Among the contents of the emails posted by information activists is a reference to the Department of Justice directing Bank of America to hire lawyers and security consultants to go after Wikileaks. The emails come from security contractor HBGary Federal, which sought to do work on the project.

We speculated that the federal government might be behind BAC’s curious preemptive move against Wikileaks given both the tight ties between the bank and federal regulators and the tight connections — symbiosis really — between the firms BAC hired and the federal security state.

The email from December 2010 sent to an HBGary operative from an official of another security firm — Palantir — claims that the powerhouse law firm of Hunton & Williams was putting together a team to go after Wikileaks. The details:

They are pitching the bank to retain them for an internal investigation around wikileaks. They basically want to sue them to put an injunction on releasing any data. DOJ called the GC of BofA and told them to hire Hunton and Williams, specifically to hire Richard Wyatt who I’m beginning to think is the emperor. They want to present to the bank a team capable of doing a comprehensive investigation into the data leak. Currently they are recommending:

-Hire H&W as outside council on retainer
-Use Palantir for network/cyber/insider threat investigation
-Use Berico/HBGary to analyze wikileaks the organization (people, history, where they are located) Apparently if they can show that wikileaks is hosting data in certain countries it will make prosecution easier.
-Use a team of GD/PWC forensics investigators.

They have a half hour with the GC of the 3rd largest bank in the world to plead their case.

They want 5-6 slides from Palantir-HBGary-Berico outlining what we can do. It’s due tomorrow morning.

Last week BAC denied ever seeing any such proposal — which is fortuitous as the actions outlined may well have been criminal. Still to be heard from — Hunton & Williams, the pivot man in this operation.

Thus far much of the outrage has been directed at HBGary and the corporate entities which employed them, along with an almost juvenile fascination with pointing out all the info available online about folks.

But the original sin from a public policy perspective is the DOJ nudge. A nudge which only confirms that Bank of America is now a thinly veiled arm of the federal government. And that we now live in a proto-fascist state.

Update: Looks like the local Time Warner Cable franchise purchased and used some of HBGary’s network security tools — Responder Pro + DDNA. TWC then promptly lost the user password for the HBGary site. Twice.