This Ars Technica rundown of the whole HBGary Federal vs. Anonymous/Wikileaks thing is really quite astonishing for a whole number of reasons, not least the staggering hubris and chutzpah of Aaron Barr, but there’s also the comparative ease with which Anonymous nailed Barr to his own mizzen. Maybe it’s just me, but the subtext I get from the whole business is that Barr’s desire to “take down” Anonymous stems from a sort of envy and admiration of them; funnier still are the communications between Barr and his pet programmer, who makes no bones about telling Barr he’s walking out onto very thin ice indeed.

Most astonishing of all (though hardly news in this day and age) is the staggering amount of money that shadowy and largely unaccountable outfits like can charge government agencies for work that neither party fully understands or – more importantly – wants the general public to know about. And as Chairman Bruce points out, there’s probably a whole lot more operations just like it that we never get to hear about:

The question now is, do people stumble over the truth here and just sort of dust themselves off and traipse away sideways — or are there more shoes to drop? The furious and deeply humiliated lawyers at HBGary ought to have enough federal clout to pursue their Anonymous harassers and nail them to the barn like corn-eating crows — after all, they claimed they know who they are, and that’s why they got savagely hacked in the first place.

However — are HBGary gonna be able to carry out that revenge attack with their usual discretion — the shadowy obscurity with which they help deny climate change and break labor unions for the Chamber of Commerce? It’s like watching a shark fight a school of ink-squirting squids.

Normally, one never sees a submarine struggle like this. If it does happen to surface, it gets cordially ignored, or ritually dismissed as a sea-monster story. But boy, this one sure is leaky.

Things are getting very permeable of late, aren’t they?