Aaron Barr revisits Anonymous

ENEMY OF THE HACKTIVISTS, Aaron Barr has raised his head again with his views on the Anonymous collective.

Barr, who worked at HBGary Federal was shamed earlier this year after he flapped his gums about how he had infiltrated Anonymous and how he was about to bring the organisation down. Since that happened, or more precisely since Anonymous found out about this and embarrassed Barr out of his job, he's been pretty quiet.

Except for a brief appearance on a schedule for a security event, which ultimately he was not able to fulfill, we've not heard much of Barr, so its nice that he has re-appeared, this time in an discussion with the editors at security firm Kaspersky's Threatpost security blog.

Barr might not have been able to take part in the discussions he was hoping to at this years Defcon but that doesn't mean that he did not turn up. He was apprehensive, but enjoyed himself - at least by his account.

"Being at the conference definitely felt odd. Here was a place where so many people knew this very public story about me. I had no idea what to expect. Would I be confronted? Heckled or, possibly, welcomed?," he said.

"I figured, going in, there were good odds that I would have some type of confrontation at some point. But it never came. In fact, it was a great trip. Like all Blackhat/DEFCON trips, I hung out with friends, met new people, had lots of laughs, talked about the state of our industry, drank too much and didn't sleep enough."

Barr was there incommunicado and wore a sort of disguise - "a baseball cap, shorts, t-shirt, and a healthy 5 o'clock shadow," he explained, and using this get-up he attended the part of the conference he had been supposed to speak at, albeit from a seat at the back.

Barr was asked to comment on Anonymous again, something that he was going to do at Defcon and something that we imagine he will spend the rest of his life doing.

"I have always been and still consider myself a liberal, but I am a liberal who has spent a career working in government and defense..." he said.

"But I also support the ideal of Western information dominance as a means of protecting our freedoms - including the freedom to access information. I believe that sometimes circumstances require more aggressive tactics in order to maintain stability."

He added that this was not his ideological belief, but an opinion that was "born out of necessity". Despite this, he said that what hacktivists like Anonymous are fighting against is an over-inflated threat that has been taken out of proportion.

"In my opinion, well-intentioned efforts run afoul of some civil libertarians and privacy advocates because of the perception of encroachment. But with mediums like social networking Web sites, which enable easy manipulation of identity, it is getting difficult to separate the actual threats from the bystanders," he explained.