WikiLeaks Might Not Even Know What's In 2.4 Million Syrian E-mails

[struggle4progress]

Alexander Abad-Santos 9:01 AM ET

While we're no doubt excited about the 2.4 million e-mails from Syrian politicians, officials, and companies that WikiLeaks says it's releasing today, we're more interested in exactly how anyone will find any juicy stuff in an ocean of documents ...

To put "The Syria Files" into perspective, the database is about 10 times the size of Wikileaks' State Department release ... WikiLeaks says about 400,000 of those e-mails are in Arabic and around 68,000 are in Russian.

... And there's also a question of veracity, which WikiLeaks addressed with this odd disclaimer: "In such a large collection of information, it is not possible to verify every single email at once; however, WikiLeaks and its co-publishers have done so for all initial stories to be published. We are statistically confident that the vast majority of the data are what they purport to be." Okay ...

... WikiLeaks says to expect stories ... in outlets like Lebanon's Al Akhbar, Germany's ARD, and Italy's L'Espresso. As you may recall, Wikileaks has had some difficulties with its media partners in the past ...

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2012/07/wikileaks-might-not-even-know-whats-their-24-million-syrian-e-mails/54199/

[treestar]

1. How do they even get this stuff?

I wonder if governments will be able to put up firewalls and stop them.