What is Humint Collection?
The daily said the cables give a laundry list of instructions for how State Department employees can fulfill the demands of a ‘National Humint Collection Directive’ in specific countries. Humint is a spy-world jargon for human intelligence collection. One cable asks officers overseas to gather information about “office and organisational titles; names, position titles and other information on business cards; numbers of telephones, cellphones, pagers and faxes,” as well as “internet and intranet ‘handles’, internet e-mail addresses, web site identification-URLs; credit card account numbers; frequent-flier account numbers; work schedules, and other relevant biographical information”. Ahead of the release of the potentially embarrassing documents, which the US fears could harm its relations with several countries, the American administration had asked the website to refrain from making the classified documents public.
