Trying to Get the Word out on the DC Madam case: Am I Being Hacked?

Ed.--This has been going on for more than a few months: I attempt to send an email to a journalist at one of their articles, say at The Telegraph, Disnfo.com, Huffington Post, Mother Jones, Talking Points Memo (this one took, no response--did it ever make it?), and numerous other progressive web sites and news publications. Either I cannot successfully send the filled-out form/message, or I get no replies, having no idea if they ever got the national security information about the DC Madam case I was apprising them of. I'm sure a few of them got it and reflected on their mortgages, sure. I've even had a semi-retired journalist who covered the intelligence beat who told me they contacted some of their other colleagues who are still working with no responses, no apparent interest. This, of course, is going on their word, a person I've never even spoken to on the phone, so there it is, I have only their word, and in these times, that ain't enough.

Do I know that I'm being hacked, can I prove it? No, but I was during the case and was surveilled, unquestionably, and it followed me onto Facebook and maybe now onto to Twitter, although it seems far more blunted. Now that we know Facebook was giving the NSA direct access, some of the harassment I was subjected to on there could be viewed in a new light. But like the victims of COINTELPRO and all the other government/private harassment programs targeting dissent in the US, I cannot prove it without herculean effort. We're talking numerous filings of FOIAs (Freedom of Information Act requests for documents on myself, whether I was being watched), but anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of this knows the Government isn't going to cough it up without one hell of a fight.

What I'm asking my readers is this: I need your help in sending out this form email that I'll paste-in below. I just attempted to send it to the journalist James Fallows at The Atlantic without any luck. It could be nothing, it could be a glitch on their part, there could be a cookie in my browser doing it, but I cannot get to the bottom of it, there seems to be no other solution then to have others send these emails on my behalf. There's nothing in this email message that I haven't written or published here on this blog, it's generalized. If you know a serious journalist covering national security issues, or you simply read on the subject a lot and have a reasonably secure email account, I need you to submit this letter to news sites, blogs, journalists, progressive web sites, and so on, I need your help and would appreciate it greatly. Thank you.

And without being too prolix, here's the text of the letter. Anyone who sends it off in my name, unredacted and unaltered has my full permission:  

Good day, I was a member of the DC Madam's defense team back in late 2007, early 2008. We were granted wide-ranging subpoena powers over the telecoms as well as the intelligence community by Federal District Judge Gladys Kessler, who, I might add, was shortly after that replaced without any explanation by a board of judges (a board she was on!) by former FISA Court judge James Robertson. He quashed all of that once on board for reasons that I think were obvious: the case involved surveillance, most likely of her escort service which had a large percentage of defense/intelligence contractors, military and intelligence officers, and a whole lot more. No one seems to want to touch this element of what was erroneously defined by the MSM as a simple sex scandal--it was not, it was far more. I don't expect you to answer because I'm always meeting a wall of silence on this.

I was hired as a general researcher by the late Ms. Palfrey in December 2007 and paid by the federal defender's office for my work, but I did far more pro bono after that month. Indeed, we were going through the subpoenaed phone records that had been provided by one of her carriers, Verizon, but AT&T and Sprint had yet to comply when Judge Kessler was abruptly replaced in the middle of the night in late November. But, we had the records that went much deeper into who had a phone number and a cell or landline--the whens and wheres--and came up with a stunning array that represented the national security state and their contractors and employees on both fronts. One of them was Ret. Col. Ron Roughead, brother to now-retired CNO Gary Roughead. The former worked for SAIC the last I knew and that firm came up in materials and outside of them so many times as not to be coincidental. I could go on and on with the very solid connections between players, but I will leave you with one example: there was one call, and one call only, from a former Verizon engineer with a Muslim name who was also an early war on terror arrest, in the DC area. I won't name him here, but his story was in the press and articles can be found online.

I should also add that we found some indications of intelligence activities in a hack of her email account going back to fall of 1998--yes, it could have been anyone, but they were being forwarded all of the ingoing and outgoing items in it, beyond the sophistication of the average internet user that year. It was a Yahoo.uk account. We got bounce-backs that I identified when the surveillance account was closed. Oddly, the bounce-backs contained the text of a 419 scam, a Nigerian one that's well-known, a fake barrister's note. This wasn't directed at us and was a clear glitch. It has been written that--and I cannot speak to the veracity of it--419 scams have been known to be used as covers for intelligence operations. And there is more, much more. I wrote an account on the case that's heavily-detailed and contains literally hundreds of emails between the late Ms. Palfrey, myself, and others, primary documents, court filings, etc., down to her autopsy report. The story's not cold, incidentally, since no one ever got to the real dynamics of it, other than myself and a few others. The press was ill-equipped to do so, or unwilling, but I cannot say decisively.

This NSA story, I believe, has a direct relation to what happened to Ms. Palfrey and her escort service. I've experienced strange online harassment, visits from contractors to my blog (http://chickasawpicklesmell.blogspot.com), hacking of accounts--you name it, outside of physical confrontation and/or shadowing. I implore you to at least consider this story in light of recent events, to look deeper, or to pass some of this along, and this is just the tip of the iceberg here.

Regards, Matt Janovic, writer and private researcher

DC Madam account: "Why don't you...?"

Ed.--I was recently contacted by one of Jeane's former escorts, a first I might add, since most of them have kept a low-profile for years now. I know all of their names, every single one, because several lists are in my possession from defense materials. That doesn't matter to me. Many of those names came out in the research of the phone records from numerous writers and sites, no one really gives a shit from what I can gather.  A French documentary team might be speaking with some of them, but I seriously doubt that they're being that thorough.

Also, this being America, there seems to be some confusion/conflation over what a historical account or a chronicle is, and what a book about an event by a non-participant constitutes. Because of the nature of the case, you would have to be God and been everywhere at once to have truly experienced, maybe possible at the NSA, not possible for the rest of us mortals. Hey, not everybody had a course in historiography, so let me make it clearer for those who haven't: the book is an account by someone who was a participant in other areas of the story. At one point there was only Jeane, me, and my co-researcher. After the firing of Montgomery Blair Sibley there was no one for a time, then she proceeded pro se with Preston Burton, her court appointed counsel who came back for seconds (he won out and got to travel to the estate salad bar for limitless trips in the end).

Around five days ago I got this comment from the someone claiming to be one of Palfrey's former escorts (see my responses):

Andrea Detty said...

I very much hope that your book is not filled with conspiracy theories. I worked for her and was in the trial. I'm so sick of people that know nothing, come to these "of[f] the wall" ideas. I was not the biggest fan of her. The only thing I agree with everyone, is that the trial was a complete waste of time, money, and resources. But if you were writing a book about her and the trial, shouldn't you have contacted people that were actually involved with it?

Friday, May 4, 2012 3:11:00 AM EDT

Yeah, you don't have to hope, there won't be any of that bullshit in it and do your homework some time. And really, that's all great Andrea...so why not drop me a line and fill me in on what you know? All of it, for truth, for the historical record, for the future. 

Or is setting the record straight unimportant here? Detty testified at Palfrey's trial in her favor, that Jeane was unaware of her soliciting, but to be blunt, the defendant was "guilty as shit" as one inarticulate Los Angeles attorney put it, the fact. The truth is, I have no idea if this is Detty at all. If they want to contact me, go through TOR, some third party service, encrypt it, do it, or forever hold your peace. Were they serious I'd have gotten an email from them and that's yet to happen, will almost certainly never happen. This is possibly someone trying to cause confusion about a book they've never read, that's not even out. Angela, I never heard of you either until I read the trial transcript. There was no need for me to spend good money to have someone lie to me, they can do that via cell phones, Blackberrys, iPads, email, etc., the upside of the technology and common sense. Yes, the trial was a "complete waste of time, money, and resources," and so was going to speak with her in person for reasons I'm sure you're familiar with if you are who you claim to be.

Put up, or shut up, spread 'em, now, not later. No? I thought so.

As I told this person in my responses in comments, I've put appeals out to the former escorts of PMA years ago with no response whatsoever. Am I alone? Are you fucking kidding me? No one has gotten to speak with any of them outside of a handful like Abby Cather ("Jennifer"), Detty, but nothing tangible. One escort attempted to contact journalist Ken Silverstein back in the spring of 2007 about Shirlington Limo that she'd been taken to appointments by them, information that could have linked Jeane and Pamela Martin & Associates to Chris Baker, maybe Mitchell Wade and Brent Wilkes, then to Hookergate itself. 

If any of the former escorts had anything to say to me or to others they would have by now (serious inquiries only). They haven't because most of them are scared shitless from legal harassment. You could write twenty books on this case and never get close to describing it fully. That's how writing about an event goes. Additionally, the public isn't going to sit through thousands of pages. The account contains literally hundreds of pages of primary information from the case. Beyond that, I suppose I need to write about who the attending janitorial staff was during the trial. 

I repeat: this book isn't like Tom Wolfe where he wasn't a part of the story, where everything was second-hand. There is that--a lot of that--because so much of this case took place in cyberspace, where an information war was fought against the defendant, for starters. Have you noticed that almost everything is mediated these days, indirect, because of the technology? No, of course not, that would be to understand the nature of the historical moment we live in. You know, I'm sorry, it's true, I was unable during the proceedings to go post-human and have my mind encoded on a microchip, then uploaded onto the web, sorry, my mistake there. Put up, or shut up, don't fuck me around. I'm absolutely sure it's going to be the latter. "I would have talked with you, but you got up in my shit"--bullshit, you have no serious intention of setting the record straight, none of you former PMA escorts have but a small handful. I'm very serious, as a heart attack, as the club of a riot cop crashing down on a dissident's skull. No one needs to remind me that I learned the true meaning of "lying whore" from all of this.

 "Why don't you blah-blah-blah?" Kiss my ass? Why yes, yes you should.

Postscript on Sarah Palin...

Not only does Palin fakes orgasms, but also that she's part of the same species as the rest of us.

On Sarah Palin, generally...

Don't think for a second that Sarah Palin, this moronic bitch, this cunt, is anything but a fucking stupid and emotionally retarded child, much like her supporters. You all give her far too much credit. Yes, she has a nice rack and a great num-num ass that's she's used for ages to get ahead, but don't give her credit when she barely rises above an Anchorage hooker in wit, intellect, and basic street smarts. OK, that was unfair to Anchorage hookers, all ten of them. Comedian Lewis Black put it well that our political class is a "bowl of shit having to look at itself in the mirror" right now, but that would make Palin a bowl of diseased sexual emissions. Seward's (ice) box indeed...