Criminals. If you recall, when the Wikileaks stuff started, Assange made a threat that he had info on a major bank, widely thought to be BOA. BOA then enlisted some intelligence firms to discredit Wikileaks. Here's a slide of proposals: They also targeted supporters of Wikileaks, including Glenn Greenwald. These slides were taken from a hack into one of the firms email accounts by the group Anonymous. (Slides and info from: http://www.thetechherald.com/articl...-a-systematic-attack-against-WikiLeaks?page=1) So, now the same intelligence firms are working for the Chamber of Commerce to... The law firm employed by both BOA and the Chamber, and the one who hired the firms, was initially recommended to BOA by... the Department of Justice.
Planting fake documents with Wikileaks so that it would be discredited when the documents are proven fake? Did they lift the idea out of Girl with a Dragon Tattoo?
I've been keeping up with this as well, Rimmy. It's amazing what these guys are getting away with, consistently. Corporations and the criminal elite that run them have a de facto ticket to rise above the law. The individuals are shielded via the corporate tag, and the corporation itself is virtually indestructible... Disgusting.
Pretty scary to get a glimpse of what big corporate money is willing to do to achieve a goal. I really find the Anonymous link in all this pretty interesting. If I understand correctly, one of those firms' security guys was boasting about how he was secure against the group and could help catch some of them. His twitter and email were promptly hacked. And while they were playing around, they came across some of the emails to Bank of America offering these services. Everything just exploded from there. Crazy.
Ars Technica has scoured the hbgary emails and written a disturbing look into the collusion between government and corporations to develop and deploy computer exploits.
The interests of the wealthy lead to actions that are not simply non-democratic, but that are actually anti-democratic.