Source: Boiling Frogs Post and Corbett Report
TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES:
TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES:
Late last year, hackers with the anonymous hacking group LulzSec
raided the servers of Strategic Forecasting, Inc., or Stratfor, a
private intelligence company in Austin, Texas, coming away with some 5
million emails. Last month, Wikileaks began publishing the emails as
“The Global Intelligence Files” to much fanfare.
Significant revelations have already emerged from the material.
One email from a Mexican military analyst alleged
that Russia and Israel have swapped data link codes for their military
hardware, allowing Russia to hack into Israeli-supplied Georgian drones
and Israel to disable Russian-supplied Iranian missiles.
Another claims
that Osama Bin Laden’s body was not “buried at sea” as claimed by
official US military sources—a claim Stratfor CEO George Friedman said
he personally doubted—but flown to the Armed Forces Institute of
Pathology in Bethesda and eventually cremated.
Yet another email, this one from a Turkish security analyst, claims
to confirm recent rumours that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan has
terminal cancer and has been given just two years to live by doctors.
All of these claims, and the many, many more like them that continue
to emerge on a daily basis from this email archive, are just that:
claims. Stratfor itself had its own system for assessing the
trustworthiness of its sources, grading them on a letter scale with “A”
being the most reliable. At best, many of these emails amount to nothing
more than informed speculation. At worst, they are nothing more than
gossip, rumours and outright lies that have been cynically peddled to a
company that makes its living dealing in salacious information.
Regardless of the truth of this or that particular claim, perhaps the
most significant thing to emerge from the emails is the fact that
companies like Stratfor exist at all. That private companies are in
possession of vast intelligence networks and vast sums of data on
private individuals is a trend that few are comfortable with, but few
are aware of until situations like the Stratfor leak bring back to the
public’s attention.
Last week I had the chance to discuss this issue
with Russell Tice, a 20-year veteran intelligence analyst who worked
for the DIA and the NSA, and is best known for blowing the whistle on
the Bush-era illegal NSA wiretapping program, about the concept of
privatized intelligence and what concerns him about the Stratfor leak.
The entire idea of outsourcing intelligence work to private companies
is disturbing for the exact same reasons that the outsourcing of
military work to contractors like Blackwater is disturbing. It fosters
an unhealthy relationship between intelligence agencies and the private
sector. It defers the question of culpability for misconduct and can be
used to shield the government from being held accountable for crimes
committed on its behalf. And it creates a revolving door that allows the
private companies enormous leeway in bending and breaking laws by
offering incentives to the agencies that are supposedly keeping an eye
on them.
As the home page
of the Global Intelligence Files notes, the release shines a light on
the murky world of the intelligence-industrial complex. Stratfor’s
sources include embassy staff, government employees and journalists,
paid via Swiss bank accounts and pre-paid credit cards to provide the
company with information that it could provide for clients.
Some of the more bizarre targets of this network included The Yes Men,
a group of pranksters who have targeted Dow Chemical for the Bhopal gas
disaster of 1984 which killed thousands and injured half a million
people. Stratfor also spied on PETA
for Coca-Cola, which was apparently concerned that the group’s protest
of the Vancouver Olympics might reflect poorly on Coke’s sponsorship of
the games.
More worryingly, the emails reveal that in 2009 Stratfor CEO George
Friedman consulted with Goldman Sachs managing director Shea Morenz on “StratCap,”
a scheme for using the insider intelligence gained from Stratfor’s
sources for making money from investments. In an August 2011 email,
Friedman explained:
“What StratCap will do is use our Stratfor’s intelligence and
analysis to trade in a range of geopolitical instruments, particularly
government bonds, currencies and the like”
In 2011, Morenz invested $4 million in the company and joined Stratfor’s board. StratCap is set to launch later this year.
Nor is Stratfor the only such company that uses such questionable and possibly illegal tactics in the world of spies-for-hire. Last year,
hackers compromised the servers of HBGary Federal, a Stratfor-like
company, revealing that they had pitched ideas to companies like the
Bank of America and the US Chamber of Commerce to distribute fake
documents about the companies’ critics in order to discredit them.
But even more than all of that, the question of for-profit
intelligence work takes on an altogether sinister tone in an
increasingly electronic world where so much data about each and every
person’s private lives are being tracked, stored and sold by private,
unaccountable corporations.
In 2010, a major scandal erupted
when it was revealed that Google Street View cars were not only
snapping pictures for the construction of Google’s mapping service, but
wi-fi data, including passwords and email messages. The revelations
prompted investigations in dozens of countries,
as well as fines in Swiss and French courts. In June of last year, a US
federal judge ruled that the company could be fined for wiretapping in
the case.
The company, whose corporate motto is “don’t be evil,” was helmed from 2001 until 2011 by Eric Schmidt, who once advised users
who were worried about privacy, “If you have something that you don’t
want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first
place.” He also suggested that in the future, people might have to change their names as they get older so friends, employers and co-workers won’t be able to Google their past.
Also in 2010, whistleblowing repository Cryptome.org
published criminal compliance guides for Microsoft, Skype, Facebook,
AOL, PayPal and MySpace, detailing how each site responds to various
government requests for information on their users. Microsoft was so
angry about the posting of their document,
which included detailed guides for government workers about what type
of information was logged for each account and how to read the logs
themselves, that they got Cryptome’s ISP to take the site down due to a copyright claim. After a counter-claim by the site’s owner, Cryptome and the Microsoft document were restored.
In December 2011, Privacy International released the results
of a year-long sting operation targeting the international surveillance
industry. Posing as potential customers, the group managed to acquire
hundreds of documents detailing all manner of electronic surveillance
equipment that could be used to track an iPhone, Android or Blackberry
users’ location, steal email contacts, and even change messages.
In January of this year, it was revealed
that a company called Vigilant Video has been compiling a database of
license plate scans using license plate reading technology. The database
has so far logged hundreds of millions of datapoints, each showing the
date, time and location of a given vehicle. The database, called the
National Vehicle Location Service, is available for free use by law
enforcement.
All of this information paints a bleak picture, but it is important
to understand that the question of increasing surveillance over our
personal lives is one that rests to a large extent in the hands of the
public. We tacitly endorse the actions of Microsoft every time we
purchase a computer running a Windows operating system. We give the OK
to Apple every time we purchase an iPhone. More and more, we even
willingly give up our privacy by posting the details of our whereabouts,
our contacts, and our activities on social media platforms.
It is true that programs like the NSA’s illegal wiretapping program
are an ongoing concern for all citizens of the US and around the world,
and remain largely out of the purview of the general public. That
governments around the world are increasingly contracting the services
of companies like Stratfor to do their dirty work for them is something
that must be rectified through a political process.
But when we fail to hold the corporations whose services we are using
accountable for what they do with our data, that is a problem which
begins and ends with an informed, active public taking the
responsibility of protecting their own information back into their own
hands.
Perhaps, in an ironic way, this is what the Stratfor leak really
points to after all: the fact that in an electronic world, our secrets
are only secret if we protect them. And if the Stratfor story teaches us
nothing else, the mere reminder that the safeguarding of our personal
information begins by taking our private data seriously will make the
entire episode valuable.
