Barrett Brown, former self-professed Anonymous "spokesman," has released a new analysis of the HBGary emails which suggests HBGary was part of an effort at mass surveillance, possibly targeted on the Middle East:
The programme appears to allow for the large-scale monitoring of social networks by way of such things as natural language processing, semantic analysis, latent semantic indexing and IT intrusion. At the same time, it also entails the dissemination of some unknown degree of information to a given population through a variety of means – without any hint that the actual source is US intelligence. Scattered discussions of Arab translation services may indicate that the programme targets the Middle East.
The analysis includes many other companies, notably Google, Apple, Akamai, and Northrup Grumman, the first three of which are prominent tech companies and the latter of which is a major defense contractor, with annual revenues numbering $32 billion.
Discussion in the analysis' summary suggests a targeted effort at compromising mobile and web privacy through installation of games, wallpapers, and other "extras," which is a common tactic of malware developers. The language processing would presumably flag certain segments of text sent and received by the phone or desktop, which would then be collected and analyzed at the regional level.
An important fact to remember in this analysis is the combination of US intelligence assets and corporate infrastructure. Whereas government intelligence is interested in assessing diplomatic possibilities, the very same tools can be very easily used by these same companies to assess product viability and marketability.
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