The Syria Files

I began publishing the Syria Files on 5 July 2012, during the armed conflict that followed the 2011 uprising against President Bashar al-Assad's government. I described a database of 2,434,899 emails from 680 Syria-related entities or domain names, including those of the ministries of Presidential Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Finance, Information, Transport and Culture, dating from August 2006 to March 2012. Around 400,000 emails were in Arabic and 68,000 in Russian.

I published the emails progressively, alongside stories by partner organisations: Al Akhbar (Lebanon), Al Masry Al Youm (Egypt), ARD (Germany), the Associated Press, L'Espresso (Italy), OWNI (France) and Público (Spain). I said the material was embarrassing both to the Syrian government and to its opponents, and early reporting concerned dealings between Syrian state bodies and Western companies.

One early line of reporting, summarised by Global Voices, concerned emails indicating that Selex Elsag, part of the Italian defence group Finmeccanica, had supplied radio equipment to the Syrian Wireless Organization under a 2008 contract that was extended in May 2011, and that company representatives visited Damascus to provide training in February 2012.

I did not disclose our source. On 6 July 2012 the hacktivist collective Anonymous issued a statement claiming credit for supplying the emails, saying that an operation begun on 5 February 2012 by members of Anonymous Syria, AntiSec and the 'Peoples Liberation Front' had breached multiple Syrian domains and servers (Dark Reading).

I said that in so large a collection it was not possible to verify every email at once, but that we and our partners had verified those used in initial stories and were 'statistically confident' that the vast majority of the data were what they purported to be. We also reported that around 42,000 of the emails were infected with viruses or trojans.