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Whistleblowing website WikiLeaks on Monday began publishing -- The Global Intelligence Files -- more than five million confidential emails from Texas-headquartered "global intelligence" company Stratfor that has been likened to a shadow Central Intelligence Agency.
The emails, which date from between July 2004 and late December 2011, reveal the inner workings of the company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to government agencies, including the United States Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defence Intelligence Agency and large corporations such as Bhopal's Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, to name a few.
The messages will reveal Stratfor's "web of informers, pay-off structure, payment-laundering techniques and psychological methods," claimed a WikiLeaks press release. "The material shows how a private intelligence agency works, and how they target individuals for their corporate and government clients," it added.
The material contains privileged information about the US government's attacks against Julian Assange and WikiLeaks and Stratfor's own attempts to subvert WikiLeaks. There are more than 4,000 emails mentioning WikiLeaks or Julian Assange.
The emails also expose the revolving door that operates in private intelligence companies in the United States. Government and diplomatic sources from around the world give Stratfor advance knowledge of global politics and events in exchange for money.
Stratfor in a statement shortly said the release of its stolen emails was an attempt to silence and intimidate it. It said it would not be cowed under the leadership of George Friedman, Stratfor's founder and chief executive officer. It said Friedman had not resigned as CEO, contrary to a bogus email circulating on the Internet.
Some of the emails being published "may be forged or altered to include inaccuracies; some may be authentic, the company statement said.
WikiLeaks did not reveal how it had acquired access to the vast haul of internal and external correspondence of the company.
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