"The Curse of the #gifiles"

This article originally appeared @ http://wlcentral.org/node/2488 but has since been deleted.

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The curse of the #gifiles
Submitted by icon on Tue, 03/06/2012 - 22:13

The Stratfor e mails stolen by Anonymous were temporarily stored on a server that could be accessed by the FBI, the Guardian reports based on recently released court documents. This raises, amongst others, the question whether these e mails could have been tampered with on route from the Stratfor server to Wikileaks.

Such a scenario had been insinuated in a press statement issued by Stratfor after Wikileaks announced the new release:

"Some of the emails may be forged or altered to include inaccuracies; some may be authentic. We will not validate either."

Most of the e mails that have insofar been released could by all accounts be genuine; a larger proportion are discussions based on sources and news reports. Some surveillance of activists is also not entirely unexpected, and could very well have been carried out by such a company.

Some of the e mails do however catch the eye, as they reveal a deeper knowledge of the topic than the rest of the released material. These are one liners sent by Fred Burton, concerning the body of Osama bin Laden and a sealed indictment of Julian Assange.

Whether or not these statements are genuine, or true, is in the end impossible to tell, unless they are confirmed by the sender or a recipient of the e mail, or by another, independent source.

The fact that these e mails could be accessed by third parties - the FBI and two of the hackers involved - leaves the door open to criticism, and provides a new avenue to attack Wikileaks' credibility.

A simple way to remedy the current situation could be a release of all the trivial responses these one liners were likely to have triggered. As it stands, the reader gets the impression that the one liners ended the conversation, as only the preceding text is publicly available.

Salting a large data set with a few brief remarks is possible from a logistic point of view. Forging an entire string of responses requires more effort, time and concentration.

It would also be of advantage to release additional information on technical data of these e mails. This could straighten out some inconsistencies. In the case of Osama bin Laden, for instance, the time frame for him to be shot in Pakistan, brought to Afghanistan by helicopter, flown out by the CIA to the US east coast, being examined in a post mortem and buried in the sea appears rather tight. Bin Laden was reportedly killed shortly after midnight local time on the second of May 2011. The e mails discussing his transfer were sent from an unknown location at 5am ("airborne to CONUS" and "Than onward to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Bethesda."), 1pm ("Body is Dover bound, should be here by now.") and at 3pm ("Down & dirty done, He already sleeps with the fish....").