| Donate $25 for two DVDs of the Cryptome collection of files from June 1996 to the present |
3 August 2010
Related: http://cryptome.org/0002/vigilant/vigilant-spies.htm
Project Vigilant Bullshi-
"The job of the Chief Scientist is to "call bullshit" when someone has an idea that will never work." Chet Uber, Project Vigilant
Based on this material retrieved from Google cache, Project Vigilant is a fraud. The recent stories about Chet Uber recruiting volunteer Internet spies at Defcon, bragging about having 600 volunteers and advising Adrian Lamo to inform on Bradley Manning have been based on public relations hyperbole.
This material shows:
1. A plan to enlist children as spies.
2. In January 2010 there were no "fully vetted" volunteers.
3. Personal information on volunteers is being harvested for undisclosed purposes by offering a pretentious training and vetting process to ostensibly assure protection of national security secrets around the globe, with claims that federal agencies like the State Deparment will be involved. No qualifications to train in or handle national security secrets are offered.
4. Unpaid services by volunteers are being solicited under guise of patriotism to minimize financial accounting, salaries, insurance and health benefits, taxation and government oversight.
5. Notable persons have been induced to legitimate Project Vigilant by allowing their names to be used, or used without their permission or knowledge.
6. Most of the project's officer and advisory positions remain unfilled; the positions appear to be bogus.
7. Mission statements and categories of activities are empty boilerplate.
PROJECT VIGILANT Public Relations Site
"Red Tape Will Not Defeat Terrorism." - Kevin Manson
Staff
Submitted by chet.uber on Sun, 01/24/2010 - 23:58
All of the Divisions are managed by the Command Staff, which is described in detail under staff but includes the Director of VIGILANT, Deputy Director of VIGILANT, and the Assistant Deputy Director. Not in the Chain of Command but in charge of access to the Command Staff and managing the Directors Administrative Assistants, Research Associates and Protocol Officers.
In Support of the Command Staff are the Office of the General Counsel, Office of Public Affairs, and multiple high level Advisory panels Strategic Advsiors, Ethics Advisors, and Legal Adivsors.
The final position that rounds out the Command Staff is the Chief Scientist. This position is not in competition with the Director of Science & Technology (S&T). The Chief Scientist is an advisor to the Director and has no staff or position directly related to S&T, and most importantly the Chief Scientist is not focused specifically on issues of information theory, but rather is intended to be a classically trained scientist with a diverse background in the hard and soft sciences. An example of a person qualified for this position could be an MD, or PhD in Genetics or Astrophycis. The idea is that this person is someone that has the skills from math to lanuguages to advise the Director on the theoretic possibilites that are proposed for all the Directorates and as importantly from our clients and partners. The job of the Chief Scientist is to "call bullshit" when someone has an idea that will never work.
As a list Staff Includes:
*Chief of Staff
*Director's Ethics Advisors
*Director's Strategic Advisors
*Directors
*Directors Executive Staff
*General Counsel's Office
*Public Affairs Office
/.. more to come .. /
Chief of Staff
Submitted by chet.uber on Mon, 01/25/2010 - 04:16
The Chief of Staff's position is currently opened. If you are interested please contact us.
Director's Ethics Advisers
Submitted by chet.uber on Mon, 01/25/2010 - 04:45
[No entries]
Director's Strategic Advisers
Submitted by chet.uber on Mon, 01/25/2010 - 04:36
Fred Baker, [Chair] IETF/Cisco
Ed Appel, Inamecheck (retired-FBI
counter-terrorism/counter-intelligence)
B.K. DeLong, IANS
Directors
[Truncated Google entry, no cache:]
Submitted by chet.uber on Mon, 01/25/2010 - 04:13.
The following individuals are the directors of Project VIGILANT for the years of 2010-2012 ...
Directors Executive Staff
[No Google cache]
General Counsel's Office
[Truncated Google entry; no cache]
Jan 25, 2010 ... PROJECT VIGILANT Public Relations Site ... serving on the General Counsel's staff or as a legal assistant to this office please contact us ...
Divisions
Submitted by chet.uber on Sun, 01/24/2010 - 22:34
By 2006 we had formally created divisions, job postings, chain of command, a chain of succession and job descriptions for most of postions whether existing or for in the future. To be fully staffed the current estimate is approximately 1600 volunteers. As of January 1, 2010 we had refined the divisions of Project VIGILANT and we have just over 550 of the needed volunteers.
The Divisions are currently:
* Intelligence & Analysis
* Science & Technology
* Mission Support
* Liasons and Partnerships
Each Division is headed by a Director and has a Deputy Director.
All of the Divisions are managed by the Command Staff, which is described in detail under staff but includes the Director of VIGILANT, Deputy Director of VIGILANT, and the Assistant Deputy Director. There is a Chief of Staff, who is not in the Chain of Command but in charge of access to the Command Staff and managing the Directors Administrative Assistants, Research Associates and Protocol Officers.
In Support of the Command Staff are the Office of the General Counsel, Office of Public Affairs, and multiple high level Advisory panels - Strategic Advsiors, Ethics Advisors, and Legal Adivsors.
The final position that rounds out the Command Staff is the Chief Scientist. This position is not in competition with the Director of Science & Technology (S&T). The Chief Scientist is an advisor to the Director and has no staff or position directly related to S&T, and most importantly the Chief Scientist is not focused specifically on issues of information theory, but rather is intended to be a classically trained scientist with a diverse background in the hard and soft sciences. An example of a person qualified for this position could be an MD, or PhD in Genetics or Astrophycis. The idea is that this person is someone that has the skills from math to lanuguages to advise the Director on the theoretic possibilites that are proposed for all the Directorates and as importantly from our clients and partners. The job of the Chief Scientist is to "call bullshit" when someone has an idea that will never work.
Intelligence & Analysis
Submitted by chet.uber on Sun, 01/24/2010 - 23:03
The Intelligence & Analysis (I&A) Division is responsible of using all legal means of monitoring the obversable activities around the globe, especially those that happen on the networks around the globe.
We monitor all countries in the globe, and this reporting is rolled up in the military designations for those portions of the the world. In the United States we monitor each state and roll those up into nine minor regions and four major regions. Again looking for patterns in the noise.
The other part of I&A focuses not on the collection of the way we analyze the observations. We use a wide variety of methods from correlation to bit-level comparisons of repeated observed events in an an attempt to find the pattern in the noise.
The patterns that we are looking for are those that reveal the 5% of the world that has no conscious. The people that will take a rifle to work and kill their entire office, the student that will do the same to their school mates, the extremist groups that will encourage lone wolfs to go into a church and kill another human being because they don't approve of their work, the domestic and foreign terrorists that the United States, United Kingdom and the other allies have identified as a threat to our way of life, or the facist groups that go beyond complaining about the blacks and the jews and actually curb them, burn them alive, and of their own free will go beyond free speech act in a way that deprives other human beings of their life.
It is hard to in one paragraph like I just wrote to describe what we look for because the the truth is we are really looking for "what hasn't yet ever happened, what is likely to happen based on what we believe indicates behaviors in the real world (digital or physical). The problem is as we currently see it is what Dr. Fred Cohen proved in his thesis and later mathematical work -- That you can always get punched in the nose once. Malware and "bad behavior" has been proven to suffer from the halting problem. So the best we can hope for is to have a mechanism driven by the best science possible that will provide those in Intelligence to spot the most likely bad things.
We look at attacks in three modes: what may happen (prediction), what is happening (incident response), and what has happened (digital forensic evidence examination). We pray for prediction, we learn from digital forensic evidence examination. I&A has the role to "constantly watch" and try to "Attribute Actions to Actors".
The current Director of Intelligence & Analysis is AJ Fardella, the Deputy Director is Andrew Hoyle.
/ .. more to come .. /
Liasons & Partnerships
Submitted by chet.uber on Sun, 01/24/2010 - 23:52
Liaisons and Partnerships (L&P) is a new Division that was created to remove some of the load off of Mission Support (MS) related to dealing with the absolutely necessary job of forming, handling, managing the relations with one our most important assets or clients and our corporate, academic, institutional, and governmental partners.
We have at this come down to a short list for the director of this division. We have offered the Directors job to one person who we are negotiating with to develop the roles, Standard Operation Procedures, and the goals for this Division.
I will keep it short. It is better to under-promise and over-deliver, than to do the reverse.
/ .. more to come .. /
Mission Support
Submitted by chet.uber on Sun, 01/24/2010 - 23:14
Mission Support is the Division where the rubber meats the road. Mission Support is responsible for:
* Recruiting
* Vetting
* Basic Training
* Advanced Training
* Mission Preparation and Support for I&A
* Information Technology
* Information Assurance
* Information Protection
* Securtity
* Human Relations
* Accounting and Auditing
* Officer of the Day
* Medical Officer of the Day
...
* and much more.
Mission Supports current Director of over a year now is Michael Karash, the former Fire Chief of Key West, Florida. The Deputy Director, who was moved from I&A recently to help out as we are growing quickly is Michael Tomasiewicz, CISSP.
/ .. more to come .. /
Science & Technology
Submitted by chet.uber on Sun, 01/24/2010 - 23:11
Science & Technology (S&T) is the oldest and my orginal home in Project VIGILANT. The current Director of S&T Dr. Doug Jacobson, Ph.D. currently on the faculy of Iowa State University in Ames. Dr. Jacobson brings new blood to what was a thriving department that had lapsed. We have a policy of nominating the Director and they are responsible of bringing into Project VIGILANT new blood as there Deputy. We ask them to find someone they know, trust and respect - because the Deputy is the Directors shadow and they must work together closely. By forcing the Director to choose, we strengthen Project VIGILANT. Dr. Jacobson chose well and selected Dr. Christophe Veltsos, Ph.D on the faculty of Minnesota State
The following are dormant, active or the planned sub-divisions of S&T.
* Information Theory
* Information Assurance
* Independent Validation & Verification, Dr. Blaine Burnham, Ph.D., Assistant
Director of S&T.
* Adversay Characterization, Adrian Lamo, Assistant Director of S&T.
* Geo-Spatial Mapping and Related topics, Senior Scientist, AJ Fardella
* Digital Forensic Evidence & Examination
* Deception
* Information Operation and Warfare
* PSYOPS
* Cultural Antropology
* Linguistics
* Stochastics
* Natural Language Processing
* Pattern Recognition
* SPAM
* Denial of Service and DDOS
* Botnets
* Malware, including blended threats
* Threat Indentification
* False Personas
* Identity Theft
* Protection of SCADA sytems and other CIP
* Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs)
/ .. more to come .. /
Volunteerism and Vetting
Submitted by chet.uber on Mon, 01/25/2010 - 05:23
Project VIGILANT is conducted by BBHC Global LLC, which characterizes itself as a Not-Just-For-Profit business in that a large portion of profits of the business are put in to make Project VIGILANT exist.
When people want to get involved with Project VIGILANT we make it clear that while there are potentially tangible monetary benefits to participating that the project was clear a 100% Volunteer effort. If you are thinking that getting involved as an individual, going through vetting and becoming a fully vested member please keep in mind that it is a volunteer effort.
Your participation as a volunteer depends on two things, your interest and the time that you have to commit. For some positions, like advisory committees, and domain experts you can by with as little as one (1) hour per month and fulfill your position.
For other positions like being involved as a Assistant or Associate Director you can expect to be putting in more like (one) 1 hour or more per week. These jobs require that you are able to meet scheduling conditions as well as things have to be completed on time and more meetings are involved; which means scheduled times for doing things are more necessary.
For positions like Principal Investigators, Senior Scientists, Scientists, Collection Officers, Collection Managers, and Research Associates you can expect to be putting putting in one (1) to two (2) or more hours per day. Whatever it takes for your job to be completed is the time you will be asked.
Directors, Deputy Directors, and members of the command staff outside of advisory positions are expected to put in one (1) to four (4) or more hours a day towards their goals. You have scheduled events, you are managing people, your are expected to have enough free time that you can commit a significant amount of your time to do your job.
In the areas or Liaisons and Partnership that hours are general very low, but the timing can be more erratic, you need to have freedom in your schedule so you can meet with Liaisons when this is need and partners when this is needed. These can be tried to run on a schedule but the reality is we never know when a corporate partner or government or other Liaison is going to be needed.
The position with the absolute lowest time but can come at any time are related to Domain Experts in both Intelligence & Analysis and Science & Technology. In general for domain experts we tend to look for the person or people who create a protocol or area in which we work. Because they know the area so well that one hour of their time is 50 of someone who only uses the protocol. We currently have people in the areas of IMAP and SPAM that may have been called on once a year. We only need them when working on a problem we need their help on an issue say on IMAP that only the person who designed it could be of use and we would send our a call for them with a very specific description of the problem ask them about designing it.
Time and availability are the functions to look at when selecting where you volunteer in. These are just some of the areas ad we will work on expanding and working on this area.
/.. more to come .. /
Volunteerism
Submitted by chet.uber on Mon, 01/25/2010 - 05:11
For the first time since 1996, we have opened up our project to "walk-ons." We knew by 2006 after the creation of the formal structure for the day-to-day operation of the project that we would have to grow an order of magnitude in six years. Despite our best efforts to use or existing methods to "court" those with skills we absolutely need, the process was talking one day/volunteer and at that rate we would never make our goal. Because of this we created a formal project within Mission Support to deal with recruiting recruiters; and have planned to go public with our needs for top of the line wet-ware.
So if you are very good at what you love to do. Please look for lists on this page of job titles and skill sets. The first official postings are slated for July 15, 2010.
Project VIGILANT (VIGILANT) is a division within the "Not Just for Profit" entity BBHC Global LLC (BBHC) It is supported by the profits of BBHC Global LLC. Currently Project VIGILANT gives away its intelligence to help aid in the protection of Public Safety and National Security; and has a long term goal of developing new technologies and methodologies that will be provided through Technology Transfer to non-governmental owners of Critical Infrastructure; as well as all elements of the U.S. Government, Federal, Tribal, State or Local. The inclusion of transfers to Five Eyes, NATO, and other countries with which the United States has Mutual Defense treaties is subject to approval by not only BBHC, but the State Department. Our tools are powerful, and we constantly work and will continue to work in a compartmentalized manner to prevent corporate and other espionage possibilities.
We are very particular about who we allow into our vetting program KILGORE. KILGORE is the compartment within VIGILANT in which non-vested members get their basic training. This includes participation in group chats, which help to determine whether the new volunteer has ability to work in an environment where 'Mission, Team, Self' is the focus. Also we have an extremely diverse staff and it is important for us to determine any potential problems related to prejudice as diversity is something we embrace, and we feel this is a factor that makes us strong.
A list of other typical things that occur in KILGORE are:
* You sign your first of many Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA)
* Fill out an Exclusionary Document which is permission to run a credit check, background check and to validate your CV. It also has questions in it designed to weed out vigilantes, mentally unstable people, and those who are not truly joining for the right reasons.
The next part of the Exclusionary questions, asks if you have had any felonies in the last seven years, if you use drugs, if you are an United States Citizen, and if you have every been convicted of domestic abuse, child endangerment and a number of other items. Basically it is you baring your soul. To be up front if you lie to us, and we find that you have - you are automatically disqualified. Lying is not tolerated -- truthfulness is an essential part of vetting
Some things can be 'waived.' We are more interested in who you really are, who you want to become, and that you want to make the country a safer place to live. Who you were is important, but if truthful a significant number of 'weaknesses' can be dealt with. For example, things like experimental drugs use or even recreational use can be wavered depending on the type of drug, type of use and the time period in which you used drugs.
The final part of this document asks you to take an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States of America.
The time in KILGORE is generally from 30-90 days. If you already have a Federal S or TS clearance it waives the need for the background check, but the NDA and exclusionary questions portions of your volunteer application still must be filled out. We have had people go through vetting, in as quick short a period as a week.
Once you pass vetting you become a fully vested member of VIGILANT.
Explorers and Junior Volunteers
Submitted by chet.uber on Mon, 01/25/2010 - 20:57
In 2002 while working with Winn Schwartau and the concept for having a merit badge in Boy Scouts for "Computer Security Awareness" was put forth by the three of us. I was a Scout we were having long discussions about when and how ethics should be taught in the school system. We prepared the material based on Winn Schwartau's book, "Internet & Computer Ethics for Kids: (and Parents & Teachers Who Haven't Got a Clue.)", and we ran it through the Mid-America Council which represents Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota; and it was ran all the way through to the Top of the Boy Scout system. We were told that they were not adding any more merit badges for probably ten more years.
Currently Winn is using his critically acclaimed book online is is focused on Kid's Aged 7-12th grade. Our Ethics Committee is still discussing whether who a child is, their ethical make is hardened by 13 or is it at a higher age. If it is lower than one opinion is that we should be using his material at lower age levels and integrating into all curriculum's, not just being taught separately. For example, plagarism and stealing should be taught every time an assignment is given and the focus on these areas would be woven into the entire curriculum at the lowest grade possible (as low as fourth) in order to make sure that the issues of Ethics can take hold while their being is formed.
Additionally we are looking at a situation similar to Explorer posts, where we work we work with kids in high school and college from ages 17-21 to participate as Junior Volunteers in our programs. We have areas in Science & Technology and Intelligence & Analysis in which youths this age with proper supervision can and will be included into Project VIGILANT.
This project will be going through review of both our Legal Advisers and Ethics Advisers to determine the viability of such a proposition, and are hoping to have a decision by Q2 2010.
Fully Vetted Active-Duty LEO Volunteers
Submitted by chet.uber on Mon, 01/25/2010 - 05:29
[No entries]
Fully Vetted Volunteers
Submitted by chet.uber on Mon, 01/25/2010 - 05:27
[No entries]