- Conservative election poster 2010
A few recent news articles about the UK’s Conservative and Liberal-Democrat (Conservative) coalition government – the ConDem’s – brutal attack on the National Health Service.
Corporate media is looking at the price of hospital meals instead of their quality. Some hospital trusts are clearly getting much better value than others.
In other news, the hacker group Anonymous has hacked Stratfor and released many details.
Over Christmas a busy, secretive group were at work, with their own views on who had been naughty and nice. However it was not Santa’s elves, but the amorphous “Anonymous” collective making the decisions. This group of hackers released a vast trove of email addresses, passwords and credit card information belonging to subscribers of the US intelligence company Stratfor – and the hangover has carried on into the new year, with the release of MoD and Nato officials’ details.
Stratfor, an authority on strategic and tactical intelligence issues, is considered by some to be a “shadow CIA”, and provides intelligence analysis and both private and public briefings on all manner of issues. The release by Anonymous kicked off discussion about how such a breach was possible at a high-profile company specialising in all things security, as well as why it had attracted the attention of Anonymous.
Many of the thousands of email addresses and personal details belonged to people in sensitive posts within the defence and intelligence communities. Although the publication of email addresses (hardly state secrets) is not a threat in itself, their disclosure can only be extremely embarrassing for a company selling itself as an expert on security, while the release of passwords adds to the alarm.
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