Recordkeeping Roundtable’s website has the raw transcript as supplied, but I’ve decided to edit it up a little to make it more readable. Enjoy.

CASSIE FINDLAY: So our first speaker, who has been launched into first position, and I don’t know we’ll just see if I can remember. I have a whole… like a proper, formal bio for Stil but he told me an abbreviated one that I’m going to remember now, which is Stilgherrian is a journalist and — you’ll just have to remind me — information security expert, journalist, blogger, troublemaker, speaker and shall be our first speaker tonight. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

STILGHERRIAN: Thanks Cass, thanks everyone. Yes, it’s somehow appropriate we start this, I think, with the disorderly side of accessing information. What I’d like to tell you about tonight, to kick this off, is the fact that we hear about all these information tools available to us as being something that will democratise access to information, and I think it’s more it’s going to “anarchise” that access, if I can put it in those terms. Because the tools are available now not just to the rational actors of government and parties and organisations and so on. These tools are now available to the rational actors of smaller groups or individuals, they’re now also available to the irrational actors — and I don’t mean crazy peopl,e although add them into the list too if you want, I mean actors large and small who do not necessarily have a well-defined or coherent aim for what they’re doing. And I will put Wikileaks and the random people who put the label ‘Anonymous’ on themselves under that label of irrational actors.

And if you think that’s unfair I’m not, again, I must stress, I’m not calling those people crazy. They’re often very sharp and very focused people. But if you stop and think about what is the actual aim here? What is the purpose of their activity? And it’s a little hard to pin down, particularly with the people who label themselves ‘Anonymous’. It seems to be ‘something big business, government, secret, awful, stop them, ha-ha-ha’. Well that’s perhaps unfair, but if you’ve got a better one, by all means publish it.

And the problem for existing holders of information — which by definition therefore means existing holders of power — is that what on earth are these people going to do next? And who is going to do it next? Because, as I say, the tools are now available to everyone, and it’s like the kiddies are loose in the chocolate factory — and again, “kiddies” because they are not part of what the existing powers consider to be, well, I suppose the ‘old boys’ club’.

If we hark back to something like the Cold War, and we were all in very, very grave danger of something going seriously wrong and we would be vapour the next morning. You know, we ran very close to the edge on a number of occasions over a 40 year period, let’s say, to pick a number from the air. The thing that stopped us going all the way, the thing that stopped the button being pressed, was that along the way there were actual rational people who said “No, actually, let’s not blow up the entire world, that might be a bad thing.” And that’s why we hear now about rogue states and nuclear terrorism and so on, because maybe not everyone has that same approach to pressing the button.

The same is the case in the battle for information. Now we’re not going to get vapourised because someone gets a copy of an email, but what happens is that a government party might lose power, an organisation such as a business might thoroughly go out of business — so in a sense it’s vapourisation for them — although, again, I don’t want to push that analogy too far because I find that whole equation of terrorism and nuclear things, it’s wrong. We’re talking about information. No-one physically gets hurt.

And that’s why the whole recent Stratfor thing is an interesting case, because although Stratfor is not a government organisation, it has strong links to government, it operates with information that’s the kind of information that governments have, and the kind of mistakes they made and the impact the breach has had upon them is perhaps similar.

Now the points I guess I want to make — and Cass has asked me to do a quick run through of this — who before all this news had ever heard of Stratfor, anyone? One, two… Okay, that’s… and Dr Dorling. That’s actually a really high proportion. Because I was on the list. Malcolm Turnbull had obviously heard of them — he was a subscriber. I’d subscribed to their newsletters once because my email address is in that big dumped database as well and things.

But essentially their job, if we take them at their word initially, ‘cos we’ve got some emails to read to find out some more — five million emails –– but they were a private intelligence organisation supposedly dealing with open source information to provide strategic advice and risk analysis for the private sector mostly, but some government.

So the kind of client and job that we imagined that they had until the last few weeks was things like an oil company has got to spend a couple of billion dollars in building a new oil refinery; shall we build it in the south of newly liberated Iraq or shall we build it in Pakistan, or where shall we build this because we need to look 30 years ahead.

George Friedman, the founder of Stratfor is big in the world of geopolitical analysis. His book The Next 100 Years is just that, essentially explaining how America will rule the world for the next century and the risks it faces in doing so, especially in Central Asia, and that’s the kind of thing.

Now some of the people who used the label “Anonymous” — and I keep phrasing it that way because there is no leader of Anonymous, there is no centre, there is no plan, anyone can say “I subscribe to their world view and I’m now doing things in the name of Anonymous.” So I will now just go to the short-cut way of saying that and say “Anonymous did” and “Anonymous said”, even though that is wrong and I know you’re all adults and will follow me on that. But in March last year Anonymous hacked into a company called H B Gary Federal which did information security for various bits of the United States government. And it turned out that H B Gary Federal was both incompetent and possibly even corrupt in the way it did that and, well, Anonymous took them down and in the last few days it is now being revealed that H B Gary Federal is being chopped up, sold off and that’s the end of their business.

Along the way they got of H B Gary’s emails. Apparently some of those emails mention Stratfor. And apparently some of them mentioned things that Stratfor did that Anonymous thought were wrong, corrupt, evil, nasty, whatever it might be. So they decided to have a look at what Stratfor was doing.

Over a number of weeks leading up to Christmas they did manage to break into Stratfor’s, servers and over a period of a few weeks exfiltrated, as the jargon goes, 200 gigabytes of data. Their entire email archive going back a decade. Everything sent and received. Yes, that does mean that they were moving, say, several gig of data out of their network without them noticing the extra traffic. Lucky them or incompetent them, however you look at it.

I have received word that apparently Stratfor had become, or started to become, aware that the chap doing their network was perhaps not as competent as he had told them and had recently been replaced, and they were in the process of maybe doing something about a new security person, but clearly too late.

So that all came into the news around Christmas time and, again, I want to use that phrase “the kids loose in the chocolate factory”, because hacking an organisation like that is a multi-person task. You need to bring a number of skills to bear, and they can’t all be found in the one person very often. So it’s a bit like the heist movies, you know, someone knows how to break down the door, someone knows how to deprogram the security cameras and all of that kind of stuff, with a little less action and a lot more sitting at computer terminals. They got in.

Now what focused everyone’s attention at Christmas was they found that Stratfor had not only allowed these guys to get in — but I’ll come back to that — they found that they’d kept all of the names, addresses and credit card numbers of all of their subscribers unencrypted in a database that had no password on it. So, what happens next? Well those credit card numbers start being spent, and Anonymous people sort of say “Well we’re doing a Robin Hood thing, we’re making donations to the Red Cross and Medicines sans Frontieres” etc, etc.

Except, well you know, the real reason was to get at that email archive. Well that’s what’s started to be published in the last few days through WikiLeaks, although WikiLeaks have said they don’t know where they got this email from, they just happen to have 200 gigabytes of email from Stratfor, but it’s just magically arrived.

So that’s where we’re up to and we’re up to the point where as this slowly gets released we are seeing things like an email which suggests founder George Friedman was talking to Goldman Sachs about how you could set up a separate corporate structure so that it would look like an independent advice organisation, so therefore technically it’s not insider trading, etc, etc. And I didn’t find that in George Friedman’s book anywhere. I didn’t see the bit that said “Start insider trading company” but, look, lots more will come out over the next few days.

Now this could happen to any organisation, any organisation you’re involved with, tomorrow because there are two things to point out.

One is that no-one ever gets their information security perfect. It’s just impossible, it is too hard. You just have to make one mistake, you just have to have one employee who makes a mistake, and the bad guys can get in. There are guys who do this for a living on the good side called penetration testers. They’re hired by banks, insurance companies, the military, whoever, to test their defences. If you have a beer with these guys, even if you don’t have a beer with these guys, ask them how many times they fail to get in. The answer is always zero. They never fail to get in. And often it’s, well, often it’s by manipulating people rather than anything technical.

The other thing to mention is that all of the tools that are available to do this are freely downloadable from the internet, either free or at a very low price from your friendly local Russian mafia. They come with technical support that is better than the technical support for most commercial software products. Well actually they are commercial software products, they come with good support and I’ve had the very great pleasure of one of the information security companies running me through a training session in one of these. They’re very easy to use. This training session took 90 minutes. At the end of it I knew how to get a bit of software, weaponise it, create a fake email convincing someone to download the weaponised software, install it on their computer and I now have control of that computer. All right, I was working from a cheat sheet. But I was also told that if I did not have this cheat sheet, any competent systems administrator could nut it out within two days. But as I say, if they want to pay the US$200 they’ll get the technical support and someone will talk them through it.

So it’s lovely stuff, and when I talk about the kind of tools available to you, this is absolutely complete control of the computers that you infect. You can turn on the camera without turning on the red light to say that it’s recording You can turn on the microphone,. You can take screenshots. You can record what’s happening on the keyboard,. You can do absolutely anything. You can then install software — this is off the topic of information attacks really — but should you wish to get access to their financial information, well, you can install something like the Zeus anti-banking trojan which recognises the top 200 or 300 banks in the world, will notice when your web browser has logged into your net banking for that bank — so it’s still showing you the Secure Sockets Layer padlock icon, you have a secure link — but in the background while that secure link is open it can start doing funds transfer commands, on its own, without them showing up on the screen. If it notices that you’ve set things up to notify you of transactions by say email to a Hotmail or Gmail account, it will quickly log into said account and delete that email before you get a chance to see it, etc, etc.

It’s really very, very clever stuff and hats off to some of the finest software developers that the Russian mafia has managed to find.

Now where does that leave us?

Screwed basically.

I mean I don’t wish to paint it all doom and gloom but right now, today, if I can use the Cold War analogy again, while all that was happening in the background we had many people doing things to make sure that the bad stuff didn’t happen. We had radar operators sitting at their consoles, we had fighter jets on standby, we had missiles ready to be launched and so on.

Well today we have a similar kind of battle going on We don’t hear much about it because most of it’s actually run by the commercial sector, oddly enough. It’s organisations like Microsoft and McAfee and Symantec and Kaspersky out of Russia and AVG out of Prague and all of these people who are running the defensive systems. All of these companies have their people operating in the black market and grey market to keep in touch with what the bad guys might be doing next to buy the software and show it to people like me so we’re all aware of how it works and what’s going on and so they know what they’re defending against.

And Stratfor is there –– that’s an example that’s very public now. We had so many hacks last year of Sony — I forget, did we get up to 100 million in credit card records stolen? I mean it’s got to the point now where this is all churning along. So many people in the cybercrime area have pointed to this year as being very significant because there were all of these attacks last year and yet there’s a sense of no-one’s doing anything with this data yet. It’s almost the calm before the storm.

And then finally, if I can kind of wrap up, in organisations or non-organisations like Anonymous, who’s really running this?

I mean we hear about … there are people doing things and they’re the public face. We hear about people occasionally being arrested. But I have had someone who worked for an acronymic intelligence agency — I’d better not say which one — but said relatively recently, “The fact that anyone can call themselves Anonymous is quite handy.”

That were his words, “quite handy”.

I don’t think it’s all doom and gloom but, as I say, there are people who are doing the defensive stuff and are on top of this. But it does create all of those issues for society. Who now will have the balance of power? Because we are eroding some of the exclusive access to information. We do have the sense where anyone with a grudge can decide that they will reveal information without a lot of thought about the collateral damage caused by that information coming out.

I mean, the people who broke into Stratfor didn’t really care about what happened to the credit card numbers they put online, or anything in the emails. Who knows what the fallout from that bout might be? They don’t really care.

And then there’s the long term. Who creates the narrative of our history? But that’s one I better leave for another time or we’ll be here all night. Obviously you’ll have a chance to ask questions. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]
[END TRANSCRIPT]

The promo, as I told you earlier said:

In a connected world where information sharing is easier and has more impact than ever before, is the current framework of FOI, information security, privacy and archives laws and practices delivering the information society needs in a timely and appropriate way? This panel discussion will be about:

• assessing the effectiveness of current information access and security laws and methods — are they hopelessly broken?
• the culture of secrecy and withholding by government agencies
• how technology and activism offer those with the skills and motivation some alternative and very powerful ways to access and reveal information, and
• what can be done to address the current state of things and move to better ways of making information available when and where it’s needed.

I was the first speaker, talking about the new, disorderly ways of liberating information, using the Anonymous crack of Stratfor as an example. Since then, though, we’ve discovered that the whole thing might have been an FBI sting operation against WikiLeaks!

Recordkeeping Roundtable has posted the audio of the entire event: opening remarks by moderator Cassie Findlay; me; the speech by former diplomat Dr Philip Dorling, who now leads the journalistic pack in FOI stuff; the speech by Tim Robinson, Manager, Archives and Records Management Services at the University of Sydney; and the question and answer session.

Here, though, is a tweaked and slightly less bandwidth-hungry version of my speech.

[The original audio recording by Cassie Findlay was sampled at 44.1kHz. This version has the audio levels compressed and normalised, and re-sampled to 22.050kHz. It's posted here under a Creative Commons BY-SA license.]

[Update 26 May 2012: A transcript of what I said is now available.]

Podcasts

• Patch Monday episode 120, “Anonymous vs. Stratfor: the real issues”, being a nice long interview with Richard Stiennon, chief research analyst with IT-Harvest, a privately-held IT security research firm based in Detroit, Michigan. He also edits and publishes the newsletter Cyber Defence Weekly, and is author of the book Surviving Cyberwar.

Articles

• The snake oil that is domain registries’ big fat new revenue stream, Crikey, 11 January 2012.

Media Appearances

• On Monday I was on ABC NewsRadio talking about generic cyberthreats as sold by the Australian Federal Police, or something.
• On Thursday morning ABC Radio National Breakfast had an expert panel on cybersecurity, and I was one of the experts. I suggest you read the daft troll’s comment on this post. It’s a hoot.
• On Saturday afternoon I was talking about various online scams on Sydney radio 2UE. They were so happy with this week’s post that I’m now booked in for this Saturday 28 January at 1530 AEDT to talk about trolling.

Corporate Largesse

None. I thought things might start picking up this week, but apparently not.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: Rosellas neat Wentworth Falls, photographed near Railway Parade on 17 January 2012.]

Also taking part were Richard Stiennon, chief research analyst at IT-Harvest in Detroit (I spoke with him about Anonymous and Stratfor on this week’s Patch Monday podcast), and Sean Kopelke, director of security and compliance solutions at Symantec Australia. The host was Jonathan Green, who is usually editor of ABC The Drum.

Over at the ABC’s website you can find the program audio and (perhaps, eventually) transcript. But I’m also including the audio below, just in case their systems fail.

This audio is ©2012 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, of course. Even though we don’t get paid.

Well, the weekend and the start of the new week was a bit more hectic than I expected, and this was the only new photo I’d taken that could be used here. Did you really want to see my photos of taxi receipts?

I’d also intended to write a more reflective introduction, cover what it was like living in the wilds of Ryde for the week. But this post is late enough as it is, so you’ll have to live without it.

Podcasts

None. However the Patch Monday podcast returned yesterday, and I think there might well be an episode of The 9pm Edict podcast some time this week too.

Articles

I know I listed my piece for ABC The Drum on the Anonymous hack of Stratfor in last week’s Weekly Wrap, but it was published in the week covered by this post, so here it is again.

• Anonymous imposters: hiding behind the AntiSec identity, ABC Drum Opinion, 2 January 2012.

Media Appearances

• On Tuesday I spoke about Rupert Murdoch joining Twitter on ABC Local Radio around the country.
• On Wednesday I spoke about the Fidel Castro death hoax spam and related information security issues on ABC 774 Melbourne.
• On Sunday evening I spoke about Rupert Murdoch joining Twitter and other social media matters on ABC Local Radio around the country.

Corporate Largesse

None. Again. When will these PR companies actually start work for 2012?

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: Full Moon over Erskineville, photographed last night from Erskineville Road, Sydney. This is the picture as-is using the "night landscape" program setting on the Nikon Coolpix S8100.]

There’s still some end-of-year start-of-year posts to come, but I’ll deal with them over the next few days. I actually took the holiday weekend as a holiday.

Podcasts

• The 9pm Edict episode 16, which had rather a lot about Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s Christmas Message, and a fair amount about Twitter. It thought this episode was a bit weaker than others recently, because I didn’t seem to channel the rage. But I’ve been told it’s OK. I shrug my shoulders.
• The 9pm Edict episode 17, which was put together in a pub on New Year’s Eve, interrupted by the pub closing early, and filled with more than the usual number of expletives. The bits of the script that had to be left out will appear in a special bonus episode soon.

Articles

The one written piece I did about the Stratfor hack shouldn’t be listed in this Weekly Wrap, technically, because it wasn’t published until 2 January. But I’ll list it here anyway for compeleteness.

• Anonymous imposters: hiding behind the AntiSec identity, ABC Drum Opinion, 2 January 2012.

Media Appearances

• On Thursday I was interviewed on Adelaide radio 1395 FIVEaa about the Anonymous hack on Stratfor and electronic voting, as well as the broader IT issues of 2011.
• Also on Thursday, I was interviewed by ABC TV’s 7.30 about Anonymous and the Stratfor hack. Notice the theme developing?
• On Friday night I was interviewed by Perth radio 6PR, again about Anonymous and the Stratfor hack.

Corporate Largesse

None. I have been abandoned. It’s not like PR companies are real families.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: The Meaning of Life, Part 1. This uniform was worn by nearly every woman under 25 partying in Sydney on New Year's Eve. Photograph taken near the corner of George and Goulburn Streets, Sydney.]

Long story short, less than half an hour later I’m live on air chatting about the whole thing, including who Anonymous are and what their motives might be, and what might happen next.

Thanks to technical difficulties my end I couldn’t record 6PR’s audio stream, and there wasn’t time to sort that out before we went live. So this audio was recorded my end, and that means I sound just fine on my quality microphone and the radio station is at the other end of the phone.

I’ve left in a bit of my conversation with the producer before and after so you can experience The Magic of Radio. Technically that’s a breach of the NSW Surveillance Devices Act 2007 because I didn’t seek permission first but, like, shut up.

Yes, it really was just two seconds from me getting ready to being live on air.

The audio is ©2011 Radio 6PR Perth Pty Ltd, but since they don’t archive these interviews I reckon it’s fair enough putting it here provided you just listen to it and I link back to 6PR and encourage you to listen. If you’re in Perth. Or if you want to stream it.

Interestingly, they chose to focus on the “liberation” of the credit card numbers and how it affected the Australian victims.

They didn’t use any of the material we recorded on who the various victims might be, what the still-to-come publication of some 2.7 million of Stratfor’s internal emails might reveal, and the effect that could have on both Stratfor and the individuals who’ve been feeding them information.

Indeed, this article by Barrett Brown makes it clear that those emails and other internal documents were the real target, not the credit card numbers. Anonymous is trying to give the impression that there’s some powerful stuff in there, but we’ll see.

I guess when you’ve only got six minutes and have to start with “Who is Anonymous?” and “Who is Stratfor?” then there’s not really enough time to get to “This is really a follow-up to Anonymous’ hack of HBGary Federal earlier in the year.”

Careful viewers will notice that reporter Sara Everingham described me as someone who “goes by the name Stilgherrian”, which is a bit of an oops but something that seemed to cause more distress to my Twitter followers than me.

Since some people have asked, I might as well tell you that the interview was shot in a spare office at the ABC’s Ultimo headquarters — rather different from the outdoor shot the last time I was on 7.30.

And despite the story being written and voiced by Sara Everingham, I was actually interviewed by Sarah Dingle. Ah, the Magic of Television!

The video in the story is Flash, so it won’t work on your iDevice. But there’s also an MP4 version of the video.

The original plan was to cover the kinds of issues raised in my 2011 tech wrap for Crikey and the Patch Monday podcast episodes 2011: the year in security and 2011: IT’s year of consolidation.

We also covered computer support for the electoral roll and computerised voting, since Senator Cory Bernardi had raised the subject of people casting multiple votes and how only a handful of alleged cases had been prosecuted.

While I supported the idea of an online electoral roll, I spoke against online voting. I’ve written about that before at ABC’s The Drum, Electronic voting a threat to democracy.

The regular presenters were on holidays, so the host was William Goodings.

The audio is ©2011 dmgRadio Australia, but here it is ‘cos it hasn’t been posted on the radio station’s website. Besides, this is a reasonable plug.

[Update 0910: Link added to article on electronic voting.]

“This is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media,” says Clay Shirky, professor at New York University and author of the book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. And what’s had the greatest impact? “It’s Twitter,” says Shirky.

So starts my piece in Crikey yesterday, We’re all wearing green for Iran now, apparently.

The article covers two main points.

One, this isn’t really the first time demonstrations have been organised or teargas reported via Twitter. Try Bangkok in October 2008. Try Chişinău in April 2009. And as Business Week pointed out, A Twitter revolution? Hardly.

Two, people are changing their avatars green to “support democracy in Iran” based on very little information. And as commenter Rena Zurawel claimed:

Whether it is a Rose Revolution in Georgia, or Orange Revolution in the Ukraine or a Green revolution in Iran — the source and inspiration is exactly the same: $70 million decided by the Congress to spend on so called “democratic changes in Iran”.

That last point intrigued me, so I poked around a bit.

I found this 2008 report from STRATFOR Global Intelligence: Geopolitical Diary: Iran, Psywar and the Hersh Article… which is reproduced in full over the jump.

US President George W Bush issued a highly classified presidential finding in late 2007 approving the initiation of covert operations focused on “undermining Iran’s nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change,” according to a July 7 article in The New Yorker by Seymour Hersh. Congressional leaders reportedly have been informed of the finding, and approved up to $400 million dollars to fund the operation.

This is, of course, explosive news. What is explosive is not that the United States is spending money on covert operations in Iran, but that someone has leaked a highly classified document to a reporter. The secret is now out; indeed, it was released before the article’s publication date. Hersh said only that the person who gave him the information was familiar with the document’s contents. This means his source is a person with extraordinarily high, code-named clearance — not to mention a criminal.

We would expect the Bush administration to be launching multiple investigations to find the leaker. If he is a Republican or a member of the administration or the intelligence community, then massive damage control is essential. If he is a Democrat who leaked (or an official of an agency deemed unfriendly to the administration), the incident represents a political opportunity. Everyone who had access to that document should be attached to a polygraph right now. Washington should have been in turmoil all weekend.

It wasn’t. Aside from some desultory comments, no one seems terribly upset that a major covert operation has been uncovered in the press and thereby crippled.

We are certain that a journalist of Hersh’s stature, writing for a respected publication like The New Yorker, did not make his story up. Since arrests are not pending, we can only conclude that the information was deliberately leaked to Hersh by the administration. This would not be the first time Hersh has been used as a channel by administration leakers. In 2006, he reported that the administration was carrying out covert operations in Iran for roughly the same end. Hersh is not friendly to the administration to say the least. A story by him carries great credibility because it appears to be an authentic scoop by a major journalist revealing things the administration doesn’t want revealed. Such a story therefore increases the sense of uncertainty in Iran substantially more than if a minor, pro-administration journalist published it. As we have pointed out in the case of the Mediterranean air exercises by Israel, the United States and Israel are intent on increasing the psychological pressure on Iran. This story fits into that pattern.

The only thing interesting in the story is the idea that until late 2007 there had been no presidential finding and the United States was not engaged in covert operations in Iran to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program and foment regime change. Given the administration’s stance on Iran, it is unthinkable that the intelligence community would not have been running operations in Iran for years focused on just these things. STRATFOR has regularly reported on various bombings in the southwestern Arab regions of Iran as well as in Sistan-Balochistan, noting that these would be likely areas to foment unrest.

The latest finding could be an intensification in operations, but the authorization to spend up to $400 million to mess with the Iranians is really not all that much money — especially since that is the cap, and the time frame for expenditures isn’t authorized. But as Hersh made clear in 2006, operations already were under way, meaning a finding had to have been in place.

With all due respect to Mr Hersh and The New Yorker, this is a report on the obvious. The United States regards Iran as a major target for covert operations, urgently wants to know everything it can about Iran’s nuclear facilities and would love to overthrow the Iranian government. A few hundred million, even on a long shot, is the least the United States would throw at this. As for a finding in late 2007, we do not know where the bureaucratic process is right now, but there have been presidential findings on covert operations in Iran for almost thirty years. Still, the details the administration has decided to make available to The New Yorker via Hersh should make worthwhile reading.

The important point is that unless there has been a massive breach of security, the administration has again acted to increase tensions with Iran — and this just a week after floating the idea of increased diplomatic ties with Iran and about ten days since leaking the report on the Israeli exercises. Since this article has been in preparation for weeks or months, and its publication date has not been under administration control, it remains unclear where in the sequence this leak was intended. But psychological warfare with Iran seems the order of the day, and this article is clearly part of it.

Our read of course might be wrong. Grand juries might be convening as we write and the FBI could be ranging all over DC taking statements from everyone with access to covert US plans in Iran. But until that happens, we look at this as another attempt to make the Iranians feel insecure.

Please feel free to distribute this Intelligence Report to friends or repost to your Web site linking to www.stratfor.com.

Whew!

Meanwhile, I rounded out my Crikey piece with some words from Meg Pickard, community manager at The Guardian. Amongst other things.

It’s easy to get caught up in the moment, feel the infectious nature of rumour and the thrill of disseminating third(/fourth/fifth/sixth…)-hand experience, and want to feel part of a global movement.

I’m not a big fan of bandwagons.