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(Image Source: WikiLeaks)
BY MATTHEW PICHT
ANCHOR CANDICE AVILES
International watchdog WikiLeaks has begun publishing “The Syria Files” – a massive
amount of alleged leaked information from top Syrian officials. If true, CNN explains
just how big this leak is.
“Two and a half million emails from Syrian politicians and businesses, dating back six
years. They’ve described them as embarrassing to Syria and some of its opponents as well.”
At a press conference, WikiLeaks representative Sarah Harrison said these emails expose the
inner workings of the Syrian government – and the hypocrisy of its Western opponents as
well. Harrison also read a statement by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, saying these leaks
provide a broader perspective on the Syrian crisis.
“It helps us not merely to criticise one group or another, but to understand their
interests, actions and thoughts. It is only through understanding this conflict that we
can hope to resolve it."
WikiLeaks claims the emails come from around 680 entities related to Syria, with 678,000
senders and more than one million recipients. A writer for Forbes ponders how WikiLeaks
could possibly obtain access to such a wide range of information.
“Given that broad sweep, it’s difficult to imagine what sort of insider or external
hacker might even have access to so many institutions: The most likely explanation may be a leak
or outside data breach at one or several of Syria’s Internet service providers. As usual,
WikiLeaks has kept its source anonymous.”
So far, WikiLeaks has only published around 25 documents from its reportedly massive stash.
Al Jazeera reports, the files already have troubling implications for one company.
“A subsidiary of Finmeccanica, a huge Italian firm, which they say have continued, right
up to this year, to sell communication technology to Syrian police.”
WikiLeaks will be staggering the release of the remaining files over the coming weeks
and months. Even so, a writer for the Atlantic says it’s hard to know where to start analyzing
so much data.
“To put ‘The Syria Files’ into perspective, the database is about 10 times the size of
Wikileaks' State Department release... Making parsing the documents even more difficult
for most Western journalists: WikiLeaks says about 400,000 of those e-mails are in Arabic
and around 68,000 are in Russian.”
While WikiLeaks admits it has not been able to verify the authenticity of every email
in the leak, it says it’s “statistically confident” in the veracity of most of its
data.