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Hey, it was all a practical joke. So serious, you people. No humor at all, not even a bit.
Project Vigilant’s Initial Funding |
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| By: strandedwind Sunday January 2, 2011 11:47 pm | |
Project Vigilant’s Initial Funding |
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| By: strandedwind Sunday January 2, 2011 11:47 pm | |
Hey, it was all a practical joke. So serious, you people. No humor at all, not even a bit.
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12 Comments
This is pretty much exactly the revelation I expected.
I hope you will answer the many unresolved comments from your other diary.
A couple more questions:
Who provided the initial funding for Security Focus, which I gather has now gone bankrupt?
How does Project Vigilant plan to defend itself from the mounting evidence that it was behind the leaks?
You don’t even know that being a partisan (zealot) is nothing to be proud of, do you?
A whole diary for another bullshit answer. He’s already got a whole diary full of of those. He’s lame-o.
Oh look! TaoSecurity weighs in! Recommended!
It’s also registered to Stephen Ruhe, so is project vigilant.
So why didn’t you mention Stephen Ruhe in your story?
LAMO.. oh I meant LMAO..
Thanks for burning the midnight oil for us. I must say that your sudden exit from FDL tends to confirm my suspicion that there exists a rogue element inside Project Vigilant which leaked the cables and is now trying to prevent our questions from being answered. Be safe crazy man.
A cached version of this page, with no comments, is (still) available here (at least for the moment):
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fmy.firedoglake.com%2Fstrandedwind%2F2011%2F01%2F02%2Fproject-vigilant%25E2%2580%2599s-initial-funding%2F
FWIW, here’s a rather more complete look into “Project Vigilant”:
http://www.bestvirusremoval.org/15176/project-vigilant-is-a-publicity-stunt/
“Steven Ruhe
Owner, T.G.B.S Construction,
Managing Member – BBHC Global
Lincoln, Nebraska Area
OwnerStevenConstruction industryJanuary 2004 – Present (6 years 8 months)I’ve wanted to be a business owner for as long as I can remember… I work for me I build my dreams, work for someone else build there dreams.
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From http://blogs.forbes.com/firewall/2010/08/06/bbhc-global-and-project-vigilant-wheres-the-money-2/ we find:
“Who owns BBHC Global?
Steven Ruhe shows as the registrant for the domain name but the email address he provides is chet.uber@mac.com. Ruhe’s LinkedIn profile says his present job from 2004 to the present is as the owner of T.G.B.S. Construction in Lincoln, NE however a YellowPages.com search under that name turns up nothing. I checked 411.com. Nothing. Then I found a copy of the Lincoln Business Builder from April, 2007 with a photo of Steven Ruhe and his partner Brett Reifschnider of R&R Drywall. Is there another Steven Ruhe in Lincoln, NE? Not that I can find.”
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Drywall. You’ve got to be joking. A drywaller running a “computer security” business?
Thanks sybille. This is what was there before he deleted it.
____________________________________________________
Yesterday I posted a sort of death notice for Project Vigilant. I hope I’m not pulling a Mark Twain on them, with exaggerated rumors of demise, but conversations in December lead me to believe that I’m right in principle, even if the date might have slipped a bit. I was the oldest surviving member of the group outside of founder Chet Uber until I resigned at the beginning of December due to persistent conflicts with my partisan work.
There has been a tremendous amount of interest from journalists regarding Wikileaks and the people and organizations that are involved. Even those properly trained are skidding into the tinfoil hat zone for want of information, so today I’m going to knock the wheels off the conspiratorial thinking around who funded Project Vigilant.
There has been a tremendous amount of speculation as to who funded the project’s for profit parent, BBHC Global. Is it the CIA? The NSA? The Russian mafia? Space aliens? The real answer is much more pedestrian.
I got separated some years back, times were really hard, and I went to see Chet. I was willing to sweep and mop at that point and he had the infosec equivalent of such work for me. I spent two busy days with a compromised internet hosting company and walked away with a check for around $1,300.
Fast forward to the spring of 2009. I hadn’t heard from Chet in quite a while. He’d had a massive heart attack in 2005, I got Lyme in 2007, and both of us were in pretty sad shape. I’d gone back to work at the beginning of the year and for a while my credit card was attached to his Walgreens account, covering meds he otherwise would not have been able to afford.
We started talking again, every week or so. A couple of times I logged in and paid his cell bill. He’d managed to hang on to a laptop through heart attack, losing a long term relationship, losing a business, and bouncing between friends and relatives. He finally qualified for disability and things started to get easier.
I’m paraphrasing from memory but I don’t think I’m too far off with this quote.
We’d been into infosec stuff ever since we’d met, him much more than me, but this was the first time I heard the name Project Vigilant applied to his broad collection of associates. He began organizing with a will, herding infosec rock stars into formation, then pulling in those who wanted to learn. The names of those willing to be seen in public were detailed in the second Albertson column.
And now we come to the name of the high powered financier behind the startup of the for profit that supports Project Vigilant: BBHC Global.
Not nearly the revelation you expected, eh? I get periodic requests for help with network infrastructure problems, I had one come during the summer of 2009 that needed some special skills, and Chet answered some questions for me. It was a day’s work – $1,000 billed, and I had my customer make the check to BBHC Global so the company could afford to incorporate.
So that’s all there really is to it – a bunch of civic minded professionals who see each other at conferences, one of them on disability but wanting to volunteer so he could do something useful with his time, and one old friend repaying a debt to another by writing off a day’s consulting pay in hopes some good would come of it.
Well, anyone could have registered the domain for him, but the link to TaoSecurity does say that he’s the owner and that he sells Amway.
Could Chet Uber be an aka for Steven Ruhe or vice versa?
I wonder how established this business ever was? Could Manning have been that unlucky to stumble onto these snitches? He must have really needed to talk to someone if so.
Per my phone call w Neil last week….
Partisan, in THIS context was simply consultant work running a Twitter presence for a handful of Democratic candidates. niel’s gig, not project vigilants, so he dropped whatever he may have then had had going for PV to avoid any potential conflict of interests.