Sunday, Julian Assange revealed WikiLeaks and Anonymous have teamed up to publish the contents of a massive Stratfor hack members of Anonymous allegedly carried out on Christmas eve. Immediately after Assange’s press release was published, a hoax e-mail in which George Friedman drafted his resignation went viral. Barrett Brown has since claimed responsibility for this hoax and has made yet another empty promise to step down as spokesperson for Anonymous.
Unlike previous WikiLeaks releases, this story has only spread among hardcore fans of Occuponymous and WikiLeaks. The banal information gleaned from the 5 million e-mails included such shocking behavior as for-profit stock trading and at least a single instance of a bigotry. However, the social media echo chamber that is Occuponymous and WikiLeaks has never been more outraged, catalyzed, and radicalized than ever before. Anonymous was fully prepared to take advantage of this situation, and launched the so-called Operation V, which proposes a violent overthrow of the US government.
Although the public really couldn’t care less about Stratfor, Occuponymous hasn’t yet reverted to accusing the media of a purposeful blackout on the topic.
5 replies on “Stratfor revelation shocks the Occuponymous and WikiLeaks echo chamber”
Stratfor’s use of insiders for intelligence soon turned into a money-making scheme of questionable legality. The emails show that in 2009 then-Goldman Sachs Managing Director Shea Morenz and Stratfor CEO George Friedman hatched an idea to “utilise the intelligence” it was pulling in from its insider network to start up a captive strategic investment fund. CEO George Friedman explained in a confidential August 2011 document, marked DO NOT SHARE OR DISCUSS: “What StratCap will do is use our Stratfor’s intelligence and analysis to trade in a range of geopolitical instruments, particularly government bonds, currencies and the like.”
holy god! a business… trying to make money?????? THOSE DIRTY 1% BASTARDS!!! HOW DARE THEY!!!!
holy god! a business…which supplies some 300,000 major entities in the world with some of their most highly prized ‘intelligence’ couldn’t possibly abuse this position or manipulate this ‘intelligence’ and the way these other entities (many of them them FTSE 500 companies) perceive that ‘intelligence’for their own gain! PREPOSTEROUS! WHY WOULD THEY EVER EVEN CONSIDER DOING ANYTHING IN A FASHION THAT WASN’T MORALLY REPRHENSIBLE..!?!?
tinfoil hat
‘This perplexes me: To advertise a complete lack of interest in the inner workings of a major private intelligence firm, whose corporate clients (who pay up to $40,000 for Stratfor’s services) include companies like Lockheed Martin, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America – seems, to say the least, rather un-journalistic. If Stratfor is a joke, what does that say about the government agencies like the C.I.A. and other intel shops that supply Stratfor with employees. And if Wikileaks — an organization that ‘s pulled off a few of the biggest coups in the history of journalism — is a joke, who, exactly, is the joke on?’