Anonymous Partners With WikiLeaks, Then Turns On Stratfor

The hacktivist collective Anonymous Sunday announced a new partnership with whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, followed by the release Monday of a collection of 5 million emails from Texas-based Stratfor (aka Strategic Forecasting), which bills itself as "a subscription-based provider of geopolitical analysis."

Stratfor Monday released a statement denouncing the email release as "a deplorable, unfortunate--and illegal--breach of privacy" and launched a damage-control campaign seeking to discredit the emails, saying they could have been altered by Anonymous. But Stratfor refused to confirm or deny any of the emails' contents. "Having had our property stolen, we will not be victimized twice by submitting to questioning about them," it said.

Stratfor appears to have run afoul of Anonymous and WikiLeaks on account of its intelligence-gathering activities. A blog post published Sunday on the AnonOps Communications blog, a reliable source of Anonymous-related information, accused Stratfor of being "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."

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