by Galactic Love Reporter Julian Assange
The Global Intelligence Files,
files released so far...
214
courage is contagious
On Monday February 27th, 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing The Global Intelligence Files, over five million e-mails from the Texas headquartered "global intelligence" company Stratfor. The e-mails date between July 2004 and late December 2011. They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal's Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defence Intelligence Agency. The emails show Stratfor's web of informers, pay-off structure, payment laundering techniques and psychological methods.
RE: Random Business Idea - Network Security
| Email-ID | 1061018 |
|---|---|
| Date | 2010-12-09 07:44:55 |
| To | marko.papic@stratfor.com |
Well governments are another matter I think. There is almost no possible
way, with probably a couple tiny exceptions, to enfranchise your entire
bureaucracy. So instead billions will be spent on wildly complex
mechanisms to not only control the information you don't have access to,
but to control the information you do have access to. Which basically
amounts to controlling you.
From: Marko Papic [mailto:marko.papic@stratfor.com]
Sent: Thursday, December 09, 2010 00:38
To: Kevin Stech
Subject: Re: Random Business Idea - Network Security
Or as Assange says in that interview: "treat your employees well".
Great point. Problem is, that doesn't sell. ;)
Imagine telling that to our leadership... lol
On 12/9/10 12:34 AM, Kevin Stech wrote:
You're right that it's really not a technological issue. There's a great
technology for keeping your private data private already. It's called
mandatory access control and it's been around for decades. The issue is
more subtle since you're dealing with people leaking stuff they've been
cleared to see. And now you're in the realm of grey matter.
And it seems to me that here, as in many other things, an ounce of
prevention is worth a pound of cure. I think that prevention can be boiled
down to having a cohesive team with members that feel enfranchised. You
don't leak your classified material, you leak their classified material.
So if you want to be shady and exploit other people, fine. Just make sure
you are on the same page with your co-conspirators and everybody gets a
cut.
If your company sells baby cribs and your employees are church-going
soccer moms, then you might want to tone down the Dr. Evil routine.
From: analysts-bounces@stratfor.com [mailto:analysts-bounces@stratfor.com]
On Behalf Of Marko Papic
Sent: Thursday, December 09, 2010 00:16
To: Analyst List
Subject: Re: Random Business Idea - Network Security
That is the one...
Forbes mentions how companies are now focusing on "leak-proof" network
security. Interesting. I think that we would have a possible in there
since that is not just about IT. But I don't really know what I am talking
about.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: "Kevin Stech"
To: "Analyst List"
Sent: Thursday, December 9, 2010 12:11:02 AM
Subject: RE: Random Business Idea - Network Security
I believe this is the article Marko is talking about.
WikiLeaks' next target is big business, Assange says
Andy Greenberg, Forbes.com
Date: Wed. Dec. 1 2010 7:39 PM ET
http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/World/20101201/forbes-assange-interview-101201/
In a rare interview, Assange tells Forbes that the release of Pentagon and
State Department documents are just the beginning. His next target: big
business.
Early next year, Julian Assange says, a major American bank will suddenly
find itself turned inside out. Tens of thousands of its internal documents
will be exposed on Wikileaks.org with no polite requests for executives'
response or other forewarnings. The data dump will lay bare the finance
firm's secrets on the Web for every customer, every competitor, every
regulator to examine and pass judgment on.
When? Which bank? What documents? Cagey as always, Assange won't say, so
his claim is impossible to verify. But he has always followed through on
his threats. Sitting for a rare interview in a London garden flat on a
rainy November day, he compares what he is ready to unleash to the damning
e-mails that poured out of the Enron trial: a comprehensive vivisection of
corporate bad behavior. "You could call it the ecosystem of corruption,"
he says, refusing to characterize the coming release in more detail. "But
it's also all the regular decision making that turns a blind eye to and
supports unethical practices: the oversight that's not done, the
priorities of executives, how they think they're fulfilling their own
self-interest."
This is Assange: a moral ideologue, a champion of openness, a control
freak. He pauses to think-a process that occasionally puts our
conversation on hold for awkwardly long interludes. The slim 39-year-old
WikiLeaks founder wears a navy suit over his 6-foot-2 frame, and his once
shaggy white hair, recently dyed brown, has been cropped to a sandy
patchwork of blonde and tan. He says he colors it when he's "being
tracked."
"These big-package releases. There should be a cute name for them," he
says, then pauses again.
"Megaleaks?" I suggest, trying to move things along.
"Yes, that's good-megaleaks." His voice is a hoarse, Aussie-tinged
baritone. As a teenage hacker in Melbourne its pitch helped him
impersonate IT staff to trick companies' employees into revealing their
passwords over the phone, and today it's deeper still after a recent bout
of flu. "These megaleaks . . . they're an important phenomenon. And
they're only going to increase."
He'll see to that. By the time you're reading this another giant dump of
classified U.S. documents may well be public. Assange refused to discuss
the leak at the time FORBES went to press, but he claims it is part of a
series that will have the greatest impact of any WikiLeaks release yet.
Assange calls the shots: choosing the media outlets that splash his
exposes, holding them to a strict embargo, running the leaks
simultaneously on his site. Past megaleaks from his information insurgency
over the last year have included 76,000 secret Afghan war documents and
another trove of 392,000 files from the Iraq war. Those data explosions,
the largest classified military security breaches in history, have roused
antiwar activists and enraged the Pentagon.
Admire Assange or revile him, he is the prophet of a coming age of
involuntary transparency. Having exposed military misconduct on a grand
scale, he is now gunning for corporate America. Does Assange have
unpublished, damaging documents on pharmaceutical companies? Yes, he says.
Finance? Yes, many more than the single bank scandal we've been
discussing. Energy? Plenty, on everything from BP to an Albanian oil firm
that he says attempted to sabotage its competitors' wells. Like
informational IEDs, these damaging revelations can be detonated at will.
Long gone are the days when Daniel Ellsberg had to photocopy thousands of
Vietnam War documents to leak the Pentagon Papers. Modern whistleblowers,
or employees with a grudge, can zip up their troves of incriminating
documents on a laptop, USB stick or portable hard drive, spirit them out
through personal e-mail accounts or online drop sites-or simply submit
them directly to WikiLeaks.
What do large companies think of the threat? If they're terrified, they're
not saying. None would talk to us. Nor would the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
WikiLeaks "is high profile, legally insulated and transnational," says
former Commerce Department official James Lewis, who follows cybersecurity
for the Center for Strategic & International Studies. "That adds up to a
reputational risk that companies didn't have to think about a year ago."
Already U.S. laws wrapped into financial reform this year expand
whistleblower incentives to offer six- and seven-digit rewards to staffers
in any industry who report malfeasance. WikiLeaks adds another, new form
of corporate data breach: It offers the conscience-stricken and vindictive
alike a chance to publish documents largely unfiltered, without censors or
personal repercussions, thanks to privacy and encryption technologies that
make anonymity easier than ever before. WikiLeaks' technical and
ideological example has inspired copycats from Africa to China and rallied
transparency advocates to push for a new, legal promised land in the
unlikely haven of Iceland. It's also fueling a race in the cybersecurity
industry and in Washington to find technology that can plug information
leaks once for all.
Today Assange looks tired, his eyes narrowed and the skin beneath them
puffy, as if he's unused to even England's gloomy daylight. He has no
permanent home. "We're like a traveling production company; everyone moves
somewhere, and we put on a production," he sighs. "We haven't had any rest
since April." In Sweden, where many of the group's servers are based, a
warrant has now been issued for his arrest on rape charges. He's denied
the accusations, arguing they amount to smear tactics. He's also afraid to
set foot in several other countries, including the U.S., fearing that
officials will find reasons to detain him. No question that WikiLeaks
would be in trouble if he were jailed: A spokeswoman says it has a
"contingency plan," but without Assange there is no public face.
Meanwhile, his resources have been drained by defections from his
organization; some old friends and associates have taken issue with his
autocratic style.
None of which has stopped him from picking new fights. The promised
release of bank documents would be the largest assault by WikiLeaks on the
corporate sector, and Assange says the business community should expect
plenty of sequels. In early October the site shut down its
document-submission system; Assange says it was receiving more information
than it could find resources to publish, thousands of additions a day at
some points. The total is more gigabytes of data than he can count. "Our
pipeline of leaks has been increasing exponentially as our profile rises,"
he says, drawing a curve upward in the air with one hand.
If even a fraction of his claims are borne out, he's already sitting on a
crypt of data any three-letter spy agency would kill for. The world's most
vocal transparency advocate is now one of the world's biggest keepers of
secrets. And about half of those revelations, says Assange, relate to the
private sector.
Over the last four years he has been so busy embarrassing various
governments, from Washington to the corrupt Kenyan regime of Daniel arap
Moi, that many forget the corporate scandals already on WikiLeaks' trophy
wall. In January 2008 the site posted documents alleging that the Swiss
bank Julius Baer hid clients' profits from even the Swiss government,
concealing them in what seemed to be shell companies in the Cayman
Islands. The bank filed a lawsuit against WikiLeaks for publishing data
stolen from its clients. Baer later dropped the suit-but managed to stir
up embarrassing publicity for itself. The next year WikiLeaks published
documents from a pharma trade group implying that its lobbyists were
receiving confidential documents from and exerting influence over a World
Health Organization project to fund drug research in the developing world.
The resulting attention helped crater the WHO project.
In September 2009 commodities giant Trafigura filed an injunction that
prevented British media from mentioning a damaging internal report. The
memo showed the company had dumped tons of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast,
chemicals that allegedly sickened 100,000 locals. But it couldn't stop
WikiLeaks from publishing the information. Trafigura eventually paid more
than $200 million in settlements.
How can an American corporation respond to a Wiki attack? Lawsuits won't
work: WikiLeaks is legally shielded in the U.S. by its role as a mere
conduit for documents. Even if a company somehow won a judgment against
WikiLeaks, that wouldn't shut it down. Assange spreads the site's assets
over many countries. "There's no single target to drop a bomb on," says
Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University.
The best protection? With a dash of irony Icelandic WikiLeaks staffer
Kristinn Hrafnsson suggests that companies change their ways to avoid
targeting. "They should resist the temptation to enter into corruption,"
he says. Don Tapscott, coauthor of The Naked Corporation (Free Press,
2003), agrees. His simplistic conclusion: "Open your own kimono. You're
going to be naked. So you have to dig deep, look at your whole operation,
make sure that integrity is part of your bones."
Most corporations, instead, are turning to cybersecurity to shield their
private parts. Despite dozens of calls to companies in tech, energy and
finance, none wanted to talk about antileaking strategies. But a Forrester
Research study found that about a quarter of companies in the U.S., the
U.K., France, Germany and Canada were implementing leak-focused security
software in 2010, and another third are considering that option. A study
last year by the Ponemon Institute, a privacy-research consultancy in
Traverse City, Mich., found that 60% of employees admit to taking
sensitive data before they leave a company.
*****
Some of the more intriguing antileak work is being done by Uncle Sam. In
an unmarked government building on the edge of a residential Arlington,
Va. neighborhood, a cybersecurity researcher named Peiter Zatko shows just
how easily leaks can occur. He lays out a blow-by-blow history of one
insider data theft: The suspect searched broadly over the network to find
anything related to critical infrastructure, then returned to manually
probe a few interesting files. "Then he walked away with enough
information to shut down big chunks of the telephone systems in the United
States," Zatko says matter-of-factly.
Who was that shadowy data smuggler? "That was me," says the 39-year-old
researcher, giggling bashfully.
Zatko is not your typical Department of Defense employee. Even in his new
Beltway digs, he prefers to be called "Mudge," the hacker handle he used
during decades of exploring the dark corners of the Internet. Frank Heidt,
a former security staffer at MCI and several military contractors, says
that when he first read Zatko's exploit research in mid-1990s hacker
zines, he thought that Mudge must be the pseudonym of a group. "He was so
prolific that I thought he couldn't be one person," Heidt says. In 1998,
as part of the L0pht hacker think tank, Zatko testified in a congressional
hearing that he and his friends could shut down the Internet in 30
minutes.
Since March Zatko has also been a lead cybersecurity researcher at the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the mad-scientist wing of the
Pentagon devoted to projects that occasionally result in breakthroughs
like the Internet and GPS. Zatko's new pet project may be equally
ambitious: He aims to rid the world of digital leaks.
The telephone system theft case that Zatko dissected in a Darpa conference
room was a test, demonstrating that anyone with access to a network could
steal data without detection, despite the system's expensive security
software. Now his challenge is to fix the problem. Since August he has led
a project known as the Cyber Insider Threat, or Cinder. Like most Darpa
initiatives it's an X-Prize-style open invitation for ideas; recipients
typically get tens of millions of dollars in government funding.
Thirty-five entrants, mostly tiny companies, have already publicly signed
up, many more in secret. "We're looking to everyone from academia to
startups to large government contractors," says Zatko. "We're not looking
for evolutionary improvement. We want to pull the rug out from the problem
altogether."
It's a well-worn carpet. Since late 2007 every major security software
vendor, from McAfee to Symantec to Trend Micro, has spent hundreds of
millions of dollars to acquire companies in the so-called Data-Leak
Prevention (DLP) industry-software designed to locate and tag sensitive
information, and then guard against its escape at the edges of a firm's
network.
The problem: DLP doesn't work. Data is simply created too quickly, and
moved around too often, for a mere filter to catch it, says Richard
Stiennon, an analyst for security consultancy IT-Harvest, in Birmingham,
Mich. "For DLP to function, all the stars have to align," he says. "This
is a huge problem that can't be stopped with a single layer of
infrastructure."
More fashionable now is network forensics: the process of constantly
collecting every fingerprint on a company's servers to trace an intruder
or leaker after the fact-and, perhaps, deter the next one. That's a bit
like fighting the next war according to the last one. Still, revenue at
NetWitness, a prominent Herndon, Va. startup in that budding field, has
leaped from $250,000 to $40 million since 2006. While the software
generally gathers data and makes it easily available to queries, it
doesn't pinpoint culprits. "There's nothing in current technology that can
do this in an automated fashion," says Shawn Carpenter, principal
forensics analyst at NetWitness. "You need a Columbo."
Or, better yet, a robo-Columbo. Darpa's Zatko has been working on a system
of automatically identifying what he calls "malicious missions": insider
activity aimed at stealing data from inside a company's firewall, whether
it's a Dell PC remotely hijacked by a Chinese cyberspy or Bradley
Mannings, the U.S. soldier accused of leaking classified documents about
combat in Afghanistan to WikiLeaks. Zatko's system would monitor networks
in real-time for just the sort of data-stealing behavior he would perform
himself: steps like scouring large areas of the network for a certain
file, dumping piles of data to external storage hardware or sending
encrypted files out over the Internet. No single episode would signal a
leak; instead, the software would link acts in a probabilistic chain,
triggering an alert only if a string of events points to purposeful data
theft.
Some of that leaky behavior isn't what a casual observer might expect.
Consider the cyber footprints left by Robert Hanssen, a former FBI agent
serving a life sentence in a Colorado supermax prison for selling
intelligence to the Soviets over two decades. Every few days Hanssen would
stop his normal activities and make a single query to a server across the
network, a pattern he repeated for years. That server, Zatko says, held
the counterintelligence database. Hanssen was searching for himself, a
routine check to see if he'd finally been found out.
"You put all these things together into the different components of the
mission," says Zatko. "I'm looking for these new rhythms, new tells, new
interrelations and requirements."
Cinder wasn't created to combat WikiLeaks-in fact, it predates WikiLeaks'
biggest military scandals. But Zatko has nonetheless found himself
squarely in opposition to Assange's mission-a strange face-off, given that
the two men once traveled in the same hacker circles, during the years
when Assange went by the hacker handle Mendax (a Latin reference to the
"splendidly deceptive" in the poet Horace's Odes) and reveled in accessing
corporate and government systems without authorization. Neither will
reveal much about their past encounters, but Assange says that they "were
in the same milieu." Asked about Assange, Zatko says only, "I have very
pleasant memories of those old days."
WikiLeaks' founder, in fact, seems to have trouble accepting that Mudge is
working for the other side. "He's a clever guy, and he's also highly
ethical," says Assange. "I suspect he would have concerns about creating a
system to conceal genuine abuses." He dismisses Cinder as just another
system of digital censorship. And those systems, he says, will always
fail, just as China's Great Firewall can't stop well-informed and
determined dissident Internet users. "Censorship might work for the
average person but not for highly motivated people," Assange says. "And
our people are highly motivated."
*****
Shutting down WikiLeaks wouldn't stop the growing movement of transparency
agitators. They now have a nation-size ally: Iceland. Since WikiLeaks
scored a major scoop unearthing the corrupt loans that helped destroy that
country's largest bank, the volcanic island is fast on its way to becoming
the conduit for a global flood of leaks.
It began when Kaupthing Bank collapsed in October 2008-a calamitous chain
reaction that has strapped Iceland with $128 billion in debts, around
$400,000 per capita. Ten months later Bogi Agustsson, a Walter
Cronkite-ish anchor for Icelandic national broadcaster RUV, appeared on
the evening news and explained that a legal injunction had prevented the
station from airing a prepared expose on Kaupthing. Viewers who wanted to
see the material, he suggested, should visit a site called Wikileaks.org.
Those who took Agustsson's advice found a summary of Kaupthing's loan book
posted on the site, detailing more than $6 billion funneled from
Kaupthing's coffers to its own proprietors and companies they owned, often
with little or no collateral; $900 million went to Olafur Olafsson, a
major investor in Kaupthing who, on his birthday, flew in Elton John from
England, along with a grand piano, for a one-hour concert. "The banks had
been eaten from the inside out," says Kristinn Hrafnsson, a former
investigative reporter in Reykjavik who now works with WikiLeaks.
A government investigation is still going on; no criminal charges have
been filed. But WikiLeaks became a household name in Iceland. In December
2009 Assange and Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a German who then worked with
WikiLeaks, were invited to keynote a free-speech conference in Reykjavik.
Their talk echoed an idea from American cyberlibertarian John Perry
Barlow, calling for a "Switzerland of bits." Iceland, with its independent
spirit and recent taste of explosive whistle-blowing, they suggested,
could become the digital doppelga:nger of a tax haven: a safe harbor for
transparency, where it's open season on government and business
secrets-and leakers are protected by law.
The idea might have gone nowhere if not for Birgitta Jonsdottir. Assange's
message captivated the 43-year-old poet and self-styled
"realist-anarchist." She wasn't just another idealistic protester with a
goth wardrobe and hipster haircut. In the chaotic political environment
that followed the national financial crisis, Jonsdottir had been elected
to Iceland's parliament, the Althingi, in April 2009.
Working with the country's transparency activists, she pulled together the
Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, or Immi. The initiative would bring to
Iceland all the source-protection, freedom of information and transparency
laws from around the world and even set up a Nobel-style international
award for work in the field of free expression. Jonsdottir pushed through
a unanimous resolution to create a series of bills to implement Immi. They
would also make Iceland the most friendly legal base for whistleblowers on
Earth.
Velkomin, as Icelanders would say, to Leakistan.
"The more that companies resist, the more information will get out about
them," says Jonsdottir when we meet in Reykjavik's Hressingarskalinn cafe,
around the corner from the parliament building. "They can't hide anymore.
The war is over. They lost." In Jonsdottir's vision Iceland will attract
both mainstream media and WikiLeaks-like organizations to move their data
to Iceland, enjoying legal protection, just as another firm might
incorporate in a tax-sheltering island in the Caribbean.
She may be getting a bit ahead of herself. Immi has yet to become law,
though it has backing from powerful figures, including both Iceland's
minister of justice and the head of its progressive party. Even if it
does, Immi likely wouldn't offer much legal protection to organizations
whose assets and staff aren't physically in the country; they could still
be sued anywhere else in the world, given that their digital and print
publications could appear globally. Immi could also face resistance from
the U.S. and the EU-particularly when it comes to military matters. As
Marc Thiessen, a conservative pundit, wrote on the blog of the American
Enterprise Institute in August, "Immi calls into question Iceland's
seriousness as a NATO ally, and Iceland needs to realize there will be
consequences for its actions." There could be a backlash for exposing
corporate secrets, too. Alastair Mullis, a professor of law at East Anglia
University in Britain, says, "It's possible that Iceland will become the
defamation capital of the world."
Jonsdottir and fellow Immi creator Smari McCarthy are pushing ahead
anyway. Immi, they say, doesn't fashion new laws; it cherry-picks existing
statutes from around the world (source shields from Sweden, libel
protection from New York State, protected communications with journalists
from Belgium, among them). "We're basing our legislation on laws that have
already withstood attacks," says Jonsdottir. Defamation and other concerns
like child pornography and copyright violations, she argues, would still
be illegal in Iceland and wouldn't be sheltered.
Nor is the idea to protect WikiLeaks itself, Jonsdottir points out. The
site doesn't need help: Its data and submissions process are carefully
encrypted, and its infrastructure is spread over enough
countries-including some servers in a bombproof, underground bunker in
Sweden-that taking it offline is already nearly impossible.
Instead Immi would foster a new wave of media organizations and
whistleblower outlets that don't rely on WikiLeaks' technical savvy or
resources. Already a handful of smaller, leak-focused conduits-regional
sites like Africa-focused SaharaReporters or Thaileaks.info-have published
damning data. Immi's McCarthy says he's been approached by media
organizations from Rwanda to Chechnya. German WikiLeaks staffer Daniel
Domscheit-Berg, disgruntled with Assange's laser focus on infrequent
megaleaks, has left the organization along with several others to create
his own spinoff. "In the end there must be a thousand WikiLeaks," he told
Der Spiegel in September.
Iceland certainly has the infrastructure for a lot of informational
mischief. Half an hour outside Reykjavik, on a landscape that resembles
Mars covered in snow, the Thor Data Center is preparing for an influx of
bytes. By 2011 it hopes to have thousands of servers in its
aluminum-plant-turned-server-farm, powered by ultracheap geothermal energy
and cooled by free arctic air. Iceland's biggest Web host, ironically
named 1984 Web Hosting, is excited about the boost Immi could give its
business. "I created this company to prevent thought control," says Mordur
Ingolfsson, its chief executive. "In my humble opinion, Immi is the most
important thing to happen to this godforsaken island since the Sagas were
written." (That's 600-plus years.)
Jonsdottir agrees: "WikiLeaks was an important icebreaker. It was the tip.
Immi is the rest of the wedge, and it will open up everything." (She is
less thrilled to learn that Assange speaks of Immi as his personal
creation.)I ask Assange how he expects companies to cope with a world
where hundreds of WikiLeak-alikes may soon exist. His three-part
prescription is earnest-if a bit patronizing: "Do things to encourage
leaks from dishonest competitors. Be as open and honest as possible. Treat
your employees well."
He also wants to clear up a misunderstanding. Despite his revolutionary
reputation, he's not antibusiness. He bristles at the media's focus on his
teenage years as a computer hacker who broke into dozens of systems, from
the Department of Defense to Nortel, and was eventually convicted on 25
charges of computer fraud and fined thousands of dollars.
Instead, he prefers to think of himself as an entrepreneur. He tells the
story of a free-speech-focused Internet service provider he cofounded in
1993, known as Suburbia. It was, to hear him tell it, the blueprint for
WikiLeaks-in one instance, when the Church of Scientology demanded to know
who had posted antichurch information on one site, he refused to help.
("He has titanium balls," says David Gerard, that site's creator.) "I saw
it early on, without realizing it: potentiating people to reveal their
information, creating a conduit," Assange says. "Without having any other
robust publisher in the market, people came to us."
Leaks merely lubricate the free market, he says, settling into the couch
and clearly enjoying giving me a lecture on economics. (Later, as a
45-minute interview pushes into two hours, he ignores his handler, who
keeps urging him to leave for his next appointment.) He cites the example
of the Chinese Sanlu Group, whose milk powder contained toxic melamine in
2008. While poisoning its customers, Sanlu also gained an advantage over
competitors and might have forced more of them to taint their products,
too, or go bankrupt-if Sanlu hadn't been exposed in the Chinese press. "In
the struggle between open and honest companies and dishonest and closed
companies, we're creating a tremendous reputational tax on the unethical
companies," he says.
Of course, Assange's tax isn't as equitable as it sounds. He alone decides
where to apply the penalty, choosing the targets and when to expose them
with a touch of theatrical grandstanding-and with zero accountability. For
better-and worse-WikiLeaks has become the Julian Assange Show. As a
photographer begins shooting, Assange wonders aloud if the coat he's
wearing might have been produced by a labor-exploiting company. A few
minutes later he jokes about his "messiah complex."
Like any true believer, Assange sees his work in simple terms. Markets, he
reminds me, can't exist without information. Business will come to
appreciate what he offers. And if that requires a few painful scandals in
the process?
Assange doesn't miss a beat. "Pain for the guilty.
From: analysts-bounces@stratfor.com [mailto:analysts-bounces@stratfor.com]
On Behalf Of Marko Papic
Sent: Wednesday, December 08, 2010 19:39
To: analysts
Subject: Random Business Idea - Network Security
I'm sure this has been thought of before at STRATFOR so excuse the
redundancy. I was reading a solid Forbes article on Assange and it said
that a large number of deep pocket corporations were looking into
leak-focused network security after these Wikileak episodes.
I was wondering if it was possible for us to get some of that
"leak-focused" gravy train. This is an obvious fear sale, so that's a good
thing. And we have something to offer that the IT security companies
don't, mainly our focus on counter-intelligence and surveillance that Fred
and Stick know better than anyone on the planet.
We do a lot of good work with all the personal/executive security analysis
as well. Could we develop some ideas and procedures on the idea of
"leak-focused" network security that focuses on preventing one's own
employees from leaking sensitive information.
The point here is that I am sure there are certain procedures and
precautions that companies should employ that go beyond installing network
security network to deal with potential leaks. In fact, Im not so sure
this is an IT problem that requires an IT solution.
--
Marko Papic
STRATFOR Analyst
C: + 1-512-905-3091
marko.papic@stratfor.com
--
Marko Papic
STRATFOR Analyst
C: + 1-512-905-3091
marko.papic@stratfor.com
--
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Marko Papic
Geopol Analyst - Eurasia
STRATFOR
700 Lavaca Street - 900
Austin, Texas
78701 USA
P: + 1-512-744-4094
marko.papic@stratfor.com
way, with probably a couple tiny exceptions, to enfranchise your entire
bureaucracy. So instead billions will be spent on wildly complex
mechanisms to not only control the information you don't have access to,
but to control the information you do have access to. Which basically
amounts to controlling you.
From: Marko Papic [mailto:marko.papic@stratfor.com]
Sent: Thursday, December 09, 2010 00:38
To: Kevin Stech
Subject: Re: Random Business Idea - Network Security
Or as Assange says in that interview: "treat your employees well".
Great point. Problem is, that doesn't sell. ;)
Imagine telling that to our leadership... lol
On 12/9/10 12:34 AM, Kevin Stech wrote:
You're right that it's really not a technological issue. There's a great
technology for keeping your private data private already. It's called
mandatory access control and it's been around for decades. The issue is
more subtle since you're dealing with people leaking stuff they've been
cleared to see. And now you're in the realm of grey matter.
And it seems to me that here, as in many other things, an ounce of
prevention is worth a pound of cure. I think that prevention can be boiled
down to having a cohesive team with members that feel enfranchised. You
don't leak your classified material, you leak their classified material.
So if you want to be shady and exploit other people, fine. Just make sure
you are on the same page with your co-conspirators and everybody gets a
cut.
If your company sells baby cribs and your employees are church-going
soccer moms, then you might want to tone down the Dr. Evil routine.
From: analysts-bounces@stratfor.com [mailto:analysts-bounces@stratfor.com]
On Behalf Of Marko Papic
Sent: Thursday, December 09, 2010 00:16
To: Analyst List
Subject: Re: Random Business Idea - Network Security
That is the one...
Forbes mentions how companies are now focusing on "leak-proof" network
security. Interesting. I think that we would have a possible in there
since that is not just about IT. But I don't really know what I am talking
about.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: "Kevin Stech"
To: "Analyst List"
Sent: Thursday, December 9, 2010 12:11:02 AM
Subject: RE: Random Business Idea - Network Security
I believe this is the article Marko is talking about.
WikiLeaks' next target is big business, Assange says
Andy Greenberg, Forbes.com
Date: Wed. Dec. 1 2010 7:39 PM ET
http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/World/20101201/forbes-assange-interview-101201/
In a rare interview, Assange tells Forbes that the release of Pentagon and
State Department documents are just the beginning. His next target: big
business.
Early next year, Julian Assange says, a major American bank will suddenly
find itself turned inside out. Tens of thousands of its internal documents
will be exposed on Wikileaks.org with no polite requests for executives'
response or other forewarnings. The data dump will lay bare the finance
firm's secrets on the Web for every customer, every competitor, every
regulator to examine and pass judgment on.
When? Which bank? What documents? Cagey as always, Assange won't say, so
his claim is impossible to verify. But he has always followed through on
his threats. Sitting for a rare interview in a London garden flat on a
rainy November day, he compares what he is ready to unleash to the damning
e-mails that poured out of the Enron trial: a comprehensive vivisection of
corporate bad behavior. "You could call it the ecosystem of corruption,"
he says, refusing to characterize the coming release in more detail. "But
it's also all the regular decision making that turns a blind eye to and
supports unethical practices: the oversight that's not done, the
priorities of executives, how they think they're fulfilling their own
self-interest."
This is Assange: a moral ideologue, a champion of openness, a control
freak. He pauses to think-a process that occasionally puts our
conversation on hold for awkwardly long interludes. The slim 39-year-old
WikiLeaks founder wears a navy suit over his 6-foot-2 frame, and his once
shaggy white hair, recently dyed brown, has been cropped to a sandy
patchwork of blonde and tan. He says he colors it when he's "being
tracked."
"These big-package releases. There should be a cute name for them," he
says, then pauses again.
"Megaleaks?" I suggest, trying to move things along.
"Yes, that's good-megaleaks." His voice is a hoarse, Aussie-tinged
baritone. As a teenage hacker in Melbourne its pitch helped him
impersonate IT staff to trick companies' employees into revealing their
passwords over the phone, and today it's deeper still after a recent bout
of flu. "These megaleaks . . . they're an important phenomenon. And
they're only going to increase."
He'll see to that. By the time you're reading this another giant dump of
classified U.S. documents may well be public. Assange refused to discuss
the leak at the time FORBES went to press, but he claims it is part of a
series that will have the greatest impact of any WikiLeaks release yet.
Assange calls the shots: choosing the media outlets that splash his
exposes, holding them to a strict embargo, running the leaks
simultaneously on his site. Past megaleaks from his information insurgency
over the last year have included 76,000 secret Afghan war documents and
another trove of 392,000 files from the Iraq war. Those data explosions,
the largest classified military security breaches in history, have roused
antiwar activists and enraged the Pentagon.
Admire Assange or revile him, he is the prophet of a coming age of
involuntary transparency. Having exposed military misconduct on a grand
scale, he is now gunning for corporate America. Does Assange have
unpublished, damaging documents on pharmaceutical companies? Yes, he says.
Finance? Yes, many more than the single bank scandal we've been
discussing. Energy? Plenty, on everything from BP to an Albanian oil firm
that he says attempted to sabotage its competitors' wells. Like
informational IEDs, these damaging revelations can be detonated at will.
Long gone are the days when Daniel Ellsberg had to photocopy thousands of
Vietnam War documents to leak the Pentagon Papers. Modern whistleblowers,
or employees with a grudge, can zip up their troves of incriminating
documents on a laptop, USB stick or portable hard drive, spirit them out
through personal e-mail accounts or online drop sites-or simply submit
them directly to WikiLeaks.
What do large companies think of the threat? If they're terrified, they're
not saying. None would talk to us. Nor would the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
WikiLeaks "is high profile, legally insulated and transnational," says
former Commerce Department official James Lewis, who follows cybersecurity
for the Center for Strategic & International Studies. "That adds up to a
reputational risk that companies didn't have to think about a year ago."
Already U.S. laws wrapped into financial reform this year expand
whistleblower incentives to offer six- and seven-digit rewards to staffers
in any industry who report malfeasance. WikiLeaks adds another, new form
of corporate data breach: It offers the conscience-stricken and vindictive
alike a chance to publish documents largely unfiltered, without censors or
personal repercussions, thanks to privacy and encryption technologies that
make anonymity easier than ever before. WikiLeaks' technical and
ideological example has inspired copycats from Africa to China and rallied
transparency advocates to push for a new, legal promised land in the
unlikely haven of Iceland. It's also fueling a race in the cybersecurity
industry and in Washington to find technology that can plug information
leaks once for all.
Today Assange looks tired, his eyes narrowed and the skin beneath them
puffy, as if he's unused to even England's gloomy daylight. He has no
permanent home. "We're like a traveling production company; everyone moves
somewhere, and we put on a production," he sighs. "We haven't had any rest
since April." In Sweden, where many of the group's servers are based, a
warrant has now been issued for his arrest on rape charges. He's denied
the accusations, arguing they amount to smear tactics. He's also afraid to
set foot in several other countries, including the U.S., fearing that
officials will find reasons to detain him. No question that WikiLeaks
would be in trouble if he were jailed: A spokeswoman says it has a
"contingency plan," but without Assange there is no public face.
Meanwhile, his resources have been drained by defections from his
organization; some old friends and associates have taken issue with his
autocratic style.
None of which has stopped him from picking new fights. The promised
release of bank documents would be the largest assault by WikiLeaks on the
corporate sector, and Assange says the business community should expect
plenty of sequels. In early October the site shut down its
document-submission system; Assange says it was receiving more information
than it could find resources to publish, thousands of additions a day at
some points. The total is more gigabytes of data than he can count. "Our
pipeline of leaks has been increasing exponentially as our profile rises,"
he says, drawing a curve upward in the air with one hand.
If even a fraction of his claims are borne out, he's already sitting on a
crypt of data any three-letter spy agency would kill for. The world's most
vocal transparency advocate is now one of the world's biggest keepers of
secrets. And about half of those revelations, says Assange, relate to the
private sector.
Over the last four years he has been so busy embarrassing various
governments, from Washington to the corrupt Kenyan regime of Daniel arap
Moi, that many forget the corporate scandals already on WikiLeaks' trophy
wall. In January 2008 the site posted documents alleging that the Swiss
bank Julius Baer hid clients' profits from even the Swiss government,
concealing them in what seemed to be shell companies in the Cayman
Islands. The bank filed a lawsuit against WikiLeaks for publishing data
stolen from its clients. Baer later dropped the suit-but managed to stir
up embarrassing publicity for itself. The next year WikiLeaks published
documents from a pharma trade group implying that its lobbyists were
receiving confidential documents from and exerting influence over a World
Health Organization project to fund drug research in the developing world.
The resulting attention helped crater the WHO project.
In September 2009 commodities giant Trafigura filed an injunction that
prevented British media from mentioning a damaging internal report. The
memo showed the company had dumped tons of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast,
chemicals that allegedly sickened 100,000 locals. But it couldn't stop
WikiLeaks from publishing the information. Trafigura eventually paid more
than $200 million in settlements.
How can an American corporation respond to a Wiki attack? Lawsuits won't
work: WikiLeaks is legally shielded in the U.S. by its role as a mere
conduit for documents. Even if a company somehow won a judgment against
WikiLeaks, that wouldn't shut it down. Assange spreads the site's assets
over many countries. "There's no single target to drop a bomb on," says
Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University.
The best protection? With a dash of irony Icelandic WikiLeaks staffer
Kristinn Hrafnsson suggests that companies change their ways to avoid
targeting. "They should resist the temptation to enter into corruption,"
he says. Don Tapscott, coauthor of The Naked Corporation (Free Press,
2003), agrees. His simplistic conclusion: "Open your own kimono. You're
going to be naked. So you have to dig deep, look at your whole operation,
make sure that integrity is part of your bones."
Most corporations, instead, are turning to cybersecurity to shield their
private parts. Despite dozens of calls to companies in tech, energy and
finance, none wanted to talk about antileaking strategies. But a Forrester
Research study found that about a quarter of companies in the U.S., the
U.K., France, Germany and Canada were implementing leak-focused security
software in 2010, and another third are considering that option. A study
last year by the Ponemon Institute, a privacy-research consultancy in
Traverse City, Mich., found that 60% of employees admit to taking
sensitive data before they leave a company.
*****
Some of the more intriguing antileak work is being done by Uncle Sam. In
an unmarked government building on the edge of a residential Arlington,
Va. neighborhood, a cybersecurity researcher named Peiter Zatko shows just
how easily leaks can occur. He lays out a blow-by-blow history of one
insider data theft: The suspect searched broadly over the network to find
anything related to critical infrastructure, then returned to manually
probe a few interesting files. "Then he walked away with enough
information to shut down big chunks of the telephone systems in the United
States," Zatko says matter-of-factly.
Who was that shadowy data smuggler? "That was me," says the 39-year-old
researcher, giggling bashfully.
Zatko is not your typical Department of Defense employee. Even in his new
Beltway digs, he prefers to be called "Mudge," the hacker handle he used
during decades of exploring the dark corners of the Internet. Frank Heidt,
a former security staffer at MCI and several military contractors, says
that when he first read Zatko's exploit research in mid-1990s hacker
zines, he thought that Mudge must be the pseudonym of a group. "He was so
prolific that I thought he couldn't be one person," Heidt says. In 1998,
as part of the L0pht hacker think tank, Zatko testified in a congressional
hearing that he and his friends could shut down the Internet in 30
minutes.
Since March Zatko has also been a lead cybersecurity researcher at the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the mad-scientist wing of the
Pentagon devoted to projects that occasionally result in breakthroughs
like the Internet and GPS. Zatko's new pet project may be equally
ambitious: He aims to rid the world of digital leaks.
The telephone system theft case that Zatko dissected in a Darpa conference
room was a test, demonstrating that anyone with access to a network could
steal data without detection, despite the system's expensive security
software. Now his challenge is to fix the problem. Since August he has led
a project known as the Cyber Insider Threat, or Cinder. Like most Darpa
initiatives it's an X-Prize-style open invitation for ideas; recipients
typically get tens of millions of dollars in government funding.
Thirty-five entrants, mostly tiny companies, have already publicly signed
up, many more in secret. "We're looking to everyone from academia to
startups to large government contractors," says Zatko. "We're not looking
for evolutionary improvement. We want to pull the rug out from the problem
altogether."
It's a well-worn carpet. Since late 2007 every major security software
vendor, from McAfee to Symantec to Trend Micro, has spent hundreds of
millions of dollars to acquire companies in the so-called Data-Leak
Prevention (DLP) industry-software designed to locate and tag sensitive
information, and then guard against its escape at the edges of a firm's
network.
The problem: DLP doesn't work. Data is simply created too quickly, and
moved around too often, for a mere filter to catch it, says Richard
Stiennon, an analyst for security consultancy IT-Harvest, in Birmingham,
Mich. "For DLP to function, all the stars have to align," he says. "This
is a huge problem that can't be stopped with a single layer of
infrastructure."
More fashionable now is network forensics: the process of constantly
collecting every fingerprint on a company's servers to trace an intruder
or leaker after the fact-and, perhaps, deter the next one. That's a bit
like fighting the next war according to the last one. Still, revenue at
NetWitness, a prominent Herndon, Va. startup in that budding field, has
leaped from $250,000 to $40 million since 2006. While the software
generally gathers data and makes it easily available to queries, it
doesn't pinpoint culprits. "There's nothing in current technology that can
do this in an automated fashion," says Shawn Carpenter, principal
forensics analyst at NetWitness. "You need a Columbo."
Or, better yet, a robo-Columbo. Darpa's Zatko has been working on a system
of automatically identifying what he calls "malicious missions": insider
activity aimed at stealing data from inside a company's firewall, whether
it's a Dell PC remotely hijacked by a Chinese cyberspy or Bradley
Mannings, the U.S. soldier accused of leaking classified documents about
combat in Afghanistan to WikiLeaks. Zatko's system would monitor networks
in real-time for just the sort of data-stealing behavior he would perform
himself: steps like scouring large areas of the network for a certain
file, dumping piles of data to external storage hardware or sending
encrypted files out over the Internet. No single episode would signal a
leak; instead, the software would link acts in a probabilistic chain,
triggering an alert only if a string of events points to purposeful data
theft.
Some of that leaky behavior isn't what a casual observer might expect.
Consider the cyber footprints left by Robert Hanssen, a former FBI agent
serving a life sentence in a Colorado supermax prison for selling
intelligence to the Soviets over two decades. Every few days Hanssen would
stop his normal activities and make a single query to a server across the
network, a pattern he repeated for years. That server, Zatko says, held
the counterintelligence database. Hanssen was searching for himself, a
routine check to see if he'd finally been found out.
"You put all these things together into the different components of the
mission," says Zatko. "I'm looking for these new rhythms, new tells, new
interrelations and requirements."
Cinder wasn't created to combat WikiLeaks-in fact, it predates WikiLeaks'
biggest military scandals. But Zatko has nonetheless found himself
squarely in opposition to Assange's mission-a strange face-off, given that
the two men once traveled in the same hacker circles, during the years
when Assange went by the hacker handle Mendax (a Latin reference to the
"splendidly deceptive" in the poet Horace's Odes) and reveled in accessing
corporate and government systems without authorization. Neither will
reveal much about their past encounters, but Assange says that they "were
in the same milieu." Asked about Assange, Zatko says only, "I have very
pleasant memories of those old days."
WikiLeaks' founder, in fact, seems to have trouble accepting that Mudge is
working for the other side. "He's a clever guy, and he's also highly
ethical," says Assange. "I suspect he would have concerns about creating a
system to conceal genuine abuses." He dismisses Cinder as just another
system of digital censorship. And those systems, he says, will always
fail, just as China's Great Firewall can't stop well-informed and
determined dissident Internet users. "Censorship might work for the
average person but not for highly motivated people," Assange says. "And
our people are highly motivated."
*****
Shutting down WikiLeaks wouldn't stop the growing movement of transparency
agitators. They now have a nation-size ally: Iceland. Since WikiLeaks
scored a major scoop unearthing the corrupt loans that helped destroy that
country's largest bank, the volcanic island is fast on its way to becoming
the conduit for a global flood of leaks.
It began when Kaupthing Bank collapsed in October 2008-a calamitous chain
reaction that has strapped Iceland with $128 billion in debts, around
$400,000 per capita. Ten months later Bogi Agustsson, a Walter
Cronkite-ish anchor for Icelandic national broadcaster RUV, appeared on
the evening news and explained that a legal injunction had prevented the
station from airing a prepared expose on Kaupthing. Viewers who wanted to
see the material, he suggested, should visit a site called Wikileaks.org.
Those who took Agustsson's advice found a summary of Kaupthing's loan book
posted on the site, detailing more than $6 billion funneled from
Kaupthing's coffers to its own proprietors and companies they owned, often
with little or no collateral; $900 million went to Olafur Olafsson, a
major investor in Kaupthing who, on his birthday, flew in Elton John from
England, along with a grand piano, for a one-hour concert. "The banks had
been eaten from the inside out," says Kristinn Hrafnsson, a former
investigative reporter in Reykjavik who now works with WikiLeaks.
A government investigation is still going on; no criminal charges have
been filed. But WikiLeaks became a household name in Iceland. In December
2009 Assange and Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a German who then worked with
WikiLeaks, were invited to keynote a free-speech conference in Reykjavik.
Their talk echoed an idea from American cyberlibertarian John Perry
Barlow, calling for a "Switzerland of bits." Iceland, with its independent
spirit and recent taste of explosive whistle-blowing, they suggested,
could become the digital doppelga:nger of a tax haven: a safe harbor for
transparency, where it's open season on government and business
secrets-and leakers are protected by law.
The idea might have gone nowhere if not for Birgitta Jonsdottir. Assange's
message captivated the 43-year-old poet and self-styled
"realist-anarchist." She wasn't just another idealistic protester with a
goth wardrobe and hipster haircut. In the chaotic political environment
that followed the national financial crisis, Jonsdottir had been elected
to Iceland's parliament, the Althingi, in April 2009.
Working with the country's transparency activists, she pulled together the
Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, or Immi. The initiative would bring to
Iceland all the source-protection, freedom of information and transparency
laws from around the world and even set up a Nobel-style international
award for work in the field of free expression. Jonsdottir pushed through
a unanimous resolution to create a series of bills to implement Immi. They
would also make Iceland the most friendly legal base for whistleblowers on
Earth.
Velkomin, as Icelanders would say, to Leakistan.
"The more that companies resist, the more information will get out about
them," says Jonsdottir when we meet in Reykjavik's Hressingarskalinn cafe,
around the corner from the parliament building. "They can't hide anymore.
The war is over. They lost." In Jonsdottir's vision Iceland will attract
both mainstream media and WikiLeaks-like organizations to move their data
to Iceland, enjoying legal protection, just as another firm might
incorporate in a tax-sheltering island in the Caribbean.
She may be getting a bit ahead of herself. Immi has yet to become law,
though it has backing from powerful figures, including both Iceland's
minister of justice and the head of its progressive party. Even if it
does, Immi likely wouldn't offer much legal protection to organizations
whose assets and staff aren't physically in the country; they could still
be sued anywhere else in the world, given that their digital and print
publications could appear globally. Immi could also face resistance from
the U.S. and the EU-particularly when it comes to military matters. As
Marc Thiessen, a conservative pundit, wrote on the blog of the American
Enterprise Institute in August, "Immi calls into question Iceland's
seriousness as a NATO ally, and Iceland needs to realize there will be
consequences for its actions." There could be a backlash for exposing
corporate secrets, too. Alastair Mullis, a professor of law at East Anglia
University in Britain, says, "It's possible that Iceland will become the
defamation capital of the world."
Jonsdottir and fellow Immi creator Smari McCarthy are pushing ahead
anyway. Immi, they say, doesn't fashion new laws; it cherry-picks existing
statutes from around the world (source shields from Sweden, libel
protection from New York State, protected communications with journalists
from Belgium, among them). "We're basing our legislation on laws that have
already withstood attacks," says Jonsdottir. Defamation and other concerns
like child pornography and copyright violations, she argues, would still
be illegal in Iceland and wouldn't be sheltered.
Nor is the idea to protect WikiLeaks itself, Jonsdottir points out. The
site doesn't need help: Its data and submissions process are carefully
encrypted, and its infrastructure is spread over enough
countries-including some servers in a bombproof, underground bunker in
Sweden-that taking it offline is already nearly impossible.
Instead Immi would foster a new wave of media organizations and
whistleblower outlets that don't rely on WikiLeaks' technical savvy or
resources. Already a handful of smaller, leak-focused conduits-regional
sites like Africa-focused SaharaReporters or Thaileaks.info-have published
damning data. Immi's McCarthy says he's been approached by media
organizations from Rwanda to Chechnya. German WikiLeaks staffer Daniel
Domscheit-Berg, disgruntled with Assange's laser focus on infrequent
megaleaks, has left the organization along with several others to create
his own spinoff. "In the end there must be a thousand WikiLeaks," he told
Der Spiegel in September.
Iceland certainly has the infrastructure for a lot of informational
mischief. Half an hour outside Reykjavik, on a landscape that resembles
Mars covered in snow, the Thor Data Center is preparing for an influx of
bytes. By 2011 it hopes to have thousands of servers in its
aluminum-plant-turned-server-farm, powered by ultracheap geothermal energy
and cooled by free arctic air. Iceland's biggest Web host, ironically
named 1984 Web Hosting, is excited about the boost Immi could give its
business. "I created this company to prevent thought control," says Mordur
Ingolfsson, its chief executive. "In my humble opinion, Immi is the most
important thing to happen to this godforsaken island since the Sagas were
written." (That's 600-plus years.)
Jonsdottir agrees: "WikiLeaks was an important icebreaker. It was the tip.
Immi is the rest of the wedge, and it will open up everything." (She is
less thrilled to learn that Assange speaks of Immi as his personal
creation.)I ask Assange how he expects companies to cope with a world
where hundreds of WikiLeak-alikes may soon exist. His three-part
prescription is earnest-if a bit patronizing: "Do things to encourage
leaks from dishonest competitors. Be as open and honest as possible. Treat
your employees well."
He also wants to clear up a misunderstanding. Despite his revolutionary
reputation, he's not antibusiness. He bristles at the media's focus on his
teenage years as a computer hacker who broke into dozens of systems, from
the Department of Defense to Nortel, and was eventually convicted on 25
charges of computer fraud and fined thousands of dollars.
Instead, he prefers to think of himself as an entrepreneur. He tells the
story of a free-speech-focused Internet service provider he cofounded in
1993, known as Suburbia. It was, to hear him tell it, the blueprint for
WikiLeaks-in one instance, when the Church of Scientology demanded to know
who had posted antichurch information on one site, he refused to help.
("He has titanium balls," says David Gerard, that site's creator.) "I saw
it early on, without realizing it: potentiating people to reveal their
information, creating a conduit," Assange says. "Without having any other
robust publisher in the market, people came to us."
Leaks merely lubricate the free market, he says, settling into the couch
and clearly enjoying giving me a lecture on economics. (Later, as a
45-minute interview pushes into two hours, he ignores his handler, who
keeps urging him to leave for his next appointment.) He cites the example
of the Chinese Sanlu Group, whose milk powder contained toxic melamine in
2008. While poisoning its customers, Sanlu also gained an advantage over
competitors and might have forced more of them to taint their products,
too, or go bankrupt-if Sanlu hadn't been exposed in the Chinese press. "In
the struggle between open and honest companies and dishonest and closed
companies, we're creating a tremendous reputational tax on the unethical
companies," he says.
Of course, Assange's tax isn't as equitable as it sounds. He alone decides
where to apply the penalty, choosing the targets and when to expose them
with a touch of theatrical grandstanding-and with zero accountability. For
better-and worse-WikiLeaks has become the Julian Assange Show. As a
photographer begins shooting, Assange wonders aloud if the coat he's
wearing might have been produced by a labor-exploiting company. A few
minutes later he jokes about his "messiah complex."
Like any true believer, Assange sees his work in simple terms. Markets, he
reminds me, can't exist without information. Business will come to
appreciate what he offers. And if that requires a few painful scandals in
the process?
Assange doesn't miss a beat. "Pain for the guilty.
From: analysts-bounces@stratfor.com [mailto:analysts-bounces@stratfor.com]
On Behalf Of Marko Papic
Sent: Wednesday, December 08, 2010 19:39
To: analysts
Subject: Random Business Idea - Network Security
I'm sure this has been thought of before at STRATFOR so excuse the
redundancy. I was reading a solid Forbes article on Assange and it said
that a large number of deep pocket corporations were looking into
leak-focused network security after these Wikileak episodes.
I was wondering if it was possible for us to get some of that
"leak-focused" gravy train. This is an obvious fear sale, so that's a good
thing. And we have something to offer that the IT security companies
don't, mainly our focus on counter-intelligence and surveillance that Fred
and Stick know better than anyone on the planet.
We do a lot of good work with all the personal/executive security analysis
as well. Could we develop some ideas and procedures on the idea of
"leak-focused" network security that focuses on preventing one's own
employees from leaking sensitive information.
The point here is that I am sure there are certain procedures and
precautions that companies should employ that go beyond installing network
security network to deal with potential leaks. In fact, Im not so sure
this is an IT problem that requires an IT solution.
--
Marko Papic
STRATFOR Analyst
C: + 1-512-905-3091
marko.papic@stratfor.com
--
Marko Papic
STRATFOR Analyst
C: + 1-512-905-3091
marko.papic@stratfor.com
--
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Marko Papic
Geopol Analyst - Eurasia
STRATFOR
700 Lavaca Street - 900
Austin, Texas
78701 USA
P: + 1-512-744-4094
marko.papic@stratfor.com
