Stratfor calls hack on its emails “deplorable”
Lawyers for WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange wrapped up their arguments Wednesday against his extradition to Sweden to face rape allegations, as they pursued a new ‘quiet’ approach to his defense strategy.
A collection of more than 5 million emails hacked from intelligence firm Stratfor’s servers and now being released by Wikileaks detail what the secret-sharing website is calling a global network of informants, which it says includes a large number of journalists.
Wikileaks implied that Yossi Melman, a journalist for the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz was one such informant, referring to email correspondence it obtained between Melman and a Stratfor analyst.
Melman tells Stratfor in the email that Uri Brodsky, a suspected Mossad spy allegedly involved with the 2010 assassinations of Hamas commanders in Dubai, was arrested at the request of Germany.
“Not true he was arrested by a request of Germany and not Dubai over the obtaining a German passport deceptively which was used in the murder,” Melman writes.
In a Excel spreadsheet taken from another email, which says “confed fuckhouse” in the subject line, contact information was found for journalists working at organizations such as Al Jazeera and Egypt’s al-Ahram. While Wikileaks claims that the spreadsheet details a vast informant network, some entries note that journalists were simply spoken to and that only nine had signed agreements with company.
In the case of the Haaretz journalist, he had already written about the subject publicly and in later correspondence between two Stratfor employees, one writes that Melman was simply “Doing his job” and linked to his article in Haaretz.
In a statement made on Monday, Stratfor criticized Wikileaks for their release of the emails and stressed that their organization is not affiliated with any government and that the company will not expound on their content.
“This is a deplorable, unfortunate — and illegal — breach of privacy. 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,” read the statement.