Private Intelligence

Stratfor, Wikileaks and exposing the murky world of "private intelligence"

 This early morning, I came across a news item that mentioned that Wikileaks had now a new smoking gun on its site - the entire tranche of close to 5 million emails exchanged between Stratfor employees internally and externally. Stratfor, is a "private intelligence" company which publishes intelligence information for public consumption ostensibly. But that it seems ..is only a public facade. This agency is more than that; it also uses the tactics adopted by traditional spooks to wheedle out information from paid (or otherwise) informants - in government and out of it - across the globe and have also acted as a some kind of a shady operator in the interests of the US covert agencies as well.