Stratfor email leak
[4] On December 24, 2011, hackers took control of Stratfor's website and released a list of names, credit card numbers, passwords, and home and email addresses.
The emails revealed Stratfor's surveillance of groups such as Occupy Wall Street and activists fighting for compensation from Dow Chemicals for the Bhopal disaster.
[6] The e-mails are alleged to include client information, notes between Stratfor employees and internal procedural documentation on securing intelligence data.
[9] In an initial announcement, WikiLeaks stated that they opened up a database of the emails to two dozen media organizations operating in several countries, including the McClatchy Company, l'Espresso, la Repubblica, ARD, the Russia Reporter,[10] and Rolling Stone,[9] along with a "sneak preview" to the Yes Men.
[27] Mark LeVine, professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, described this as "troubling" because Homeland Security had coordinated police attacks on the Occupy movement.
[21] An email from a Stratfor analyst indicated that up to 12 officials in Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency knew of Osama bin-Laden's safe house.
Ynetnews also stated that, during the 2008 South Ossetia war, the leaked emails revealed Georgia "realized that their UAVs were compromised and were looking for a replacement for the Israeli made drones".
Burton stated by email that Netanyahu informed him of his success in consolidating power within the Likud party ahead of regaining the position of prime minister, shared thoughts regarding his distrust of US President Barack Obama, threatened assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and declared intentions to unilaterally start a war against Iran.
The emails indicate that Stratfor was receiving information about Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez's medical condition from an Israeli intelligence source.
[21] In the emails, staff discuss a report from a Stratfor source that Israeli commandos and Kurdish fighters destroyed Iranian nuclear facilities.
[10] WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told Reuters that his concerns with Stratfor stem from it relying on informants from government agencies and its monitoring of activist organizations.
[33] Max Fisher, the associate director of The Atlantic, argued that Stratfor has a poor reputation "among foreign policy writers, analysts, and practitioners" and that as a result Anonymous and Wikileaks have exaggerated the significance of the information they released.
[37] Daniel W. Drezner, a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, wrote in Foreign Policy that the "docu-dump says more about Wikileaks and Anonymous than it does about anything else" and criticized the hype of the release.
