Slashdot Mirror
WikiLeaks Begins Releasing Stratfor Internal Emails
owenferguson writes "WikiLeaks has begun leaking a cache of over 5 million internal emails from the the Texas-headquartered 'global intelligence' company Stratfor. The emails date from between July 2004 and late December 2011. They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal's Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Marines and the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency. The associated news release can be found on pastebin."
The plots of the reverse vampires will be revealed.
You mean the ones that acted as the catalyst for the Arab Spring? Maybe you didn't find them that interesting, but some of us did.
You've totally nailed the purpose of wikileaks: to entertain you. They should just give up.
Seems like a familiar acronym...
From the article:
"Government and diplomatic sources from around the world give Stratfor advance knowledge of global politics and events in exchange for money."
I hope it's effective. I don't have a problem with people buying info.
I do have a huge problem with people in positions of responsibility selling it for their own profit at our expense though...
For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. - Publius
You mean the ones that acted as the catalyst for oppressive Arab governments to be overthrown and replaced by even more oppressive Arab governments? Maybe you didn't find them that interesting, but some of us did.
FTFY
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I'm pretty sure that proof could be posted that the president eats babies, and a large segment of the population like yourself would say 'meh'. There was some rather nasty revelations in the Manning leaks, but I'm guessing you missed them or didn't cae.
That complacency is why our democracy is sliding away.
It's on America's tortured brow, That Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow
I think the point is that these intelligence services go beyond what any reasonable person would consider ethical or appropriate.
No, pastebin fronts as a code-sharing site. :)
Seriously, how have they not been nuked from orbit by the powers that be? Or at least vigorously co-opted by the NSA?
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
I'll wait 'til I've seen verification before I believe it or not ... but it's real or not, I still found this line funny:
If it's real, I also wonder about:
I mean, this is a group that makes their money by paying off people to get them information, in ways that are hinted are against the law (likely they're getting other people to break the law of other countries, even if the company themselves aren't) ... but they're against hackers that break the law? It seems a a bit hypocritical to me.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Her: "What looks like a bear, acts like and bear and IS a bear?"
Me: "Gee honey bubbles, I have no idea... I know I know - A BEAR!!!!"
Her: "Nuh uh!"
Me: "No? Then what looks like a bear and acts like a bear and IS a bear that ISN'T a Bear?"
Her: "A BERENSTAIN BEAR!!!!"
My daughter, the genius. If the CIA is a bear, Stratfor is a Berenstain Bear. Kind of like how a Southern Mansion is a Southern Mansion, but a Southern Mansion Style McMansion in the exurbs of San Diego is a caricature of a Mansion. Both comfy places to live, the McMansions just fake and cheezy and third rate as fuckall.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
The french revolution had quite a lot of bad governments before something good was found as well.
I'll wait 'til I've seen verification before I believe it or not ... but it's real or not, I still found this line funny:
If it's real, I also wonder about:
I mean, this is a group that makes their money by paying off people to get them information, in ways that are hinted are against the law (likely they're getting other people to break the law of other countries, even if the company themselves aren't) ... but they're against hackers that break the law? It seems a a bit hypocritical to me.
Sure, just like the way the government can't easily conduct certain forms of surveillance because that would run afoul of the 4th Amendment... but they can contract that out, purchasing the same information from companies conducting the same surveillance, and that's perfectly cromulent.
Yet, if you commit a crime by proxy, you're just as guilty as your hireling. For example, if you hired a contract killer you would be convicted for murder along with your mercenary. And unlike the US Constitution, the law under which you'd be convicted is not the highest law of the land.
Figure that one out in a logically consistent, non-hypocritical way.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I'm not a 'leftist', so I'll have to apologize for not fitting into your world of walking, talking strawmen.
Regardless, you seem to be under the (albeit sincerely naive) impression that all those things you list are still working in your favour, and that those in political and corporate power are beholden to your interests. They aren't. You're thinking is about 50 years too late - those were the 'good ole days' of benevolence and spirit, working against common enemies and using whatever means necessary to triumph.
In a world where governments are beholden to corporations with no loyalties, they are as likely to be working against you as they are for you. Get it yet?
It's on America's tortured brow, That Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow
I mean, this is a group that makes their money by paying off people to get them information, in ways that are hinted are against the law (likely they're getting other people to break the law of other countries, even if the company themselves aren't) ... but they're against hackers that break the law? It seems a a bit hypocritical to me.
It's only hacking if it is done by someone not in power, or not on the behest of someone in power.
The government can listen to your phone calls without a warrant. But a man recording police is being tried for a 75 year jail sentance for recording police out in the open.
In the same way, when it is the powers that be are stealing information through nefarious methods, it is just business as usual. When you do it to them, they call their friends - who arrest you.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
The Bhopal disaster was caused by Union Carbide. It had nothing to do with Dow. I don't like Dow either, but blaming them for that is ridiculous.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
DOW didn't buy on a whim, many people spent a lot of time in the process of buying the corp. Simply selling a corporation does not allow it to escape justice; despite them usually escaping justice anyway. DOW bought Union Carbide knowing the issues and expecting to never have to factor that cost other than maybe a few PR statements and lawyers considered minor baggage in the acquisition.
It has everything to do with DOW; because Union Carbide still exists within a bigger corporation - simply because the name changed and some people shuffled around does not make them disappear, it means the new name becomes the one we rail against.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Yeah, if they can't form a perfect representative democracy within a single year, then they deserve to live under dictatorial rule forever. It's high time we take up the white man's burden and show them how to live, because clearly they have no right to try to rule themselves.
Just out of curiosity, roughly how many fifths of a person would you say Arabs are?
you know when the U.S. Government tries to charge you under the Espionage Act, that's how.
Mark Anthony Collins
I am about to show my age, but once upon a time, news organizations were amongst the premier intelligence gathering organizations on Earth. No shit. Reporters could discover sources that foreign agents could never approach, keep secrets, and even upend a Presidency. Think of that. Now, they are just parts of conglomerates' entertainment divisions. So, what happened to the really good investigative journalists, who could dig diamonds from piles of crap? Well, some of them are at Stratfor.
You mean the ones that acted as the catalyst for the Arab Spring?
We keep hearing that from fans and boosters of Wikileaks, but it simply isn't true. Do you really think that the Arabs living under bad governments needed someone to tell them that they had badly run corrupt governments when it was a fact that assulted them nearly every day of their lives? Do you not know that many of those countries had been simmering under revolution or revolt for years? I guess the "White Man's Burden" is still with us in the form of "Wikileaks".
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
...considering this company, at first glance at TFS, seems to be primarily concerned with passing information of a secure and sensitive nature between not only State agencies of different countries but also defence contractors which themselves are concerned also with collecting and dispersing such information for whatever purposes; I'm concerned that it is dealing with the company which had the dubious honour of processing in and storing the UK census data from 2011. This is considered live information and as far as I'm concerned, what with the nature of the questions* contained in that census (I was a refuser for the following reason), that information in the wrong hands (ie ANY agency or individual working under the flag of a different nation - ANY DIFFERENT NATION!) is a persistent threat to national security, and whoever authorised such an arrangement should hang by their bollocks. If Lockheed Martin are involved with such a company, how much of the UK census data have they passed through this company to other companies or agencies, or how much of that data that this company has been entrusted with has found its way to eg DHS? I for one am very concerned.
*ie, what's the occupation of every adult of working age in the household, what's their earning power, how many hours do they work, how often individuals travel abroad, where they travel to...
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
"You're thinking is about 50 years too late - those were the 'good ole days' of benevolence and spirit, working against common enemies and using whatever means necessary to triumph."
This wasn't true 50 years ago either. The last time this was true was before recorded history.
The last time we had something like this, they were called Pinkertons. Between this company and companies like Blackwater, it's... it's just not good.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Regardless, you seem to be under the (albeit sincerely naive) impression that all those things you list are still working in your favour, and that those in political and corporate power are beholden to your interests. They aren't. You're thinking is about 50 years too late - those were the 'good ole days' of benevolence and spirit, working against common enemies and using whatever means necessary to triumph.
The thing that has changed is the enemy. This is really old wisdom, literally 2000 years at the least. If a country lacks outside enemies, it starts to find inside enemies. And since we don't do that christian/jew/black/whatever persecution thing anymore, it turned out that simply considering everyone else an enemy and taking the whole capitalist everyone-for-himself mantra seriously was the easiest solution.
Like all dogmas, once you take things too seriously, they start to go downhill.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
never driven by the stratfor building have you?
Do you really think that the Arabs living under bad governments needed someone to tell them that they had badly run corrupt governments
Strawman argument. The claimed effect of Wikileaks wasn't to "tell them how bad their government was", it was to "confirm" it. There is a difference between suspecting that your leaders are corrupt, and actually seeing classified intelligence reports from another country's diplomats detailing the exact corruption that is going on, and basically stating that your government operates more like the Mafia.
Would the revolution have happend without Facebook? Possibly - Berlin Wall fell long before people commonly had access to email. But does that mean that Facebook wasn't a factor? Obviously not: the fact that something was possible without X (where X is Facebook, Wikileaks etc.) does not mean that X was not a factor in this particular case.
Nobody is claiming that the Arab Spring happened because of Wikileaks, or because of Facebook or the internet. What people are claiming is that these things were contributing factors. Amnesty International named Wikileaks, the Internet, technology and journalism as being catalysts of the Arab Spring It's also worth pointing out that Qaddafi accused Wikileaks of being behind the Arab Spring in Tunisia, so it's not as if it's only Wikileaks supporters who saw Wikileaks as being a factor. Julian Assange has said Wikileaks played a role, but was not the major factor in the Arab Spring:
He said WikiLeaks had ''played a significant role'' in the uprisings sweeping the Arab world by publishing secret documents about those countries' authoritarian regimes, but the site was not the major factor in the movements.
''It does look like we played a significant role in it. That said, the tinder of the Middle East was drying,'' he said, crediting the internet and satellite TV stations like al-Jazeera with major roles in the uprisings.
Even those who reject the Wikileaks factor do admit it "may have played a minor atmospheric rule":
There’s been a lot of speculation, notably in the U.S., over the role social media played in the Tunisian revolution (it sure feels nice to say those two words.)
Wikileaks may have played a minor atmospheric rule in baring to the whole world what was whispered about the Ben Ali regime’s corruption, showing that US diplomats were aghast at the mafia nature of his regime.
Social media, from Twitter and Facebook to video upload sites, were crucial in spreading the word about what happened in a country where the press was tightly muzzled. It generated tremendous amounts of solidarity in the Arab world in beyond. But it’s just a means of communication, not a driver in itself.
At the end of the day, Tunisians took the streets because they had enough. They risked getting shot and beaten with no guarantee of success. And it’s likely that if they hadn’t heard about events around their country through Twitter and Facebook, they would have heard it by telephone.
i didn't know that Goldman Sachs bought a board membership and that it basically saved stratfor from going out of business.
i didn't know that GS was trading on information from stratfor. it creates all kinds of possibilities for GS to manipulate markets even more than it already does. it would be like if GS had someone sitting on the New York Times board or the Bloomberg board. it doesn't look very good to have people who make billions of dollars off of news reports actively having an influencing over the editorial decisions of that publishing body. but thats exactly what GS has here with stratfor and 'stratcap'.
now, add on top that Stratfor is allegedly bribing people for information, or using threats and intimidation, or 'pscyhological, sexual control' of sources to get information. you basically have Goldman Sachs directly involved in this stuff, its just all kinds of weird stuff.
Goldman has a history of inserting itself into relationships with other companies, and then doing weird things that are hugely conflicted. A perfect example being the Paulson hedge fund and the ABACUS junk mortgage CDOs they did in the mid 2000s. Then there is what they did on Nymex - being on the board, and being a huge trader at the same time, manipulating the oil market (see The Asylum by Leah McGrath Goodman).
"...government internal intelligence seems hampered by ideological slant and internal politics"
Not to mention national and international law, some level of oversight and what passes for morals and ethics. The same justification was used re the hiring of mercenary companies as they could do things outside the laws that restricted the normal armed forces.
A private intelligence/security company working at this level and unhindered by governmental limitations makes me very nervous.
It also makes me nervous that national security information is being passed to a private non-governmental entity in the hope of a job after leaving 'public service'. Such people should be prosecuted as traitors.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial