Wikileaks and Anonymous Join Forces To Reveal How Dumb Our Intelligence Is

The most recent bombshell of confidential documents dropped by infamous watchdog organization Wikileaks is already looking to have an enormous impact on our understanding of government security practices. Specifically, intimate details on the long-suspected fact that the U.S. has been paying a whole lot of money to have private corporations spy on citizens, activists and other groups and individuals on their ever-expanding, McCarthy-style shitlist. But perhaps more importantly, the docs demonstrate something very interesting about the nature of U.S. government intelligence: They haven't really got much of it.

U.S. government intelligence contractor Stratfor is the first of the red-handed entities being outed in this newest batch of docs, which were delivered to Wikileaks care of the equally infamous hacking collective Anonymous. They show that the company, at the behest of U.S. intelligence agencies, had been conspiring a program of clandestine dragnet surveillance targeting private citizens and organizations based on political beliefs and allegiances, among other things. But what's even more ludicrous is that the government is getting a bum deal — a look at the recently revealed "intel" reveals that a lot of it is just pure hogwash, and Stratfor very likely knows it.

In one example, emails reveal that Stratfor had been tracking the political performance art collective The Yes Men, a group famous for impersonating politicians and corporate representatives in order to showcase the absurdity and corruption present within powerful institutions. But "tracking" in this case merely involved selling the government a list of public appearances planned by the group's members.

See also: A Timeline Detailing Anonymous and Wikileaks' Growing Relationship

Jamal Ghosn, associate editor at the Lebanese publication Al Akhbar, a Wikileaks media partner, also reported that Stratfor employees focused on activities in that region were simply using Google Translate on their articles as a way to glean intel for the United States. Not exactly "intelligence" on either count, but very much akin to paying untold amounts for an office temp to frequently type things into a search engine. Remember to file your taxes this month, folks!

Government waste and mismanagement in the intelligence community shouldn't be such a shocking revelation, however. At last year's Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, former senior official of the U.S. National Security Agency, Thomas Drake warned us about the U.S. government's ham-fisted and ineffectual intelligence-gathering programs like Trailblazer, a billion dollar effort that in the end, he says, "delivered nothing but a few PowerPoint slides."

Meanwhile, domestic surveillance in the United States continues to expand. A Washington Post investigative series and book from last year, Top Secret America explores some of the more outward-facing evidence of much of what groups like Wikileaks and Anonymous are now beginning to confirm — an enormous network of private intelligence contractors taking from America's indebted coffers to keep botched and inconclusive tabs on its citizenry.

Drake calls the staggering and secretive buildup of this shadow surveillance state "fundamentally anathema to our form of government." He's not wrong. What we may now be witnessing is the intelligence equivalent of post-9/11 military buildup in the last decade. But no matter how big and bloated they get, there's still no guarantee that the government's intelligence toadies will ever be able to manage the overwhelming flood of data that seems to increase exponentially in volume with every passing moment — that's a job for a computer, if only they could get smarter.

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