald, Urizenus Sklar argued that the US Attorney in the Barrett Brown case was attempting to smear Barrett by listing a whole number of allegedly bad attributes of Barrett and then publishing them in a public court document.  

I think Uri missed the bigger picture here. Not that Uri is wrong.  But Uri missed the fact that larded into the US Attorney's comments is a tacit indictment of the entire US criminal justice system.  

The US Attorney's screed against Barrett looked like this:

Perhaps without realizing the prejudicial effects on brown the media repeatedly has publicized potentially inadmissible and prejudicial information such as Brown’s … anarchist ideology… troubled childhood and alternative schooling, declaration that he is an atheist, use and abuse of ecstasy, acid, heroin, and marijuana, lack of steady employment, claimed diagnoses of ADHD and depression, associates descriptions of Brown as a junkie, name fag, moral fag, court jester…

Now, the question is this:  Why on God's Green Earth should it be impossible, or even difficult, for someone who is an atheist, or someone who is depressed, or someone who has ADHD or someone who lacks steady employment, or someone who has used drugs to get a fair trial in this country?

You see the deep point here is that implicit in the US Attorney's statement is the admission that for people who are even just a tiny bit outside of the mainstream, the justice system can not be counted on to be fair to them.  Any perceived flaw which sets you outside of a Norman Rockwell ideal is enough to ensure that the justice system, if you find your way into it, will grind you to pieces.  Tiny pieces.

If you are depressed, you cannot count on the justice system to be fair to you.

If you use marijuana, you cannot count on the justice system to be fair to you.

If you had alternative schooling or raised by alternative parenting, you cannot count on the justice system to be fair to you.

If you are a student of, or influenced by, anarchist writings, you cannot count on the justice system to be fair to you.

If you were once a heroine addict, now on Suboxone, you cannot count on the justice system to be fair to you.

If you had a troubled childhood, you cannot count on the justice system to be fair to you.

If you lack steady employment, you cannot count on the justice system to be fair to you.

If you are a moral fag (that is, if you are ethically motivated hacker), you cannot count on the justice system to be fair to you.

In short, if you are remotely alternative and outside of the power structure, you cannot count on the justice system to be fair to you. 

That you US Attorney, for admitting this.  Now, when do we begin to fix the problem?

Perhaps without realizing the prejudicial effects on brown the media repeatedly has publicized potentially inadmissible and prejudicial information such as Brown’s … anarchist ideology… troubled childhood and alternative schooling, declaration that he is an atheist, use and abuse of ecstasy, acid, heroin, and marijuana, lack of steady employment, claimed diagnoses of ADHD and depression, associates descriptions of Brown as a junkie, name fag, moral fag, court jester…”

And not only was the prosecutor thoughtful enough to think of all the possible bad things one might say about Barrett, but she took the trouble to write them down so we could have them. And then she put them in a court document. And published it. And then a gag order was placed on Barrett and his defense team. Just so, you know, they wouldn’t damage his reputation by responding to these claims.

prosecutor's gag order: list bad things that might be said, then muzzle the target

Of course the ultimate concern is that all that chatter out there would make it impossible to impanel an impartial jury. Because people in the Dallas region are following this case in sooo religiously (being rabid readers of The Nation and all). And if there are two thing a Texan cannot abide it’s moralfags and namefags! Gosh, I’m so happy I live in a country where politicians appoint kind, thoughtful prosecutors that have everyone’s best interests at heart. Because, you know, if you are sending someone to jail for 105 years you wouldn’t want people to think they are - SHOCK! - an atheist or something.

Yes, summer is winding down, but it isn't too late to cram in some late late summer reading.  And who better to suggest good solid reading, but the FBI.  Dell Cameron, writing in the Daily Dot, has the goods.  He gives us the 20 online publications concerning Barrett Brown that the prosecution considers "must read."  Or is that "don't read".  Hmm these lists are so confusing...

Here is how Mr. Cameron lays it down.

I attended the gag order hearing on September 4 and listened as the U.S. government spoke candidly about the journalists who've covered Barrett's case. Twenty articles were admitted into evidence from various writers and websites. Much to my surprise, the U.S. government has great taste in journalism. I've collected the online articles it selected as evidence against Barrett Brown for your reading pleasure.

You want to know who made the list, don't you?  Well to see it you just gotta click through! [link]

Spoiler though, some of the names will be familiar to Herald readers!

Over the past several years, Hacktivists like the members of Anonymous and leakers like Chelsea Manning, with the assistance of publishers like WikiLeaks, have exposed gigabytes of secrets of the American empire. The consequences have been far-reaching, and by some accounts the revelations helped fuel the Tunisian uprising and the subsequent Arab Spring.

One potential danger with any alleged hack or leak is that one wants to make sure it is legitimate. The original concept of WikiLeaks, after all, was that the vetting of alleged leaks could be crowdsourced. While WikiLeaks has since employed alternative ways of vetting documents, vetting by crowd sourcing is certainly a good idea and one that we should endorse. Leaks cannot be taken as automatically true and we cannot rely on government institutions or corporations for the truth on these matters. Leaks and the products of hacks need to be vetted by the hacktivist community. A recent hack provides an example of what is at stake and how we can crowdsource the vetting of important leaks and hacks.

Back on January 22, a hacker by the name of JAsIrX announced the release of documents from the hack of a private military contractor called Britam Defence. Critical emails among the documents suggested that the Qatari government and Britam were, with the blessing of the United States Government, discussing details of a false flag operation that would involve making a chemical weapon attack look like it was under Assad's control.

The Britam hack involved the release of gigabytes of information, but the principle smoking gun in the document dump was a Dec. 24 email apparently from Britam Defence's Business Development Director David Goulding to Founder and Dynamic Director of the firm Phillip Doughty (a former SAS officer):

Phil

We've got a new offer. It's about Syria again. Qataris propose an attractive deal and swear that the idea is approved by Washington.

We'll have to deliver a CW to Homs, a Soviet origin g-shell from Libya similar to those that Assad should have.

They want us to deploy our Ukrainian personnel that should speak Russian and make a video record.
Frankly, I don't think it's a good idea but the sums proposed are enormous. Your opinion?

Kind regards David

false flag forgery?

CW, is of course shorthand for "chemical weapon," and a g-shell is a "gas shell" for delivering chemical weapons.The document dump also included a number of contracts, and information on employees, including a folder /Iraq/People/ that contained the photocopies of passports of several Ukrainians - presumably who would be drawn on for the operation.

Many of us read of the Britam hack back in January and didn't pay much attention to the contents at the time, but given recent events and the accompanying drumbeat to war, people are revisiting the released documents, which seem remarkably prescient. If the documents from that hack are authentic, they provide evidence that the United States gave its blessing to the Qataris for a false flag chemical warfare attack, presumably as a pretext to propel us into military intervention in Syria.

News of the Britam hack was originally published in the Daily Mail's online publication The Mail Online and in Cyber War News, which is a usually reliable online publication that keeps track of hacktivist actions - in particular those by Anonymous. This was soon followed by a counternarrative in which it was claimed that Britam had in fact been hacked, but that it was a state-sponsored hack - either by an Iranian groups or by the Syrian Electronic Army - and that the incriminating emails were faked. The Israeli online publication Ynet, summarized the counter-narrative as follows.

Computer security experts called in by Britam have proved that the emails relating to Syria and Iran were fabricated, the report said.

"They are 100% false," said Simon Lalor, Britam's chief executive. "From a technical point of view, the emails are fabricated. Who wrote the content is another question."

He estimated that the company had been "used as a vehicle to create tension and embarrassment for those with a political motivation."

The hacking is being investigated by cybercrime and counterterrorism specialists at Scotland Yard, likely in collaboration with the security services. Iran's possible involvement in the cyber attack is also being probed.

Britam subsequently sued the Daily Mail, which removed the story from its website (the story is still available via web archive) and apologized saying "the emails turned out to be forged". Other publications did not remove the story (a spokesperson for Cyber War News told us the breach of Britam had been authenticated even if individual documents had not, so they do not intend to remove the story).

With the recent developments in Syria the Brtiam false flag story has regained legs, and a number of online news sources have been suggesting that the emails are credible evidence of a false flag operation. These include voltairenet.org, beforeitsnews.com, globalresearch.ca, and rumormillnews.com. Meanwhile, The Examiner, which published the story when it first came out continues to keep the story online and that story has been linked to frequently on Facebook and elsewhere in social media.So what are we to make of this? Are all these documents the product of the Britam hack (which no one disputes having happened), or are some of them manufactured? If there is "proof" that the documents are fraudulent, it would be nice to know what that proof is.

We asked some hacktivists connected with Anonymous to look into the matter and here is there basic assessment. While many of the files look legitimate, the document dump also included two emails (one on the Syrian false flag plot) that seem out of place in the context. The two emails in question are entitled "Iranian Issue" and "Syrian Issue". The real problem comes in the headers of the two emails.

Header from "Iranian Issue"
For; Thu, 16 Oct 2012 23:57:18 +0800 (SGT)
Received: (qmail 18137 invoked from network), 16 Oct 2012 15:57:27 -0000

Header from "Sirian Issue" [sic]
For; Mon, 24 Dec 2012 23:57:18 +0800 (SGT)
Received: (qmail 18137 invoked from network), 24 Dec 2012 15:57:27 -0000

is something odd in the e-mail header?

First, the process ID of the Qmail email program is the same (18137) and the possibility of two emails sent at different times having the same process ID is miniscule.

Second, the time on the emails is also identical down to the second. So it appears that the headers were the same and the hacker substituted two different messages in the body of the text. The only difference is the date. One is changed to 16 Oct and the other is set to 24 Dec. One problem with just changing the date is that the hacker forgot to change the day, so that it reads "Thu, 16 Oct 2012." Oct. 16, 2012 was a Tuesday. This is a devastating critique of the key letters that provided the evidence for a false flag operation.

None of this is to suggest that the Syrian gassing incident was not a false flag operation. Indeed The Mint Press has a very interesting article suggesting that Saudis provided the weapons to the rebels and that the attack was carried out by rebels (or perhaps the weapons were misused by the rebels).

It is also worth considering that the Britam hack might have been engineered by Britam itself and designed specifically to discredit anyone who might make a false flag charge. On the one hand, whoever made the forgery appears to have had access to an email that arrived on the Britam servers. Whoever made the forgeries was also clever enough to integrate some information on the emails with those of the legitimate material in the files - for example introducing an IP address from Singapore. But at the same time the forger made a very detectable error of getting the day of week wrong. So one might think that it could be an attempt to create an easily discredited false flag claim, thus inoculating Britam against future charges of that nature.

False flag operations are not new or rare. There is a long history of them, dating to the Roman Emperor Nero who used the pretext of the burning of Rome to carry out his persecution of Christians, and of course the burning of the Reichstag, which Adolf Hitler used as a pretext to purge the Communists from the German government.

False flag operations are also carried out by the United States - for example operation Ajax, which was an operation that removed Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh from power in Iran in 1953. According to declassified CIA records (detailed by James Risen of the New York Times), among the many other actions in that operation, Iranians working for the CIA posed as communists and harassed Iran's religious leaders, and in one case bombed the home of a leading cleric. The operation successfully turned the religious leadership against the Mossadegh government.

Today false flag operations are so salient in our culture that even video games like Modern Warfare include false flag elements. The problem with trying to expose a false flag operation today is that the Internet is clogged with people claiming that any tragedy or attack is some sort of false flag operation - a notable example being 9-11 truthers. Truthers and other conspiracy theorists thus end up being "useful idiots" for the power structure, as they undermine the credibility of actual conspiracies and false flag operations when they do arise.

And this is the problem. People claiming the possibility of a false flag operation in Syria needs to be particularly cautious to make sure that their evidence is in order. The credibility of the hacktivist movement demands that we get the facts right. We expect governments to lie when expedient. We expect corporations to lie when expedient. Hacktivists cannot afford to be casual with the truth. Getting at the truth is their fundamental cause. It cannot take a back seat to any other cause. Truth first.

It seems like just today that I published a long article explaining the strange case of Barrett Brown and how a beloved Second Life alumnus was looking at 105 years in prison for sharing a link to an online document dump. Come to think of it, it *was* today! And this afternoon, I received the news that a gag order has been issued for Barrett Brown and his defense team. A gag order? Let’s reflect on that.

The prosecution, to make the case for a gag order, offered up a number of articles that had been published in places like the New York Times, The Nation, The Huffington Post, etc – seven by that mild mannered tweed wearing lovable professor Ludlow! The view of the prosecution was that given all the people in Texas that read The Nation and the annual NYT articles on Barrett Brown it just would not be possible to find a neutral jury pool. Because you know, all people in Texas do is read The Nation.

Let’s put this in even more perspective. This is the judicial system that convinced itself that there was not too much publicity for OJ, or for Jodi Arias, or for really any trial that shows up on Nancy Grace. But OMG someone publishes a story in The Nation and the scales of justice are out of balance. You just can’t find a neutral jury anymore.

Allow me to opine:  Barrett Brown was exercising his constitutional right to *defend* himself against charges for which he has not been convicted. And, by the way, these are charges which he believes, as do I, that are not just false, but absurdly false. Ditto for the lawyers. If they can’t defend their client in public against false charges then the public will be ignorant of the specifics of the trial and will not be able to judge whether justice is being served or whether it is being miscarried. Of course that is probably the point – if justice was being served there would be no point in a gag order; there would be no reason to fear open discussion of the specifics of the case.

And so, as the Herald yacht powers its way towards Long Island New York, I stare at the now dormant Barrett Brown hotline wondering: Is this how the American system of justice finally collapses into a system for oppression and tyranny? Not with a bang or even a whimper, but just a dial tone?

Last week I was on the Herald Yacht, steaming towards the Herald retirement villa in the Turks and Caicos islands, when the emergency phone rang in the ready room. Helmut, my trusty cabin boy summoned me. Barrett Brown was calling.

Mr. Brown, for those of you who don’t know, is currently in federal custody looking at charges that could put him away for 105 years for linking to the cache from a hack of the private intelligence firm Strategic Forecasting. He was also an alumnus of the notorious Second Life griefer group The Patriotic Nigras and a second group called illuminati/i/illuminati. “Uri baby,” he implored, “you have to come out of retirement, the fate of the free world hangs in the balance!”

For those of you who don’t know it, the story of Barrett Brown is an interesting one. After his years as a Second Life griefer, Barrett graduated to being a rather gifted writer, penning many essays for Vanity Fair, The Skeptical Inquirer, True/Slant, The Guardian, and the Huffington Post. True to his roots, he mercilessly trolled conservative pundits like Thomas Friedman, Michelle Malkin, Charles Krauthammer, and Sara Palin biographer Robert Stacy McCain.

In 2010 Brown was working on a book on right wing political pundits, when some of the actions of Anonymous caught his attention and he penned a defense in support of one of their anti-censorship operations in Australia. This brought him to the attention of Gregg Housh (the Anon who bought a Guy Fawkes mask and, with a crack team of fellow Anons, made the first video for Operation Chanology) and Housh subsequently brought Brown into the orbit of Anonymous. Brown eventually became a frequent spokesperson for Anonymous during the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings. (Brown’s role did not involving computer hacking – he couldn’t hack his way out of a box of tissues.) His interview with Michael Issikoff in those heady days remains legendary. 

In February, 2011, against the background of the Anonymous actions in the Arab Spring, Aaron Barr, the CEO of a private information security company called HBGary boasted that he had identified leadership of Anonymous. This boast provoked an epic hack of HBGary by a hacktivist group called Intenet Feds (subsequently called LulzSec). That hack, which was splashy enough to garner the attention of The Colbert Report, resulted in every form of pwnage known to mankind, including the defacing and destruction of the servers and websites of HBGary. Along the way 70,000 e-mails were downloaded and posted online. One terabyte of data from HBGary’s backup servers were wiped, and as a final insult to injury the contents of its CEO Aaron Barr’s iPad were remotely wiped.

The HBGary hack was motivated by the desire to humiliate HBGary, but it had the side effect of dropping a gold mine into the lap of Mr. Brown. One of the first things discovered was a power point presentation that developed a strategy for undermining the credibility of the journalist Glenn Greenwald and thereby neutralize his defense of WikiLeaks. But there was more. There was a conspiracy of government agencies, lobbying and cybersecurity firms to carry out a disinformation campaign against critics of the Chamber of Commerce. There were also plans for data mining and disinformation campaigns targeting social organizations and advocacy groups.

The plot was already thick, but then it thickened more. By June, the FBI had the goods on the leader of LulzSec, one Hector Xavier Monsegur, who was known to his associates in LulzSec as Sabu. The FBI arrested Sabu on June 7, 2011 and (according to court documents) turned him into an informant the following day. Six months later (Dec. 24, 2011) under the control of the FBI and possibly the FBI’s direction, Sabu appears to have directed some of his LulzSec crew (now called AntiSec) to hack the website of a private security company known as Strategic Forecasting, yielding a trove of approximately five million emails. The FBI may have controlled Sabu and hence the Stratfor hack, but they lost control of the five million emails in the Stratfor database, which quickly made their way onto the Internet and then to WikiLeaks.

When the contents of the Stratfor leak became available, Barrett Brown (who again played no role in the hacking and had no relation to LulzSec or Sabu) determined that his ProjectPM should have a look at it. To direct the project participants to the Stratfor data dump, he pasted a URL into a chat channel. This ultimately would be the principle “crime” for which he is facing 105 years in jail.

It is worth noting that the contents of the Stratfor hack were even more outrageous than those of the HBGary hack. This time the emails ranged from proposals for renditions to surveillance on the Yes Men on behalf of Dow Chemical. One remarkable exchange revealed that the Coca-Cola company was asking Stratfor for intelligence on dealing with PETA, and the Stratfor Vice President for Intelligence remarked in a leaked email that “The FBI has a classified investigation on PETA operatives. I'll see what I can uncover.” Suggesting, of course, that not only did Stratfor have access to the classified material, but that it would be provided to Coca-Cola. The FBI had been turned into a private dick for corporate America.

The FBI, arguably itself responsible for the information being released, needed to get the toothpaste back into the tube, decided that one way to staunch the distribution of the Stratfor data would be to stomp on Brown and his Project PM. A warrant was issued for Brown’s laptop, presumably on the assumption that incriminating information would be found there.

When the FBI went to serve the warrant on Brown he was not home but at his mother’s house, and he sensibly decided to stay there. The FBI returned with a warrant to search his mother’s house, retrieved his laptop, and found exactly nothing incriminating. Deciding they needed a way to turn up the heat on Brown, they initiated charges against his mother for obstruction of justice.

At the time Brown was experiencing the difficult side effects of the medication he was taking to ameliorate the effects of his heroin addiction while also dealing with the harassment of his mother by the FBI, and he snapped, uploading a video to YouTube that vaguely threatened the FBI agent that was harassing his mother.

“I know what’s legal, I know what’s been done to me… And if it’s legal when it’s done to me, it’s going to be legal when it’s done to FBI Agent Robert Smith—who is a criminal.”
“That’s why [FBI special agent] Robert Smith’s life is over. And when I say his life is over, I’m not saying I’m going to kill him, but I am going to ruin his life and look into his fucking kids… How do you like them apples?”

Because threatening an agent would only put Barrett away for a few years, the charges that could lock him up permanently had to be found elsewhere. In this instance, the DoJ took advantage of the fact that the Stratfor data had a number of unencrypted credit card numbers and validation codes. This would be the pretext for charging Brown with Traffic in Stolen Authentication Features, Access Device Fraud, Aggravated Identity Theft. Add to this an Obstruction of Justice charge and the charges relating to the threat against the FBI agent, and Brown is looking century of jail time. He has been denied bail.

When Brown went to jail, work on ProjectPM ground to a halt. Even worse, the DoJ now took an interest in everyone else who had participated in ProjectPM. On April 2, the DOJ served the domain hosting service CloudFlare with a subpoena for all records on the ProjectPM website, and in particular asked for the IP addresses of everyone who had accessed and contributed to ProjectPM, claiming it was a criminal enterprise. The message was clear: Anyone else who looks into this matter does so at their grave peril.

Here we are. Barrett Brown sits in prison and many activists are afraid to go near the Stratfor files; worse, the mainstream media appears to be completely uninterested in their contents.

While the media and much of the world have been understandably outraged by the revelation of the NSA’s spying program, Barrett Brown’s work was pointing towards much deeper problems. First, he showed that this wasn’t merely a problem of private intelligence firms spying on us – it was worse than that. These firms are trying to manufacture a false reality for us. They are engaged in PSYOPS against a civilian population on behalf of their corporate clients.

But even this tells only half the story. One might have thought that private intelligence agencies were simply doing outsourced intelligence work for the US Government. But unfortunately it seems that the tail has begun to wag the dog – it appears that in many respects the US Government and in particular the Department of Justice is now working for private intelligence firms. This is evident when, for example, Stratfor asks for FBI classified files on PETA or the Department of Justice is used to try and punish journalists for probing into these private intelligence companies.

But I disgress. I began with Barrett’s call to the Herald hotline. So what did Barrett want? He put it this way: “Uri baby, in the hall of mirrors that is the Internets, you can only trust the Herald to get the story right. You and Pix have got to come back. The game is bigger now.”

And well, yes, the game is bigger now. Former Herald staffer Prokofy Neva saw this too, in her delightfully positive and chirpy essay on her blog Wired State. 

The entire thing makes me think of The Wrong Hands and the Justice League -- a story in Second Life that prefigured many of our woes in real life today…

… It's like the story of WikiLeaks and the story of the NSA, today. It is one of the many thing I feel were prototyped in Second Life where it was really easy to prototype -- a hostage community of people online that you could easily affect like dropping a rock in a pond, endless capacity for virtual harassment, endless edge-casing and lawfaring capacity with a troop of coders and developers of the same hacker tribe who are the managers of Second Life at Linden Lab.

Actually, I don’t know what that means and neither do you, but what I think Prok is trying to say is that reality is beginning to imitate the virtual reality of 2006, and those of us who honed our skills trying to sort through the spy-vs-spy mindfuck games of Second Life are particularly well equipped to navigate house of mirrors created for us by the NSA, FBI, private intelligence companies etc.

So now that the so-called Real World has begun to imitate Second Life, the Herald is returning to its mission of helping its dedicated readers find their way through the house of mirrors. There is a war on reality happening. The Herald is going to cover it. For Barrett Brown. For our readers. And for the lulz.
 

After reading the New York Times' revelation that the US government pays AT&T employees to sit with DEA and local law enforcement agents and query a phone record database "that contains the records of decades of Americans’ phone calls" and and adds four billion call records to the database every day, I began wondering what all this costs.

Based on public records, it appears that AT&T has been paid approximately $900,000/year by the Harris County, Texas Sheriff's Department over each of the last 5 years under a sole source agreement for services associated with "Operation Hemisphere". AP reports that the "federal government pays the salaries of four AT&T employees", but only one of these employees is in Texas, so the total cost of Operation Hemisphere remains unclear. Is AT&T also charging $900,000/year for each of the other 3 employees? In any case, there seems to be plenty of room for profit.

One of the Hemisphere training slides published by the NYT shows a total of 2770 requests for 2012. 

How confident can one be that AT&T is billing $900,000/year in Texas?

Experienced Internet Detectives agree - reading through the comments on most web sites risks permanently lowering your opinion of the collective intelligence of the public, but this risk is offset by an occasional surprisingly insightful gem. So I was delighted to come across a comment that points out Harris County budget public hearing notifications mention Operation Hemisphere -- and costs.

Didn't Harris County get the memo?

Spending a few minutes with a google search tailored to look through the http://www.co.harris.tx.us site for mention of Operation Hemisphere uncovered a wealth of public meeting notices with budget statements running back to 2008 -- and a neatly symmetric pattern of grants to the Sheriff's Department and matching sole source payments for professional services to AT&T.

While the NYT claims the formerly secret program reaches back 26 years, it appears AT&T is in a position to supply uniquely valuable information dating back decades, put the NSA's collect-it-all ambitions to shame, and profit handsomely while doing so. 

Unfortunately, this may also damage AT&T's reputation as pointed questions about 4th Amendment rights are raised, and an arrangement where records are released via administrative subpoena rather than via a judicial warrant could lead some to conclude that this is another example of unconstitutional government overreach. Certainly Tyler Durden over at ZeroHedge is not alone in concluding "America is now officially an authoritarian state, in which personal privacy no longer exists in any capacity, in which the public-private complex collaborates against its citizens without express prior public knowledge or permission".

Harris County details grants and sole source professional service payments

date	type	dollars	description
01/22/08	sole source services	$944,321	AT&T for purchase of service associated with Operation Hemisphere for the Sheriff’s Department for the period ending July 31, 2008 at an approximate cost of $944,321.
10/07/08	grant	$950,000	Accept additional 2008 High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Grant funds from the Office of National Drug Control Policy in the amount of $950,000 to support the Houston Intelligence Support Center’s Operation Hemisphere to interdict illegal drug trafficking.
03/10/09	sole source services	$910,705	AT&T for intelligence services provided to the Intelligence Support Center, Operation Hemisphere Program, for the Sheriff's Department for the period of August 1, 2008-July 31, 2009 at an estimated cost of $910,705.
06/09/09	grant	$1,226,649	Accept 2009 High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area grant funds in the total amount of $1,226,649 for the Major Drug Squad, Houston Money Laundering, Houston Intelligence Support Center, Truck, Air, Rail, and Port, Gang and Non-Traditional Gang Squad, and Houston Intelligence Support Center-Operation Hemisphere initiatives.
01/12/10	sole source services	$391,172	AT&T in the amount of $391,172 for Operation Hemisphere investigative services for the Sheriff's Department.
05/11/10	grant	$450,000	Accept an amendment to an agreement with the Office of National Drug Control Policy for 2009 High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area supplemental grant funds in the amount of $450,000 for the Houston Intelligence Support Center-Operation Hemisphere Initiative.
07/27/10	sole source services	$469,407	AT&T in the amount of $469,407 for Operation Hemisphere investigative services for the Sheriff’s Department.
09/14/10	grant	$924,500	Accept 2010 High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Grant funds in the amount of $924,500 for the Operation Hemisphere initiative.
02/08/11	sole source services	$924,500	AT&T sole source for Operation Hemisphere, formerly Hudson Hawk, investigative services for the Sheriff’s Department in the amount of $924,500.
01/24/12	grant	$666,667	Accept High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Grant funds in the additional amount of $666,667 from the Office of National Drug Control Policy for the Houston Intelligence Support Center – Operation Hemisphere Initiative.
05/08/12	sole source services	$762,111	AT&T in the amount of $762,111 for Operation Hemisphere investigative services for the Sheriff’s Department for the period ending June 30, 2012.
11/06/12	grant	$373,795	An amendment to an agreement with the Office of National Drug Control Policy for additional High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Grant funds in the amount of $373,795 for the Houston Intelligence Support Center-Operation Hemisphere Initiative
01/29/13	sole source service	$373,795	AT&T in the amount of $373,795 sole source for Operation Hemisphere investigative services for the Sheriff’s Department for the period ending June 30, 2013.