The powerful law firm at the center of the WikiLeaks plot

One of the big outstanding questions in the story of the plot to undermine WikiLeaks and Salon's Glenn Greenwald, as well as a separate plan to discredit critics of the Chamber of Commerce, is the nature of the role played by the large international law firm Hunton & Williams.

Hunton, which brags it employs 1,000 lawyers in 18 offices on three continents, has worked for both the Chamber and Bank of America. The company is nervous because WikiLeaks is reportedly planning to release internal bank documents, and Bank of America apparently connected with Hunton to help respond to the crisis.

Hunton attorneys in turn had a series of e-mail communications -- since hacked by WikiLeaks supporters and published online -- with a trio of technology firms that proposed various schemes to attack WikiLeaks, Greenwald and critics of the Chamber. (One typical idea was to provide labor activists with false documents in order to discredit them.)

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Inside look at foreclosure decisions

Internal documents and emails give insight into how lender decides whether to foreclose

One Valley man says he doubts mortgage giant Fannie Mae's pledges to help troubled homeowners, after he disputed his foreclosure. Some of the lender's internal communications shed light on the way his home's fate was decided.

In investigating the claims of Phoenix resident Glen Reinfried, 12 News obtained Fannie Mae documents and internal emails relating to Reinfried's case. They show conflict between what some staff members want the company's public image to be and the realities of a major mortgage company in the midst of the housing market collapse.

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Confidential Communique: Secure Client Information Exchange

Confidential Communique: Secure Client Information Exchange: "It is not Email.
S.C.I.E. is for secure high level executive communications, that must forever remain confidential.
The cells and the..."

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Anonymous Hacks Security Firm Investigating It; Releases E-mail

A U.S. security firm that claimed to have uncovered the real identity of Anonymous members responsible for a recent spate of web site attacks became a victim of Anonymous itself, when members of the online vigilante group breached the company’s network and stole more than 60,000 internal e-mails.

The group posted the e-mail spool Sunday on the Pirate Bay torrent site for anyone to download and sift through.

HBGary Federal, which does classified work for the U.S. federal government among other security work, claimed it had been working with the FBI to unmask hackers behind recent denial-of-service attacks against PayPal, Visa, MasterCard and Amazon. Members of Anonymous — a loosely structured group of internet troublemakers — had organized the mass attacks after the companies suspended accounts used by WikiLeaks to receive donations and host documents. More recently, members of the group directed denial-of-service attacks against government web sites in Tunisia and Egypt.

Last month, the FBI announced it had executed more than 40 search warrants against people suspected of participating in the WikiLeaks-related attacks. British police also arrested five men in relation to the attacks.

The hack against HBGary Federal occurred after the Financial Times published a story on Saturday quoting Aaron Barr, CEO of the company. Barr said his company’s researchers had uncovered clues to the real identities of top members of Anonymous by monitoring chat rooms and Facebook groups they frequented. Barr identified a co-founder of the group, who goes by the name Q, and said he planned to give some of the information to the FBI. He also planned to present his findings at a security conference in San Francisco next week.

On Sunday, Anonymous ridiculed the company’s research skills and the accuracy of its data in a press release posted at Daily Kos, mocking the company’s “infiltration of our entirely secret IRC server anonops.ru and in particular our ultra-classified channels #opegypt, #optunisia, and, of course, #reporters, which itself is the most secret of all.”

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Madoff trustee: JP Morgan Execs Warned of Fraud

NEW YORK (AP) -- E-mails and other internal documents show that executives at JPMorgan Chase were complicit in Bernard Madoff's massive fraud, lawyers seeking to recover funds for his victims said Thursday.

The lawyers work for a court-appointed trustee who filed a $6.4 billion complaint under seal late last year against JPMorgan, the disgraced financier's primary bank for two decades. The parties agreed to make portions of it public on Thursday.

Among the e-mails cited is one in 2007 in which an unidentified JPMorgan Chase employee recounts being told "there is a well-known cloud over the head of Madoff and that his returns are speculated to be part of a (P)onzi scheme."

The material supports allegations that "the bank's top executives were warned in blunt terms about speculation that Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme," attorney Deborah Renner said in a statement. "Yet the bank appears to have been more concerned only with protecting its own investments in (the Madoff firm's) feeder funds."

In a statement on Thursday, JPMorgan said the complaint "is meritless and is based on distortions of both the relevant facts and the governing law."

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