Sunday, September 9, 2012

TrapWire tied to White House, Scotland Yard, MI5 and others, claims hacked Stratfor email



An email hacked from Stratfor that discusses the use of the TrapWire surveillance system has been decrypted, revealing insider claims that the widespread spy program was adopted by the White House, Scotland Yard, Canadian authorities and others.

When WikiLeaks published a trove of correspondence last week reported to be from the servers of Strategic Forecasting, or Stratfor, included in the data dump was at least one email that initially appeared as pure gibberish. The communiqué, sent from Stratfor Vice President of Intelligence Fred Burton to seven other staffers within the private firm, has now been decoded, however, and its content suggests that the TrapWire surveillance program was put into the hands of the most elite and powerful governments and law enforcement agencies in the entire world.

The email, dated September 23, 2010, includes a string of correspondence between Burton and more than half-a-dozen colleagues exchanging information for a full day about how Stratfor is distributing feeds from its TrapWire system and with whom. Although encoded, the emails are encrypted in Base64 format, which can easily be decoded online. A decoded copy has also been uploaded to the Web by hacktivists aligned with Anonymous.

“Chatted with Mike M, the TW [TrapWire] operator and former CIA crony,” Burton writes in the first email included in the