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3.3 million e-mails between the most powerful men are about to be released.

308 points by sathishmanohar 15y ago

rufibarbatus 15y ago
I've been in the financial consulting business for a while and I'm still sometimes stunned by the kinds of things clients will send me as unencrypted email. What's the legal status of email? Is it treated as if it were "just like snail mail"? My point being: wouldn't it actually be better in terms of fostering awareness and better processes if cleartext email bore no presumed privacy whatsoever? Then, say, a couple standards might get updated, and companies might need to update their internal processes in order to comply. EDIT: Rearranged some paragraphs. Taking the opportunity to acknowledge the alternative to my "simply stop legally blessing people's treating email as if it were snail mail": to regulate the internet further and try to impose "Intel takedowns" and/or stricter protocols than the ones that outline email today.
- gwern 15y ago
  > What's the legal status of email? Is it treated as if it were "just like snail mail"? If only. That would be an improvement. As matters stand, they're much more poorly protected: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_privacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_privacy > After 180 days in the U.S., email messages lose their status as a protected communication under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and become just another database record.[6] This means that a subpoena instead of a warrant is all that's needed for a government agency to force email providers such as Google's Gmail to produce a copy.[6] Other countries may even lack this basic protection, and Google's databases are distributed all over the world. Since the Patriot Act was passed, it's unclear whether this ECPA protection is worth much anymore in the U.S., or whether it even applies to email that originates from non-citizens in other countries.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
donky_cong 15y ago
Where is WikiLeaks when its needed
- mschonfeld 15y ago
  Military prison, European jail, fleeing and hiding in south America, etc...
mike-cardwell 15y ago
They should have used https://grepular.com/Automatically_Encrypting_all_Incoming_Email https://grepular.com/Automatically_Encrypting_all_Incoming_E...
- mschonfeld 15y ago
  Haha if stratfor bothered to encrypt anything, I trust that they would keep the encryption keys in their home folder in a file called "ENCRYPTION KEY.PRIVATE"
  - mike-cardwell 15y ago
    Ideally you'd generate a new keypair for each employee. Move their private key onto an OpenPGP smart card, and give them that. Then encrypt all of their incoming email with their public key on the server as it comes in. In case they lose their smartcard or you need to recover their email for any other reason, keep a second copy of their key, password protected, offline, in a safe. Or alternatively encrypt all incoming email with a second master key, whos private key is offline, password protected, in a safe.
DevX101 15y ago
900 upvotes and 92 comments on the reddit thread, yet not one comment that is critical of this action. To release the emails of private individuals and firms without any a priori evidence that they have committed any sort of crime is distasteful to me. It would be unethical if the tables were turned and ordinary citizens were getting their emails released. And its unethical in this case as well, regardless of whether the victims are powerful or not. I supported the wikileaks 'collateral damage' video leak, because I think its important that our government be transparent and its citizen understand the ramifications of going to war. But this, I can't support it.
- angersock 15y ago
  It would be unethical if the tables were turned and ordinary citizens were getting their emails released. It would be unethical if a company properly secured their servers. It would be educational if ordinary citizens expected their communications to be completely private without taking reasonable measure to assure same. This is a great lesson in security. I supported the wikileaks 'collateral damage' video leak, because I think its important that our government be transparent and its citizen understand the ramifications of going to war. But this, I can't support it. One of the ramifications of going to war, like it or not, is increased scrutiny. This is a weaker form of the "collateral damage" that our politicians and bureaucrats routinely write off.
  - angersock 15y ago
    Alright, so, anyone care to put effort into a reply as opposed to solely downvotes?
    - danilocampos 15y ago
      > It would be unethical if a company properly secured their servers. My guess is that this is the root. It's unethical for you to walk into my house and read my mail regardless of whether I locked the door that morning or not. I'm not losing any sleep over this particular leak, just saying, what I quoted is probably their beef.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
- mike-cardwell 15y ago
  Maybe he's using a pseudonym and Tor? It's easy enough to publish anonymously on the Internet...
- test01 15y ago
  Its not the actual emails, rather a prediction that the emails will be released.
jonhendry 15y ago
Yeah, nobody messes with Doctors Without Borders. In any case, I expect the emails to be a lot of subscriber list maintenance, back issues, UNSUBSCRIBE messages, maybe PDFs of scans of material that was either public at the time or became public since, that were sent in by contacts or sources.
peterwwillis 15y ago
Ugh. Why does the title say 3.3 million e-mails? The pastebin claims 2.7 million. Why did they feel the need to announce this before the wiki had all the data? Barrett just had to get extra PR time? Why do all these releases sound like they're written by kids in tree forts with bed sheet capes on? Then again all self-righteous announcements kind of read the same way to me. What's with their wiki? What is this shit? http://echelon2.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges http://echelon2.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges This whole thing is a big Anonymous waste of fucking time. Please flag this.
officemonkey 15y ago
Not to be a pedant, but it should be "among", not "between."
- imurray 15y ago
  That is pedantic, and not in a particularly well justified way: http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/nonerrors.html#between http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/nonerrors.html#between
  - officemonkey 15y ago
    Usage of "between" in this particular headline causes confusion because between implies there are only two men. If the line read "3.3 million e-mails between many of the most powerful men are about to be released." I would have grimaced and kept my piece.
    - officemonkey 15y ago
      peace* <- Muphry's Law strikes.
forensic 15y ago
Stratfor is not much more than a small news organization. Why would a news company have secret intelligence from the "world's most powerful men"? They are in the business of publishing everything they know -- that's how they get paid! Their info is not secret. Anyone who emails them is trying to get info RELEASED, not hide it! They certainly have secret informants, but why do you want to compromise informants who are willing to work with the press? What does that solve? Dick Cheney does not send emails to Stratfor. He's not stupid! This whole operation is just another demonstration that Anonymous only targets low hanging fruit. They tried hacking the NYT but their security was too good. They tried hacking the Pentagon but hopelessly failed. So they decided to hack a small (high-quality) news company with 70 employees, that reports exclusively on global affairs. Now they are going to reveal Stratfor's sources and get people killed, just like they did in the Mexico affair. This isn't an achievement, it's just showing off. I doubt they are going to find much and the victims of this release are not going to be anyone in powerful positions. Rather it will be informants like Gaddafi's Butler who will have their lives ruined. For the record, I would support Anonymous if they actually bothered to hack the government and release those files. I would even support them if they hacked known bad guys like Halliburton or known propaganda networks like FOX. But Anonymous is just picking low-hanging fruit and hyping it up to make themselves look good. The "top secret client list" is nothing more than a marketing strategy by Stratfor. Their client list is: people interested in global politics.
russellallen 15y ago
Well done, Anonymous. You've hacked into an independent online news service, destroyed their business, probably permanently shut them down, stole money from their readers and will now release all their correspondence with their sources. Fuck you. I was a subscriber - I suppose I should now go back to getting all my news from Murdoch. This is a blow against the freedom of the press and a blow against a free and open society. There is a reason why we should as a society respect journalists and their sources. I hope the perpetrators are prosecuted and jailed.
akamaka 15y ago
I subscribed to Stratfor for a while and I thought I'd explain what the site is for anyone who's wondering. (And yes, my info was part of the leak, unfortunately) It's basically a subscription news site ($100/year) that delivers focused international news. They usually stay away from trendy topics and party politics, which is pretty nice. Despite their claims of having sources around the world, it's quite obvious that most of their information comes from other newspapers and just Googling around. It's infrequent that they would mention getting information from a source, and when they did, it was never anything more than an aside or a rumor. Certainly nothing of value. That's why I seriously doubt that anything explosive will come from this email leak. People who have access to sensitive information leak it for two reasons: to spread their message to a wide audience (think Watergate and the Washington Post, or Bradley Manning and Wikileaks), or to swap it with other insider groups, in exchange for other information. Stratfor, with its small audience and utter lack of people on the ground, has neither. Finally, I probably sound kind of negative about Stratfor, and while I no longer subscribe, they did have some really great, unique articles that you wouldn't find in any newspaper. Here's one example: http://www.4hoteliers.com/4hots_fshw.php?mwi=3645 http://www.4hoteliers.com/4hots_fshw.php?mwi=3645
asdfurtedfgs 15y ago
I have higher hopes for hacker news. There is more to this than the morality of publishing emails. http://pastebin.com/8yrwyNkt http://pastebin.com/8yrwyNkt Specifically, of interest (at least to me), as the post claims that Stratfor themselves said this (I haven't actually checked/found external verification, please post URL if you do): "In the past month Stratfor has drawn attention to a carefully assembled open-source report that asserted that last month's attack on Iraq wasn't intended just to punish Saddam Hussein for blowing off U.N. weapons inspectors. By sorting through thousands of pieces of publicly available data--from Middle East newspapers to Iraqi-dissident news--Stratfor analysts developed a theory that the attacks were actually designed to mask a failed U.S.-backed coup. In two striking, contrarian intelligence briefs released on the Internet on Jan. 5 and Jan. 6, Stratfor argued that Saddam's lightning restructuring of the Iraqi military, followed by executions of the army's Third Corps commanders, was evidence that the coup had been suppressed. Predictably, U.S. officials said the report was wrong." Is everyone here happy with the claim that Anonymous hacked in and copied emails; is it too hard to imagine that it's a false flag op? Neither side can prove themselves, that is true, but there should be more trepidation before making claims or assuming we are being handed the truth. Also, take a look at http://anonanalytics.com/ http://anonanalytics.com/ if you haven't, the PDF they published recently is a pretty good read. That's a faction of Anon that I have high hopes for.
- jonhendry 15y ago
  So a false flag hack was undertaken to, what, punish Stratfor over something they published about seven/eight years ago? As opposed to a bunch of misguided, ignorant script kiddies thinking Stratfor is something it isn't?
hessenwolf 15y ago
I wonder how many marriages will be in tatters...
thisismyname 15y ago
When are these getting released?

308 points by sathishmanohar 15y ago

I've been in the financial consulting business for a while and I'm still sometimes stunned by the kinds of things clients will send me as unencrypted email. What's the legal status of email? Is it treated as if it were "just like snail mail"? My point being: wouldn't it actually be better in terms of fostering awareness and better processes if cleartext email bore no presumed privacy whatsoever? Then, say, a couple standards might get updated, and companies might need to update their internal processes in order to comply. EDIT: Rearranged some paragraphs. Taking the opportunity to acknowledge the alternative to my "simply stop legally blessing people's treating email as if it were snail mail": to regulate the internet further and try to impose "Intel takedowns" and/or stricter protocols than the ones that outline email today.

gwern 15y ago
> What's the legal status of email? Is it treated as if it were "just like snail mail"? If only. That would be an improvement. As matters stand, they're much more poorly protected: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_privacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_privacy > After 180 days in the U.S., email messages lose their status as a protected communication under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and become just another database record.[6] This means that a subpoena instead of a warrant is all that's needed for a government agency to force email providers such as Google's Gmail to produce a copy.[6] Other countries may even lack this basic protection, and Google's databases are distributed all over the world. Since the Patriot Act was passed, it's unclear whether this ECPA protection is worth much anymore in the U.S., or whether it even applies to email that originates from non-citizens in other countries.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

donky_cong 15y ago

Where is WikiLeaks when its needed

mschonfeld 15y ago
Military prison, European jail, fleeing and hiding in south America, etc...

mike-cardwell 15y ago

They should have used https://grepular.com/Automatically_Encrypting_all_Incoming_Email https://grepular.com/Automatically_Encrypting_all_Incoming_E...

mschonfeld 15y ago
Haha if stratfor bothered to encrypt anything, I trust that they would keep the encryption keys in their home folder in a file called "ENCRYPTION KEY.PRIVATE"
- mike-cardwell 15y ago
  Ideally you'd generate a new keypair for each employee. Move their private key onto an OpenPGP smart card, and give them that. Then encrypt all of their incoming email with their public key on the server as it comes in. In case they lose their smartcard or you need to recover their email for any other reason, keep a second copy of their key, password protected, offline, in a safe. Or alternatively encrypt all incoming email with a second master key, whos private key is offline, password protected, in a safe.

DevX101 15y ago

900 upvotes and 92 comments on the reddit thread, yet not one comment that is critical of this action. To release the emails of private individuals and firms without any a priori evidence that they have committed any sort of crime is distasteful to me. It would be unethical if the tables were turned and ordinary citizens were getting their emails released. And its unethical in this case as well, regardless of whether the victims are powerful or not. I supported the wikileaks 'collateral damage' video leak, because I think its important that our government be transparent and its citizen understand the ramifications of going to war. But this, I can't support it.

angersock 15y ago
It would be unethical if the tables were turned and ordinary citizens were getting their emails released. It would be unethical if a company properly secured their servers. It would be educational if ordinary citizens expected their communications to be completely private without taking reasonable measure to assure same. This is a great lesson in security. I supported the wikileaks 'collateral damage' video leak, because I think its important that our government be transparent and its citizen understand the ramifications of going to war. But this, I can't support it. One of the ramifications of going to war, like it or not, is increased scrutiny. This is a weaker form of the "collateral damage" that our politicians and bureaucrats routinely write off.
- angersock 15y ago
  Alright, so, anyone care to put effort into a reply as opposed to solely downvotes?
  - danilocampos 15y ago
    > It would be unethical if a company properly secured their servers. My guess is that this is the root. It's unethical for you to walk into my house and read my mail regardless of whether I locked the door that morning or not. I'm not losing any sleep over this particular leak, just saying, what I quoted is probably their beef.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

mike-cardwell 15y ago
Maybe he's using a pseudonym and Tor? It's easy enough to publish anonymously on the Internet...
test01 15y ago
Its not the actual emails, rather a prediction that the emails will be released.

jonhendry 15y ago

Yeah, nobody messes with Doctors Without Borders. In any case, I expect the emails to be a lot of subscriber list maintenance, back issues, UNSUBSCRIBE messages, maybe PDFs of scans of material that was either public at the time or became public since, that were sent in by contacts or sources.

peterwwillis 15y ago

Ugh. Why does the title say 3.3 million e-mails? The pastebin claims 2.7 million. Why did they feel the need to announce this before the wiki had all the data? Barrett just had to get extra PR time? Why do all these releases sound like they're written by kids in tree forts with bed sheet capes on? Then again all self-righteous announcements kind of read the same way to me. What's with their wiki? What is this shit? http://echelon2.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges http://echelon2.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges This whole thing is a big Anonymous waste of fucking time. Please flag this.

officemonkey 15y ago

Not to be a pedant, but it should be "among", not "between."

imurray 15y ago
That is pedantic, and not in a particularly well justified way: http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/nonerrors.html#between http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/nonerrors.html#between
- officemonkey 15y ago
  Usage of "between" in this particular headline causes confusion because between implies there are only two men. If the line read "3.3 million e-mails between many of the most powerful men are about to be released." I would have grimaced and kept my piece.
  - officemonkey 15y ago
    peace* <- Muphry's Law strikes.

forensic 15y ago

Stratfor is not much more than a small news organization. Why would a news company have secret intelligence from the "world's most powerful men"? They are in the business of publishing everything they know -- that's how they get paid! Their info is not secret. Anyone who emails them is trying to get info RELEASED, not hide it! They certainly have secret informants, but why do you want to compromise informants who are willing to work with the press? What does that solve? Dick Cheney does not send emails to Stratfor. He's not stupid! This whole operation is just another demonstration that Anonymous only targets low hanging fruit. They tried hacking the NYT but their security was too good. They tried hacking the Pentagon but hopelessly failed. So they decided to hack a small (high-quality) news company with 70 employees, that reports exclusively on global affairs. Now they are going to reveal Stratfor's sources and get people killed, just like they did in the Mexico affair. This isn't an achievement, it's just showing off. I doubt they are going to find much and the victims of this release are not going to be anyone in powerful positions. Rather it will be informants like Gaddafi's Butler who will have their lives ruined. For the record, I would support Anonymous if they actually bothered to hack the government and release those files. I would even support them if they hacked known bad guys like Halliburton or known propaganda networks like FOX. But Anonymous is just picking low-hanging fruit and hyping it up to make themselves look good. The "top secret client list" is nothing more than a marketing strategy by Stratfor. Their client list is: people interested in global politics.

russellallen 15y ago

Well done, Anonymous. You've hacked into an independent online news service, destroyed their business, probably permanently shut them down, stole money from their readers and will now release all their correspondence with their sources. Fuck you. I was a subscriber - I suppose I should now go back to getting all my news from Murdoch. This is a blow against the freedom of the press and a blow against a free and open society. There is a reason why we should as a society respect journalists and their sources. I hope the perpetrators are prosecuted and jailed.

akamaka 15y ago

I subscribed to Stratfor for a while and I thought I'd explain what the site is for anyone who's wondering. (And yes, my info was part of the leak, unfortunately) It's basically a subscription news site ($100/year) that delivers focused international news. They usually stay away from trendy topics and party politics, which is pretty nice. Despite their claims of having sources around the world, it's quite obvious that most of their information comes from other newspapers and just Googling around. It's infrequent that they would mention getting information from a source, and when they did, it was never anything more than an aside or a rumor. Certainly nothing of value. That's why I seriously doubt that anything explosive will come from this email leak. People who have access to sensitive information leak it for two reasons: to spread their message to a wide audience (think Watergate and the Washington Post, or Bradley Manning and Wikileaks), or to swap it with other insider groups, in exchange for other information. Stratfor, with its small audience and utter lack of people on the ground, has neither. Finally, I probably sound kind of negative about Stratfor, and while I no longer subscribe, they did have some really great, unique articles that you wouldn't find in any newspaper. Here's one example: http://www.4hoteliers.com/4hots_fshw.php?mwi=3645 http://www.4hoteliers.com/4hots_fshw.php?mwi=3645

asdfurtedfgs 15y ago

I have higher hopes for hacker news. There is more to this than the morality of publishing emails. http://pastebin.com/8yrwyNkt http://pastebin.com/8yrwyNkt Specifically, of interest (at least to me), as the post claims that Stratfor themselves said this (I haven't actually checked/found external verification, please post URL if you do): "In the past month Stratfor has drawn attention to a carefully assembled open-source report that asserted that last month's attack on Iraq wasn't intended just to punish Saddam Hussein for blowing off U.N. weapons inspectors. By sorting through thousands of pieces of publicly available data--from Middle East newspapers to Iraqi-dissident news--Stratfor analysts developed a theory that the attacks were actually designed to mask a failed U.S.-backed coup. In two striking, contrarian intelligence briefs released on the Internet on Jan. 5 and Jan. 6, Stratfor argued that Saddam's lightning restructuring of the Iraqi military, followed by executions of the army's Third Corps commanders, was evidence that the coup had been suppressed. Predictably, U.S. officials said the report was wrong." Is everyone here happy with the claim that Anonymous hacked in and copied emails; is it too hard to imagine that it's a false flag op? Neither side can prove themselves, that is true, but there should be more trepidation before making claims or assuming we are being handed the truth. Also, take a look at http://anonanalytics.com/ http://anonanalytics.com/ if you haven't, the PDF they published recently is a pretty good read. That's a faction of Anon that I have high hopes for.

jonhendry 15y ago
So a false flag hack was undertaken to, what, punish Stratfor over something they published about seven/eight years ago? As opposed to a bunch of misguided, ignorant script kiddies thinking Stratfor is something it isn't?

hessenwolf 15y ago

I wonder how many marriages will be in tatters...

thisismyname 15y ago

When are these getting released?