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Analysis Foreign Policy

the global intelligence files are on the way

Wikileaks announced today that it will be publishing another massive dump of leaked documents that “date from between July 2004 and late December 2011” in the coming weeks. This time, it’s an archive of more than five million internal emails from the “global intelligence” firm Stratfor, founded during the Clinton administration and headquartered in Austin, Texas. Wikipedia says Stratfor is actually short for Strategic Forecasting, Inc, and the obnoxious smartness of the branding is, I think, an insight to the nature of the company. According to their website, Stratfor is a “subscription-based provider of geopolitical analysis” whose goal is “to make the complexity of the world understandable to an intelligent readership, without ideology, agenda or national bias.” Their website main page looks a lot like that of a typical news and analysis organ, complete with a hierarchy of chronological stories and quick links (compare it with BBC News).

This is the same Stratfor that made news last Baby Jesus Day when Anonymous claimed it had hacked the intelligence service’s website and stolen unencrypted passwords and credit card information belonging to its subscribers. Anonymous then used that information to make donations to various charities, and it published the subscriber list, which was reported at the time to include Apple, the Miami Police Department, and the US Air Force. Wikileaks now adds to that partial list “Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defense Intelligence Agency.” I find it comforting to know that the same intelligence group on which hugely influential organizations in both the public and private sectors rely didn’t encrypt sensitive information, but it does seem that they had managed to pull the full list from the web (look at this and this, or more accurately, don’t).