Wikileaks releases Syrian govt. emails

WikiLeaks reports having received 2.5m emails from Syrian government officials, which it began releasing Thursday night. Founder Julian Assange: "The material is embarrassing to Syria, but it is also embarrassing to Syria's opponents."

The database comprises 2,434,899 emails from the 680 domains. There are 678,752 different email addresses that have sent emails and 1,082,447 different recipients. There are a number of different languages in the set, including around 400,000 emails in Arabic and 68,000 emails in Russian. The data is more than eight times the size of ’Cablegate’ in terms of number of documents, and more than 100 times the size in terms of data. Around 42,000 emails were infected with viruses or trojans. To solve these complexities, WikiLeaks built a general-purpose, multi-language political data-mining system which can handle massive data sets like those represented by the Syria Files.

• [Kommkast]

  Ooooo… once the data mining on this is in full swing.. things could get.. interesting. 

• [fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

  This is the part where all the “Why does Wikileaks always hate America? They should released documents from some actually evil country!” team graciously concedes, right?

  • [humanresource]

    Nah, they’re as likely to concede as the “Wikileaks doesn’t matter in any way, its just Assange’s ego trip” crowd, and the “Wikileaks is cyberterrorism” people.  Ain’t gonna happen.

  • [theophrastvs]

     Your point is apt.  however, don’t you think there might be a substantial subset of this vast dump that will embarrass “America”?  (think along the lines of spiriting Assad to safe havens if commercial interests (and not for instance humanitarian) are met)

• [Severian12]

  Maybe this is how Julian stays out of jail? 

  • [John Irvine]

     Or how he is quietly introduced to a diet of Polonium 210.  I suspect Russia will come out of this looking particularly bad.

    • [Severian12]

      I don’t think they’ll be able to blame Russia for that anymore.

• [Amelia_G]

  Wow! This could conceivably move Russia out of its blockade against international efforts against the Assads.

  • [Teresa McTigue]

    It depends what’s in the emails.

• [Adam Greenfield]

  Interesting, I wonder how they got their hands on this info.

  • [fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

    Given the modest but nontrivial number of defections among Syrian officials of various stripes of late, my suspicion would be that somebody pissed off the wrong techie, who then took a ‘backup’ with him.

• [Amelia_G]

  Russia just announced it will export no new weapons to Syria, i.e., they put a moratorium on new agreements for arms sales. Supposedly there’s some concern that Syria won’t be able to pay Russia for weapons already delivered. Not clear whether arms sales already agreed to but not yet delivered will also be stopped.
  http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/aufstand-in-syrien-russland-stoppt-lieferung-von-waffen-a-843403.html