Wikileaks publishes 5 mln emails from US think tank

LONDON - Reuters

The anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks began publishing yesterday more than five million emails from a U.S.-based global security analysis company that has been likened to a shadow CIA.

The emails, snatched by hackers, could unmask sensitive sources and throw light on the murky world of intelligence-gathering by the company known as Stratfor, which counts Fortune 500 companies among its subscribers. Stratfor in a statement shortly after midnight said the release of its stolen emails was an attempt to silence and intimidate it. Some of the emails being published “may be forged or altered to include inaccuracies; some may be authentic,” the company statement said. “We will not validate either. Nor will we explain the thinking that went into them. Having had our property stolen, we will not be victimized twice by submitting to questioning about them,” the statement said.

WikiLeaks did not say how it had acquired access to the vast haul of internal and external correspondence of the Austin, Texas company, formally known as Strategic Forecasting Inc.