Sockpuppet army deployment. Brooks Bros riots, 2008 town hall disruptions

This links to a fascinating yet long article well worth the time it takes to read it.  Many of the posts on this forum over the past couple of days help to lend much credence to the concerns raised in this piece.  Here are a few choice highlights from it.  

HBGary people are talking about creating "personas", what we would call sockpuppets. But for a defense contractor with ties to the federal government, Hunton & Williams, DOD, NSA, and the CIA -  whose enemies are labor unions, progressive organizations,  journalists, and progressive bloggers -  a persona apparently goes far beyond creating a mere sockpuppet.  It involves creating an army of sockpuppets, with sophisticated "persona management" software that allows a small team of only a few people to appear to be many, while keeping the personas from accidentally cross-contaminating each other. Then, to top it off, the team can actually automate some functions so one persona can appear to be an entire Brooks Brothers riot online.

The first shadow box content on how they do it speaks for itself.  All of this is for the purposes of infiltration, data mining, and (here's the one that really worries me) ganging up on bloggers, commenters  and otherwise "real" people to smear enemies and distort the truth.  The second shadow box recounts HBGary CEO explaining this concept in detail.  Pertinent exerpts from the third shadow box explaining how one person can appear to be many personas:  We can automate the posting of content on RSS feeds we subscribe to and then repost content on twitter with the appropriate hashtags.  There are a variety of social media tricks we can use to add a LEVEL OF REALNESS TO ALL FICTITIOUS PERSONAS.   

After a lengthy analysis, we find an update:  The government is soliciting the use of the persona management software.  A leaked email example is then provided. 

Say what you will about the source.  This has already been SOOOO confirmed.   I guess desperate times require desperate measures.  Just goes to show you what lengths people are willing to go to when they can't even select a 2012 candidate, let alone effectively confront the nations problems.  Instead they go around picking hugely unpopular fights they cannot possibly win, act as though democratic will of their opponents is some commodity that can be bought and sold on the stock exchange and worse still, something they can fake when they are too impotent to drum it up on the merits of their own agendas.   

Thank goodness this too has been busted wide open, kinda like Walker when he shot himself in the foot last week with his big mouth. 

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/16/945768/-UPDATED:-The-HB-Gary-Email-That-Should-Concern-Us-All