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).

Stratfor just released a statement that confirms the hacker narrative and, unsurprisingly, condemns both the attack and the impending Wikileak:

Those stolen emails apparently will be published by Wikileaks. This is a deplorable, unfortunate — and illegal — breach of privacy… As with last year’s hack, the release of these emails is a direct attack on Stratfor. This is another attempt to silence and intimidate the company, and one we reject.

Equally unsurprising is the ass-covering and rumour-forestalling campaign that Stratfor is officially beginning:

Some of the emails may be forged or altered to include inaccuracies; some may be authentic. We will not validate either. Nor will we explain the thinking that went into them. Having had our property stolen, we will not be victimized twice by submitting to questioning about them… The emails are private property. Like all private emails, they were written casually, with no expectation anyone other than the sender and recipient would ever see them. They should be read as such… We again apologize for any problems this incident has created, and we deeply appreciate the loyalty that has been shown to Stratfor since last year’s hack.

So what might these millions of “casual” emails contain that could cause such a well-connected intelligence firm to issue a preemptive damage control statement? We’ll need to wait and see the be sure, but the Wikileaks statement — well worth reading in full — contains quite a few tidbits of what it claims will “show Stratfor’s web of informers, pay-off structure, payment-laundering techniques and psychological methods”:

• “Government and diplomatic sources from around the world give Stratfor advance knowledge of global politics and events in exchange for money.”
• “Stratfor has a mix of covert and overt informants, which includes government employees, embassy staff and journalists around the world” who are  “paid via Swiss banks accounts and pre-paid credit cards” and through the “routine use of secret cash bribes.”
• “Stratfor did secret deals with dozens of media organisations and journalists – from Reuters to the Kiev Post.”
• Stratfor staff have fed tips to Israeli intelligence, and amusingly refer to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad as “Adogg” in some emails.
• Astoundingly, there exists a “revolving door that operates in private intelligence companies in the United States.” The release tells us that Stratfor’s current vice president for intelligence was “a former special agent with US State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service and was their Deputy Chief of the counterterrorism division,” and Wikipedia adds that he served on the Texas border security council under Rick Perry.

What I was most shocked to read about in this quite short release is an apparent collusion plan with Goldman Sachs due to launch this year. The emails, including “a confidential August 2011 document, marked DO NOT SHARE OR DISCUSS,” show that Goldman Sachs now-former managing director Shea Morenz and Stratfor CEO George Friedman “hatched an idea to ‘utilise the intelligence’ it was pulling in from its insider network to start up a captive strategic investment fund.” In 2011, “a complex offshore share structure extending as far as South Africa was erected” to hide the connection between Stratfor and the investment fund, shell game style. Morenz remains at Goldman, where he manages more than $100 billion in investments, and in 2011 he “invested ‘substantially’ more than $4 million and joined Stratfor’s board of directors.” Given how close this scheme sounds to insider trading on an international scale, it seems legally questionable, which would add Morenz to a distinguished list of Goldman Sachs executives who ought to be investigated.

As with Cablegate in late 2010, this promises to be an interesting development. Wikileaks is apparently partnering with over 25 journalistic organs and activists, including Rolling Stone and McClatchy, to report and analyze the emails. But the ties with governments run deep for Stratfor, so I expect to hear statements from key Administration officials in Defense and possibly State condemning it too. There might be the odd Congressman who’ll use it as an opportunity to remind us all how evil Wikileaks is for actively attacking our government’s big-hearted efforts at Keeping Us Safe. What we probably won’t see are any investigations or prosecutions. After all, how then would the US Intelligence agencies and the Marines and the Air Force figure out whom to shoot at and blow up?