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I'm not sure that schizophrenia is any better an explanation than straightforward arrogance. Assuming that the leaks of his work are reasonably accurate I'd be concerned if the government actually started using his research to arrest people though.

I'm not sure that Barrs interest in finding patterns in publicly available information in order to sell his intelligence is any different to advertising analysts doing the same thing. The attempt to socially engineer Anonymous via IRC is a bit more extreme, but I haven't seen any evidence that he intended harrassing them; the problem would have occurred if and when law enforcement bodies started harassing innocent people based on his dodgy intelligence. If you start making any investigative work or social network analysis carried out by private citizens online illegal on the basis of stalking laws then you risk censuring a lot of people actually doing good work.

True, and Barr's idea is not actually far off; Facebook and other social networking sites are intelligence goldmines, linking people to aliases, groups, networks, and a lot of other things. Think of how hard it may be for a fugitive to retreat to a trusted safehouse when he's published a list of everyone he's ever met on Facebook via the Friends list, and/or named the handful of people he hasn't friended in a status or note.

The CIA has shown interest in Facebook's database for a long time, because, besides the normal detective work a normal detective can do if he reads through a Facebook page, if you get a handful of real mathematicians working with that dataset, they can certainly rig something up that would at least return really interesting results.

I am not a lawyer, but I'd like to address your legal points.

Just as I don't need a warrant to view a publicly available website, he shouldn't either. What you are proposing is that it should be illegal to view public pages in a certain order or time. What is the difference of me viewing 100 of my new crushes friends pages over 2 days vs 2 years? There isn't, but the first is rifling, the second is innocent curiosity.

I don't believe he was cyberbullying anyone. However, to address cyberstalking and cyberharasamnet we first have to consider what a reasonable person would have felt had those actions been taken against us. Before the release of the data, and while this was going on, those on the list were unaware of what was occurring. Just as a reasonable person isn't threatened until they become aware of the stalking, threats, etc in real life. Being unaware of what he was doing would mean that no constitute cyberstalking, cyberharassment or cyberbullying took place.

Barr is a private citizen accessing public information and drawing crazy conclusions. There's nothing illegal about that nor should there be.

I agree with you up to a point.

And here's that point:

"Before the release of the data, and while this was going on, those on the list were unaware of what was occurring. Just as a reasonable person isn't threatened until they become aware of the stalking, threats, etc in real life."

People did become aware of it before the release, which is why the exploits of his servers happened, and why Anonymous got butthurt and went on a crusade.

He was dropping hints and threats in IRC, national media, and in email, that he was doing this stuff. He also "leaked" via his fake persona some of the kinds of information he was gathering to his victims so in order to drum up more publicity and to scare them into action. And, it now turns out, he planned to do a lot more than that.

I don't have a problem with him idly browsing facebook or twitter, though I have to question the mental stability of someone that spends all their time voluntarily reading and logging the incoherent ramblings of teenagers all day and trying to build a conspiracy out of it.

The legal issue is that he was threatening people with exposure, via major media outlets. When seeing this stuff, anyone who ever happened to drop in on the IRC channels had to think, "Crap. When is the FBI gonna show up to question me because I made a joke about Egypt on IRC?" You and I both know the government are wholly incompetent at dealing with issues on the Internet, and they try to make up for that incompetence by being extremely heavy-handed in execution of their misguided policies. I'd be scared as hell if I thought someone, apparently trusted by the government, was going to "reveal" my involvement in some wacky Internet conspiracy to the FBI.

The only real legal point you have is the hints and threats issue. There isn't a good public record of what was said. From the article, it appears as though he said he wasn't going to publish names publicly. Although, it seems to suggest this was post DDOS.

There isn't a clear enough public documentation of what happened to fully say one way or another. My suspicion is that those on the list did not tell him to stop, which is one way legally of measuring when harassment starts.

Wouldn't communicating an "untrue statement of fact" that certain people are leaders of an allegedly law-breaking group to government officials or other people constitute defamation (assuming that their reputations were harmed as a result)?

I think there are two issues here:

1. The first is that he did not release the report publicly, which is what would cause the defamation. Anonymous did. Thus he wouldn't be responsible for the release of the data. The issue here is really the publishing of it. He did not publish it, and selling it to a private law enforcement agency, in my mind at least is not publishing it.

2. The second issue is related to false police reports. In America, it is illegal to file a false police report. However, this is not what is happening here. He is not claiming to police that a crime was actually committed, instead he is providing information related to that crime. He is basically selling criminal leads to law enforcement. He's basically doing a crime stoppers like program, but generating the leads himself and going straight to the feds.

2. On #2, so if you want to harass someone without putting yourself on the line, generate "evidence" about them and provide it to law enforcement, but don't file a police report. Good to know!

Defamation and libel are civil offenses, meaning (in my lay understanding) a person can be held financially liable if sued but cannot be imprisoned or otherwise restricted except as far as he can be constrained to pay the judgment filed against him.

IANAL but it doesn't sound like he did anything criminal to me. He's obviously misguided and silly, thinking he can draw statistical relevance from assumptions based on his personal reading of Facebook profiles, but there is nothing illegal about reading information that someone posts on the internet.

Cyberstalking, to the best of my non-lawyer knowledge, involves real, disruptive harassment, not just a guy who saw you were friends with some other guy and drew some wild conclusions from that.

Barr never dropped the names so any post-facto prosecution for cyberstalking that would have been primarily based on his use of electronic methods to "identify" Anonymous leaders is unlikely.

I don't think there's anything wrong with doing your own detective work, and you certainly don't need a warrant to follow Facebook or Twitter pages. Private investigators do this kind of stuff in the "real world" all the time (granted, they have licenses).

I agree that Barr is incompetent and/or a tinge off his rocker, but the idea that only law enforcement should be able to search publicly accessible data is silly. If I find the page of a guy I haven't seen in five years, should it be illegal if I spend some time reading his publications? What if I just want to find someone that I've heard a story about so I can ask them more information? Should that be illegal? Remember, the people publishing these things publish them by their own choice with the understanding that they are making the information publicly accessible.

Dropping a bunch of names and recklessly implicating individuals in a criminal investigation is at least a civil offense, but there's no crime in drawing wild conclusions about people while cruising Facebook -- at least as long as you use the conclusions judiciously.

Yes, I should have been more clear.

I believe what is illegal is that he was threatening these people, by dropping hints in IRC and national media. He used his fake persona to notify the people he had identified as "leaders" that a security company was researching them and had leadership information, etc.

I don't think it should be illegal to browse facebook, twitter, etc. But, the social engineering aspect of things and the kind of shitstorm he was cooking up was definitely evil and irresponsible. I believe some of the stuff he did does constitute bullying or harassment, and many of his targets are underage.

Regardless of the legality, which was just an afterthought in my post, honestly (I had to even search to see if cyberstalking and such had any legal meaning, and it turns out it does), I find what he was doing disturbing as hell.

"Self-aggrandizing, convinced they have comprehended great secrets based on little to no data (schizophrenics often believe that have 'other ways of knowing' or extremely heightened intuition), and a belief that once they tell the whole story of the truths that have been revealed to them the world will take notice and be amazed."

Are you describing a schizophrenic or a newbie entrepreneur? ;)

Point conceded. Maybe this guy is merely recklessly arrogant and has drunk the Koolaid of entrepreneurship, and is not actually insane.

I think your last paragraph nails it. He apparently called out a bunch of innocent people. Imagine the damage that could do?

And agreed, the coder was a saint among men!

Regardless of whether the ones he called out are innocent (though I suspect most are, since his methods are the work of a madman), he trawled through hundreds of profiles, twitter feeds, IRC conversations, and basically cyberstalked the hell out of every friend of every person he thought might be a "leader" of Anonymous; many of them underage, and the vast majority completely oblivious about Anonymous. He even created a fake persona, who was a kid just like his targets. This is the stuff pedophiles and con-men do to get closer to their victims. I'm not suggesting the guy is a pedophile (but "con-man" might be a good word to describe him); I'm just saying that I can't believe any adult (if not Barr himself, who I don't think is quite sane, then one of the many people at his company who had some idea of what he was doing) would look at all these activities and not think, "Whoah! This is crazy and probably illegal. We need to reel this guy in, or get him out of this company before he causes us real trouble."

he trawled through hundreds of profiles, twitter feeds, IRC conversations, and basically cyberstalked the hell out of every friend of every person he thought might be a "leader" of Anonymous...This is the stuff pedophiles and con-men do to get closer to their victims might do.

That's also what private investigators and intelligence agents might do. By your logic, all private investigators using the same methods are pedophiles.

If I were deliberately smearing AB, I'd try to concoct a reason to mention him as you do in posts also mentioning "pedophile" and "schizophrenic" as often as possible, only I'd use logic that wasn't such an indiscriminate stretch.

That said, yes, I agree he's an unsavory character. His actions were also likely to get him in trouble. He was totally out of his depth and should've been fired.

"If I were deliberately smearing AB, I'd try to concoct a reason to mention him as you do in posts also mentioning "pedophile" and "schizophrenic" as often as possible, only I'd use logic that wasn't such an indiscriminate stretch."

Yeah, I would, too.

But, I'm being sincere. This is creepy behavior from a guy who was not listening to reason from anyone around him.

I don't think anyone needs to smear him...anyone who reads the emails can't come away thinking this guy is a good guy. I'm just ranting because this whole thing is terrifying to me.

The thought that our government might be funding this kind of insanity under the guise of "national security" is...well, have you ever seen The Lives of Others? It's a great film about the Stasi in East Germany, and how they read everything, watched everyone, kept dossiers on everyone, and basically just kept an eye on every single person on the off chance they might be up to something. This, to me, is the modern equivalent...though I would hope it's not taking place in any actual police office.

(Off topic anecdote)

A friend of mine has a father who had a file on him by the Stasi. In it they had a "scent sample". Someone had broken into his bedroom and stolen a piece of linen that he had slept on while he was in the shower one day. It's crazy to think that someone had/has the job of collecting "scent samples". And what a government would need that for, really.

< /anecdote>

Now you bring in the East German secret police. Masterstroke!

You think I would go for Nazis? I'm no Philistine.

HBGary's proposed plan of attack against Wikileaks

http://www.thetechherald.com/article.php/201106/6798/Data-in...

Here's the actual document, rather than a summary: http://wikileaks.ch/IMG/pdf/WikiLeaks_Response_v6.pdf

It appears that document outlines a conspiracy to commit Federal computer crimes.

> The coder in this story is an hero

Oh man, I'm not sure if this is funnier if you meant it, or not...

> in a just world, this nutjob would end up in prison.

Yup. I'm interested to see what happens in the weeks ahead. I really doubt that anything bad (other than getting his SSN posted to Twitter...) will actually happen to him, though.

Subtlety is a art.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1426326

The subthread under my comment is one of the favorite things that's ever happened to me in an HN thread.

'an hero' does not mean what you think it does.