Government contractors targeted Chamber of Commerce's critics - Los Angeles Times

Hoping to win a lucrative agreement with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, three data security contractors for federal defense and intelligence agencies developed a proposal to monitor and manipulate the chamber's left-leaning critics, according to recently released e-mail correspondence.

Employees of the firms compiled short dossiers on a few activists that included photographs, references to their families and charts of their relationships with other liberal and labor leaders.

A review of the correspondence, dating from late October through last week, suggested that the surveillance and intelligence gathering had begun only on a superficial basis in anticipation of a coming meeting with chamber officials.

The proposals were received by Hunton & Williams, a law firm that represents the chamber.

The firm, which also represents Bank of America, solicited a separate proposal from the security firms to help the bank deal with a threat by WikiLeaks, the international hacker organization, to release some of the bank's internal data.

Chamber officials as well as a spokesman for Bank of America said they knew nothing of the surveillance proposals until the e-mails were released Friday by Anonymous, a group that is sympathetic to WikiLeaks.

"No money, for any purpose, was paid to any of those three private security firms by the chamber, or by anyone on behalf of the chamber, including Hunton & Williams," the chamber said in a statement.

Hunton & Williams did not respond to requests for comment.

But in some of the e-mails, employees of the security firms and lawyers at Hunton & Williams refer to contacts they had made with the chamber about the proposed intelligence gathering.

The revelations in the e-mails triggered anxiety among some of those who were targeted.

"We are appalled at the allegations that have come to light in these e-mails," said Inga Skippings, communications director of the Service Employees International Union, some of whose allies were the subject of the intelligence gathering project. "The chamber should immediately come clean about its involvement with Hunton & Williams and the private security firms that allegedly planned these underhanded tactics."

ThinkProgress, an arm of the liberal Center for American Progress and a consistent critic of the chamber, first reported on the e-mails on its blog last week.

In a statement, the chamber accused its critics of "perpetrating a smear campaign by trying to create the illusion of a connection" between it and the security firms.

Officials for two of the security firms, Palantir Technologies and Berico Technologies, confirmed the authenticity of the e-mails sent by their employees but said top executives had no previous knowledge of them.

A spokeswoman for the third company, HBGary Federal, said executives could not address the details of the proposed work for Hunton & Williams, citing a nondisclosure agreement covering all parties.

Copies of the e-mails were provided to the Los Angeles Times by the labor and activist groups.

The correspondence shows that starting last fall, Hutton & Williams lawyers discussed with the security companies a project to be pitched to the chamber.

The three security firms, all of which are government contractors with secret clearances, proposed coming together as "Team Themis," apparently named after a Greek goddess of law and order, to monitor and possibly disrupt chamber opponents.

"Who better to develop a corporate information reconnaissance capability than companies that have been market leaders within the [Defense Department] and Intelligence Community," the companies wrote in a pitch to Hunton & Williams.

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Why the White House Will Continue Its War with the Chamber of Commerce - CBS News

October 12, 2010 4:02 PM President Obama, senatorial candidate Alexi Giannoulias, center, and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., look at people in the crowd during a fundraiser for Giannoulias at the Drake Hotel in Chicago, Oct. 7, 2010.

(Credit: AP) The president's remarks at two fundraisers in Miami on Monday night were less notable for what he said, than for what he did NOT say.

For days President Obama has pounded away at the Chamber of Commerce, Karl Rove and others for raising money for their campaign ads that may come from foreign sources. Since last Thursday he's made it an impassioned part of his speeches at fundrasiers and rallies, strongly suggesting something sinister, even illegal, is going on. But at last night's fundraisers the president didn't even mention the charge.

Some critics and political analysts quickly concluded that the strategy must be backfiring, and the White House had decided to cut its losses. A logical response, they said, after a slew of editorial writers, even some from liberal leaning papers like the Washington Post, sharply criticized the White House for making the charge without proof.

Can DNC Backup Foreign Funds Claim?

Some compared the White House campaign to the smear tactics of Joe McCarthy in the 1950s. The non -partisan group FactCheck.org concluded that "Accusing anybody of violating the law is a serious matter requiring serious evidence to back it up. So far Democrats have produced none." Even some Democrats said the attacks were back-firing, making the president look like he's engaged in the kind of unsubstantiated attacks he so sharply criticized in the 2008 campaign.

But today Robert Gibbs said people are reading way too much into something the president didn't say. He waved off last night's failure to bring it up, suggesting that the president was simply giving an abbreviated version of his fundraiser stump speech.

Gibbs went on to ratchet up the White House attacks. If the Chamber really isn't using foreign money, all they have to do is open up their books, he said, and prove it. And he accused Rove of engaging in a "Rovian trick" by comparing his organization to the liberal Center for American Progress which also doesn't release the identities of its donors. Gibbs said the difference is that CAP doesn't use the money to pay for political campaign ads. Gibbs suggested the president will return to the attack in the coming days, when he has a long list of campaign events, mostly fundraisers.

So why would the White House stick with a strategy that's been so roundly criticized? First, because they've determined that at this point in the campaign the most urgent quest is to fire up the base, even if it means further antagonizing independent voters, fact-checkers and some in the mainstream media. Also, the White House believes that Karl Rove is an excellent bogeyman, a man liberals love to hate.

And there's another reason this strategy could help Democrats, who are deeply nervous about the flood of money coming from super-wealthy, anonymous contributors: maybe it will frighten some of them. The last thing they want is for their names to appear in print. If the White House can make them worry that their names might eventually become public, it could, perhaps, convince some of them to close their checkbooks.

CBSNews.com Special Report: Election 2010

Chip Reid is CBS News' chief White House correspondent. You can read more of his posts in Hotsheet here. Tags:Chamber of Commerice ,Campaign Finance ,Barack Obama Topics:Campaign 2010 ,White House

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