When Anonymous visited ALEC earlier this year it was a rather different move for them. They applied a free tool, the Foca metadata scanner, and this appears to have been a legal, albeit embarrassing event for the targeted organizations – a dump of all the documents they made public, whether they wanted them out or not. These are the names seen with the 413 public documents from ALEC. The PDF files released by ALEC Exposed have been batch modified to include information from their organization and they offer no additional information on authors.



   I pulled out my trusty Maltego open source intelligence and forensics application and pointed it at ALEC’s domain. Their infrastructure wasn’t all that exciting and I had trouble making the email search behave, so I got the least amount of results the tool provides. There are more people who work there, but this is all I have until I do some troubleshooting.



   I am a big fan of Gist for keeping up with friends … and keeping an eye on opponents. I have about 6,000 contacts in the system, I just added the ALEC emails, and look what popped out.



   This isn’t some huge revelation, if you look at the ALEC staff list you can find that jmoody is Jonathan Moody, Director of Donor Relations. This organization is a 501c3 charity and as such they must file an IRS form 990 revealing donors, as well as provide other information. I think that the particulars of who works for a 501c3 are something that’s included in reporting, but I’m not all that up on such things, so maybe someone else will chime in and clarify.

   Looking through that list I see a lot of fairly unique first and surnames. A proper intruder would be taking those, Googling, finding Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn, setting up Google Alerts, all that good recon stuff before the actual hit.
   I do a bunch of this sort of work now, social network analysis. Two thirds of it is actually aimed at our own people – this is how you find and organize activists, picking out who does what and how they connect to each other.
   The other third of that work is known behavior problems – Breitbart toadies doing things that might qualify them for a set of handcuffs, and some other stuff the rest of the world doesn’t seem to notice, but I keep on reading my seven pages of Google Alerts. Not a day goes by that I don’t see something that I forward to someone else, knowing its high value intel for them.

    We’re going to be going through the actual documents that have come out, hunting for where they appear in actual state legislation. We’ll be going through the donor list with a fine tooth comb, of course, and making it clear to the entities that fund this mess that we do notapprove and that we’re going to hit them in the pocketbook. The legislators that are actually members of this will be found out, publicly pilloried for their work against their own constituents, and many will be driven from office.
   As for the staff I will maybe do some of what I described above, focusing on the ones who interface with the public. This is like any anti-gang or counter insurgency work. You figure out who the key players are, who their connections are, then you start interdicting their movement, take away their sources of income, and make it hot for anyone dumb enough to associate with them.
   The real prize here will be bringing enough attention that donors get a bad taste from being associated, and if we push hard enough maybe they’ll find it a better choice to surrender their 501c3 status in exchange for the added privacy.
   If we knock out half their funding by turning them into pariahs, then get a third of what is left because they have to start paying taxes on anything they receive … well … they certainly deserve it for the damage they’ve done our country, don’t they?