Boing Boing:

The enormous corpus of email leaked from federal security contractor HB Gary following Anonymous's hacking of the company's servers continues to deliver compromising payloads.

This time, it's internal emails detailing the creation of "persona management" software to simplify the process of pretending to be several people at once online, in order simulate widespread support for a point of view -- astroturfing automation software. The software appears to have been developed in response to a federal government solicitation seeking automated tools for astroturfing message boards in foreign countries.

Persona management entails not just the deconfliction of persona artifacts such as names, email addresses, landing pages, and associated content. It also requires providing the human actors technology that takes the decision process out of the loop when using a specific persona. For this purpose we custom developed either virtual machines or thumb drives for each persona. This allowed the human actor to open a virtual machine or thumb drive with an associated persona and have all the appropriate email accounts, associations, web pages, social media accounts, etc. pre-established and configured with visual cues to remind the actor which persona he/she is using so as not to accidentally cross-contaminate personas during use.

I really love the phrase, "the deconfliction of persona artifacts." I really hate when my persona artifacts conflict, and it's just so hard to know who I'm supposed to be sometimes! Automating this sounds like a great idea.