Anonymous upgrades relationship with WikiLeaks to partner

PanARMENIAN.Net - Anonymous now says it’s upgraded its relationship with WikiLeaks from friendly acquaintance to partner, Forbes reported.

On Sunday, Feb 26, night, WikiLeaks announced the initial release of what it’s calling the Global Intelligence Files, a collection of 5.5 million emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor. The group claims those emails, to be released over the coming weeks, show Stratfor’s involvement in operations like monitoring activists seeking redress for the Bhopal chemical disaster on behalf of Dow Chemical, payments to the former head of the controversial Pakistani secret service, and even the use of the company’s information for insider trading.

WikiLeaks has partnered with 25 media organizations to sift, analyze and publish those emails: It lists Rolling Stone, the McClatchy News Agency, the Italian newspaper L’Espresso and the Indian paper The Hindu among them.

But more unusual is its other apparent partnership: Several mouthpieces for Anonymous say the hacker group gave WikiLeaks the leaked emails after a widely-publicized breach of the company’s network in December of last year. The Anonymous twitter feeds Anonops and AnonymousIRC both claimed credit for the leak, and the Anonymous “news service” YourAnonnews spelled it out even more clearly: “To clarify to all journalists – YES, #Anonymous gave the STRATFOR emails obtained in the 2011 LulzXmas hack to WikiLeaks.” WikiLeaks, per its usual practice, won’t comment on its source. But Wired.com reports that a coded tweet from WikiLeaks last December signaled the successful handoff of the files, which Anonops has identified as this one.

Publishing documents taken by Anonymous’ digital intruders would represent a new level of collaboration between the two groups. When Anonymous launched attacks against Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, Amazon and others in retaliation against those companies’ financial blockade against WikiLeaks last year, WikiLeaks kept a careful remove. “We neither condemn nor applaud these attacks,” WikiLeaks’ Icelandic spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson wrote at the time. “We believe they are a reflection of public opinion on the actions of the targets.”