Wikileaks To Publish Millions Of Emails From Syrian Officials

Wikileaks has just announced that they’re processing a trove of 2.4 million emails from and to Syrian officials that details the links between the internationally despised regime and outside governments and organizations. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange wrote that the “the material is embarrassing to Syria, but it is also embarrassing to Syria’s external opponents.”

The emails could have come from a trove hacked out by Anonymous in February that detailed the excesses of the Assad family during the conflict.

Wikileaks describes the trove as containing hundreds of thousands of addresses in multiple languages.

The database comprises 2,434,899 emails from the 680 domains. There are 678,752 different email addresses that have sent emails and 1,082,447 different recipients. There are a number of different languages in the set, including around 400,000 emails in Arabic and 68,000 emails in Russian. The data is more than eight times the size of ’Cablegate’ in terms of number of documents, and more than 100 times the size in terms of data. Around 42,000 emails were infected with viruses or trojans. To solve these complexities, WikiLeaks built a general-purpose, multi-language political data-mining system which can handle massive data sets like those represented by the Syria Files.

The first “release” – a few emails regarding Finmeccanica – aren’t particularly juicy, per se, but instead point to the mundanity of statecraft, even in a country gone mad.