• Listen to this segment

• Listen to the entire program

The activist hacker group Anonymous Syria has claimed responsibility for hacking into servers in Syria leaking files to Wikileaks, reportedly with help from the groups Anti Sex and the People’s Liberation Army. A New York based public relations firm is the latest entity to be exposed for aiding the Bashar Al Assad team in the release of files that began last Thursday. The firm of Brown Lloyd James is revealed to have been paid $5000 a month last year to improve the image of the Assad family while Syrian forces carried out a bloody crackdown on protestors.

Wikileaks will be releasing this trove of documents through multiple international news outlets and on its website as it has done in the past, with the notable difference that in the US, the Associated Press is the only media partner. This cache is more than 8 times the size of the 2010 “Cablegate” release of leaked US files and is a major show of strength from the online organization that was crippled by low funds after PayPal and major credit card companies stopped processing donations to the site nearly two years ago. Wikileaks says the Syria files were received in a number of languages, including 400,000 in Arabic and 68,000 in Russian. Before being leaked the emails, collectively, were sent through over 670,000 email addresses and received by over 1 million more. Wikileaks editor in chief Julian Assange said in a statement yesterday, “The material is embarrassing to Syria, but it is also embarrassing to Syria’s opponents… It helps us not merely to criticize one group or another, but to understand their interests, actions and thoughts. It is only through understanding this conflict that we can hope to resolve it.”

Assange has been living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London since June 19th, awaiting a decision on his application for asylum in the small South American nation. Assange sought refuge in the embassy after the British government ordered him to return to Sweden where he is wanted for questioning pertaining to allegations of sexual assault.

GUEST: Stephen Zunes, Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of San Francisco, where he chairs the program in Middle Eastern Studies; Jesselyn Radack, National Security and Human Rights Director at the Government Accountability Project, author of Traitor: The Whistle Blower and the American Taliban