Saturday, December 11, 2010

guardian article on wikileaks Cyberwar : authenticity of swedish investigations : general updatew/ a few comments

WikiLeaks backlash: The first global cyber war has begun, claim hackers

As Julian Assange is held in solitary confinement at Wandsworth prison, the anonymous community of hacktivists takes to the cyber battlefields

  • Mark Townsend, Paul Harris in New York, Alex Duval Smith in Johannesburg, Dan Sabbagh, Josh Halliday
  • guardian.co.uk,
  • Article history
    • Julian Assange
    WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Photograph: Lennart Preiss/AP

    He is one of the newest recruits to Operation Payback. In a London bedroom, the 24-year-old computer hacker is preparing his weaponry for this week's battles in an evolving cyberwar. He is a self-styled defender of free speech, his weapon a laptop and his enemy the US corporations responsible for attacking the website WikiLeaks.

    He had seen the flyers that began springing up on the web in mid-September. In chatrooms, on discussion boards and inboxes from Manchester to New York to Sydney the grinning face of a Guy Fawkes mask had appeared with a call to arms. Across the world a battalion of hackers was being summoned.

    "Greetings, fellow anons," it said beneath the headline Operation Payback. Alongside were a series of software programs dubbed "our weapons of choice" and a stark message: people needed to show their "hatred".

    Like most international conflicts, last week's internet war began over a relatively modest squabble, escalating in days into a global fight.

    Before WikiLeaks, Operation Payback's initial target was America's recording industry, chosen for its prosecutions of music file downloaders. From those humble origins, Payback's anti-censorship, anti-copyright, freedom of speech manifesto would go viral, last week pitting an amorphous army of online hackers against the US government and some of the biggest corporations in the world.

    Charles Dodd, a consultant to US government agencies on internet security, said: "[The hackers] attack from the shadows and they have no fear of retaliation. There are no rules of engagement in this kind of emerging warfare."

    The battle now centres on Washington's fierce attempts to close down WikiLeaks and shut off the supply of confidential US government cables. By Thursday, the hacktivists were routinely attacking those who had targeted WikiLeaks, among them icons of the corporate world, credit card firms and some of the largest online companies. It seemed to be the first sustained clash between the established order and the organic, grassroots culture of the net.

    But the clash has cast the spotlight wider, on the net's power to act as a thorn not only in the side of authoritarian regimes but western democracies, on our right to information and the responsibility of holding secrets. It has also asked profound questions over the role of the net itself. One blogger dubbed it the "first world information war".

    At the heart of the conflict is the WikiLeaks founder, the enigmatic figure of Julian Assange – lionised by some as the Ned Kelly of the digital age for his continued defiance of a superpower, condemned by his US detractors as a threat to national security.

    Calls for Assange to be extradited to the US to face charges of espionage will return this week. The counteroffensive by Operation Payback is likely to escalate.

    The targets include the world's biggest online retailer, Amazon – already assaulted once for its decision to stop hosting WikiLeaks-related material – Washington, Scotland Yard and the websites of senior US politicians. There is talk of infecting Facebook, which last week removed a page used by pro-WikiLeaks hackers, with a virus that spreads from profile to profile causing it to crash. No one seems certain where the febrile cyber conflict will lead, only that it has just begun.

    London

    At 9.15am last Tuesday a thin, white-haired figure left the Frontline Club, the west London establishment dedicated to preserving freedom of speech, and voluntarily surrendered to police. After two weeks of newspaper revelations concerning countries from Korea to Nigeria, and figures such as Silvio Berlusconi and Prince Andrew, a warrant for Assange's arrest had just been received by British police. It was from Swedish prosecutors eager to question him on unrelated allegations of rape.

    The response to WikiLeaks' cable release had been savage, particularly in the US. Mike Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor, said those who passed the secrets to Assange should be executed. Sarah Palin demanded Assange be hunted in the same way an al-Qaida operative would be pursued. The US attorney general Eric Holder ordered his officials to begin a criminal investigation into Assange with the intention of putting him on trial in the US. News of his arrest, even on unrelated charges, pleased the US authorities. "That sounds like good news to me," said Robert Gates, US secretary of defence.

    Yet even as Assange prepared to appear in a London court last week, an unlikely alliance of defenders had begun plotting to turn on the forces circling WikiLeaks. They were beginning to attack Amazon, which had been persuaded to sever links with WikiLeaks by Joe Lieberman, who heads the US Senate's homeland security committee; they also hit every domain name system (DNS) that broke WikiLeaks.org's domain name: Mastercard, Visa and Paypal, which stopped facilitating donations to the site, and the Swiss post office which froze WikiLeaks' bank account.

    Operation Payback was hitting back alongside a fledgling offshoot, Operation Avenge Assange, both operating under the Anonymous umbrella. These are a loose alliance of hackers united by a near-obsessive desire for information libertarianism who congregate on the website 4Chan.org.

    The cyberwar did not only involve obvious symbols of authority, though. For days, from their darkened chatrooms, the Anonymous ones had been watching a hacker called the Jester who seemed to be co-ordinating a series of attacks on internet service providers hosting WikiLeaks. They had noticed the Jester's pro-censorship credentials, deducing he must be receiving help. Speculation mounted that the Jester was a shadowy conduit working at the behest of the US authorities. "We wondered who was really behind his anti-WikiLeaks agenda," said a source.

    Attempts to railroad WikiLeaks off the net quickly failed. Removing its hosting servers has increased WikiLeaks' ability to stay online. More than 1,300 volunteer "mirror" sites, including the French newspaper Libération, have already surfaced to store the classified cables. Within days the WikiLeaks web content had spread across so many enclaves of the internet it was immune to attack by any single legal authority.

    In some respects, WikiLeaks has never been safer or as aggressively defended. As Assange was remanded in custody and taken to Wandsworth jail, Anonymous vowed to "punish" the institutions that had axed links with the website under pressure from the US authorities. The websites of Visa, Mastercard and PayPal were brought down; so too the Swedish government's.

    One Anonymous hacker said: "I've rambled on and on about the 'oncoming internet war' for years. I'm not saying I know how to win. But I am saying the war is on."

    Stockholm

    Unsurprisingly, the timing of Assange's arrest and aspects of Sweden's initial handling of the sexual allegations prompted his lawyer Mark Stephens to denounce the moves as politically motivated. A computer hacker himself, Assange, 39, achieved both instant notoriety and adulation when WikiLeaks published batches of damaging US files relating to the Afghan war in July. This fame led him to Stockholm a month later to deliver a lecture entitled: "Truth is the first casualty of war." It was a sellout. One leftwing commentator likened it to "having Mick Jagger in town".

    That night – 14 August – Assange stayed with the conference organiser at her flat in Södermalm, a former working class area of the city centre that has become Stockholm's equivalent of London's Islington. Three days later, in keeping with his habit of regularly changing addresses, Assange stayed in Enköping, a town 100 miles from Stockholm, with another woman who had also attended his lecture on the importance of truth in a war zone.

    Assange left Sweden on 18 August and the women went together to the police the next day. According to Claes Borgström, their lawyer, the women did not know each other before going to the police. Initially, he said, the women wanted some advice, but the police officer concluded a crime had been committed and contacted the duty public prosecutor.

    In court last week Assange was alleged to have had sex with unlawful coercion with a woman who was asleep and to have sexually molested the other by having sex without a condom.

    In Sweden, among the country's community of hackers and left-leaning political activists, the timing is viewed as coincidental rather than conspiratorial.

    "The Americans are very lucky indeed that Assange screwed around in Sweden, a society which takes rape allegations very seriously,'' said Åsa Linderborg, culture editor of the leftwing Aftonbladet tabloid. Film-maker Bosse Lindquist, whose WikiLeaks investigation will be broadcast on Swedish TV tonight, and who has spent many hours with Assange over the past few months, said Assange's attitude to women did not seem in any way striking.

    "If you look at the two prosecutors involved in investigating the rape allegations, they are not types you would imagine bowing to any kind of pressure from, say, the Swedish government or the United States.''

    A senior civil servant, who requested anonymity, also dismissed allegations of political plotting against Assange, arguing that Swedish culture is often misunderstood. "Swedes do not have an iconoclastic tradition in which you build people up then demolish their reputations. Even when people are celebrities, we accept that they may have questionable private lives. Swedes are capable of seeing the advantages of WikiLeaks while conceding that Assange may have unsavoury morals between the sheets.''

    Linderborg, though, says there is a widespread sense in Sweden that Assange's rise to fame fuelled his libido and ego.

    "Plenty of women are attracted by his underdog status and the supposed danger of spending time with him. He has several women on the go at once. One person told me he screws more often than he eats,'' Linderborg said.

    Of course, given the nature of the web, the allegations have triggered a series of attacks on both women's characters with lurid claims of "women who cry rape" and "bitches trying to send an innocent man to prison".

    Operation Payback

    Those monitoring the chatrooms used by Operation Payback say its hackers have set aside the sexual allegations, instead concentrating their efforts on amassing greater potency for the next phase of the WikLeaks fightback. The weapons deployed last week were "denial of service" attacks in which online computers are harnessed to jam target sites with mountains of requests for data, knocking them out of commission.

    The initial attacks against the Swiss PostFinance required about 200 computers, according to one Anonymous source. Yet within a day hackers were able to recruit thousands more pro-WikiLeaks footsoldiers. By the time the Visa and Mastercard websites were disrupted last Wednesday, close to 3,000 computers were involved.

    Anonymous leaders began distributing software tools to allow anyone with a computer to join Payback. So far more than 9,000 users in the US have downloaded the software; in second place is the UK with 3,000. Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, France, Spain, Poland, Russia and Australia follow with more than 1,000. The 11th country embroiled in the attacks is Sweden, where WikiLeaks's massive underground servers are housed, with 75 downloads.

    Sean-Paul Correll, a cyber threat analyst at Panda Security, who has monitored Operation Payback since its conception, said it was impossible to "profile" those involved. "They are anonymous and they are everywhere," he said. "They have day jobs. They are adults and kids. It is just a bunch of people." Middle-class professional members working alongside self-styled anarchists.

    Ostensibly, Anonymous is a 24-hour democracy run by whoever happens to be logged on; leaders emerge and disappear depending on the target that is being attacked and the whims of members. Correll said: "This group does not exist with some sort of hierarchy. It exists with a few organisers but these can change at any time. That gives the group great power in that it is impossible to trace and define. At the same time it is also a source of weakness as its actions can be unfocused."

    Ideas are floated on internet bulletin boards, whose location moves daily to evade detection. Ultimately a proposal hits a democratic "tipping point" and action is taken.

    A major test of Payback's mounting firepower will be Amazon, given the size of its servers. The attempt to attack the site last Thursday was half-hearted, but nevertheless audacious. Now sources estimate they would need between 30,000 and 40,000 computers to hurt Amazon and there is a growing feeling among hacktivists that it could happen. If it does, the retailer could lose millions of dollars during the Christmas season.

    So far, though, most of the attacks have been principally designed to register protest rather than destabilise companies financially, opting for their public websites rather than their underlying infrastructure.

    Two of the internet's most important social networking sites – Twitter and Facebook – are also becoming targets of elements within Anonymous.

    Twitter upset hackers last week by removing the Anonymous account – which had 22,000 followers – amid speculation that it was preventing the term #wikileaks appearing on its trending topics. The Anonymous page on Facebook was removed for violating its conditions, a move that has similarly annoyed a cohort of hackers. Both Facebook and Twitter have won praise in recent years as outlets for free speech, yet both also harbour corporate aspirations that hinge on their ability to serve as advertising platforms for other companies.

    Their use by Anonymous to direct people planning attacks has, according to many analysts, placed both in a difficult position. Facebook, which still has sites eulogising murderer Raoul Moat and Holocaust deniers, said it drew the line on groups that attack others, a bold move considering the site's WikiLeaks page boasts more than 1.3 million supporters. Any evidence that both sites yielded to US pressure and the gloves would be off. So too for any organisation that yields to American demands over WikiLeaks.

    Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion, a book which argues the internet has failed to democraticise the world successfully, believes the attacks are already viewed by Washington "as striking at the very heart of the global economy".

    Another emerging target in the weeks ahead is the US government itself. For a brief time last Tuesday, senate.gov – the website of every US senator – went down. Cyberguerillas claim it is a possible sign of things to come.

    The future

    The trajectory of the WikiLeaks controversy is almost impossible to predict. On Tuesday Assange will attend his next bail hearing. Although supporters have stumped up £180,000, it is expected bail will be refused, pending a full hearing of Sweden's extradition request. However his lawyer may also reveal fresh claims of US interference in the saga.

    Regardless of the fate of its founder, WikiLeaks will continue releasing declassified cables. At the moment only several hundred of 250,000 cables have been publicised.

    Analysts now describe the organisation's structure as a "networked enterprise", a phrase that has been used in the past in relation to al-Qaida.

    For all the US attempts, it is clear the attacks on WikiLeaks have made minimal impact and are unlikely to affect the availability of the information that WikiLeaks has already leaked.

    Meanwhile, Senator Lieberman has indicated that the New York Times and other news organisations using the WikiLeaks cables may be investigated for breaking US espionage laws. At present, who will win the "world's first information war" remains unclear.

    Morozov said: "There will be many more people from the CIA and NSA [National Security Agency] hanging out around them."

    But the conflict increasingly seems likely to target the real profits of US corporations. Today a 24-year-old from London will ready his weapons for the battle ahead.

    Comments in chronological order (Total 343 comments)

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    • stanbowles

      11 December 2010 9:38PM

      This comment has been removed by a moderator. Replies may also be deleted.

    • snix

      11 December 2010 9:41PM

      Changes are coming ,there is no use trying to cling to the shore when thr rivrt flows faster.
      Everything has to be framed as a war even truth supression
      Free Assange ,politicians should start acting like world leaders rather than the morally and spiritually corrupt posers they are

    • herpaderp

      11 December 2010 9:48PM

      Although these DDoS attacks were said to have been carried out by Anonymous, they weren't.

      Anonymous wouldn't waste its time with something like this.

      What happened was that a couple of idiots within Anonymous, but who don't really belong to Anonymous because they don't understand what Anonymous is, got a few thousand people on board to cause a bit of trouble.

      There were no lulz to be had here. To be honest the Habbo raids were funnier.

    • simonforsey

      11 December 2010 9:48PM

      Explosions in Sweeden, will our government take note and do whats right. Julian Assange is a hero of our times and needs to be protected form the fat lies, fat american terrorists that are reaking havoc in this world. Soon we will see who really are making this an unstable world.

    • MartinAlexander

      11 December 2010 9:48PM

      Really interesting article, but please, Grauniad, less of the foot-soldiers and - I couldn't believe it - 'darkened chatrooms'. Goodness. Now I know why I have never been able to find one.

      And this -

      Unsurprisingly, the timing of Assange's arrest and aspects of Sweden's initial handling of the sexual allegations prompted his lawyer Mark Stephens to denounce the moves as politically motivated

      Is this journalism or editorial? I should have thought that Stephens was prompted by Assange's innocence, and that the timing and handling were secondary.

      Speaking of the handling - there are serious doubts about the handling of this in Sweden, particularly in relation to the prosecutors and their jurisdictions, and these haven't been mentioned in the article. I'll look up the link, before anyone slams me for unsubstantiated assertions!

    • Burntfaceman

      11 December 2010 9:50PM

      Hmm...let's see, if they (for example) break the banking system it would be impressive, but then the elite would simply use them as blame to pull the drawbridge up even tighter...

      More interested in any big revelations Wiki may have: 911, Aghan, false flags, how the CIA invented Bin Laden, money laundering by Cheney/Bush, how past UK prime ministers cash in on leaving office, what and who the shadow elite NWO global elitists (such as the Bilderbergers) control; Gideon Osborne and Cameron not withstanding..?

    • ceeyewenti

      11 December 2010 9:52PM

      This comment has been removed by a moderator. Replies may also be deleted.

    • MartinAlexander

      11 December 2010 9:52PM

      See my last paragraph above...

      Mr Stephens told the BBC's Andrew Marr that the entire case against Mr Assange had been dropped by Sweden's chief prosecutor in September.

      He said it was only "after the intervention of a Swedish politician" that a new prosecutor in Gothenburg - not Stockholm, where his client and two women had been - began a new case.

      From the BBC.

    • FizzyVimto

      11 December 2010 9:52PM

      How difficult is it for journalists to understand that DDoS attacks have precisely NOTHING to do with hacking?

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Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Wikileaks vs. the Empire

from counterpunch:

Julian Quixote

By ERIC WALBERG

It was United States president Woodrow Wilson who called for "open diplomacy" — number one of his fourteen points in 1918 — so that "diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view." He would surely approve of Wikileaks' efforts at open diplomacy, though current US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has called them "an attack on America's foreign-policy interests" and indeed on "the international community", though she failed to specify which particular community members were the victims, or what they were the victims of.

On 7 December, the bane of US empire voluntarily gave himself up to Scotland Yard and will face trial and extradition to Sweden possibly by the end of the year, accused of "rape, unlawful coercion and two counts of sexual molestation", alleged to have been committed in August 2010. The trumped-up cases involve consensual relations, one an obvious "honey trap" by a CIA plant and the other a spurned Lewinsky-like groupie.

Assange is nothing short of a legend after a year of leaks, especially an April video taken from a US helicopter in Iraq in 2007 showing GIs shooting at least 12 innocent Iraqis like rabbits. Starting in July, he issued 500,000 US military documents on the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The straw for the imperial camel was a batch of 250,000 US diplomatic notes (1966-2009) in November, revealing a US diplomatic world increasingly acting as a branch of the CIA, and the cynicism of both Western and Arab regimes anxious to destroy Iran.

The leaks have been hailed as a blow to US criminal activity by people around the world, including staunchly American US Congressman Ron Paul, and condemned by lovers of US empire such as former US vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who called for Assange to be "pursued with the same urgency we pursue Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders". Former UK Foreign Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind said WikiLeaks' actions were "active assistance to terrorist organisations", neglecting to reflect on the UK's own long history of worldwide terrorist activities.

The 39-year-old Assange is an Australian citizen, though his Prime Minister Julia Gillard has threatened to cancel his passport. He is described by colleagues as charismatic, driven and highly intelligent, with an exceptional ability to crack computer codes. To his critics, he is just a publicity-seeker and womaniser.

In 1995 he was accused with a friend of dozens of hacking activities and fined, promising to be a good boy. He quietly co-authored Underground with Suelette Dreyfus, dealing with the subversive side of the Internet. Dreyfus described Assange as "quite interested in the concept of ethics, concepts of justice, what governments should and shouldn't do".

He began Wikileaks in 2006 as a "dead-letterbox" for would-be leakers — the real heroes of this saga, the unknown soldiers disgusted with their role as hired killers. His collective developed a Robin Hood guerrilla lifestyle, moving communications and people from country to country to make use of laws protecting freedom of speech. Co-founder Daniel Schmitt describes Assange as "one of the few people who really care about positive reform in this world to a level where you're willing to do something radical".

Wikileaks was forced this year to switch to a Swiss host server after several US Internet service providers shut him down, claiming he was endangering lives, though he made clear he was careful to vet the military cables from Afghanistan and Iraq precisely to avoid this. His site also came under cyber attack and PayPal cut off his ability to raise funds.

There is no doubt that Gillard, the Swedish prosecutor, PayPal, etc are all being pressured by the US government to help snuff out this ray of light exposing its many crimes. Only French Internet service provider OVH said it had no plans to end the service it provides to Wikileaks, and a judge threw out Industry Minister Eric Besson's case to force it to.

Hackivist admirers of Mr Quixote have set up mirror sites faster than traditional servers can shut Wikileaks down and are launching denial-of-service attacks targetting its Internet enemies. Coldblood, a member of the computer group Anonymous, told BBC, "Websites that are bowing down to government pressure have become targets. We feel that Wikileaks has become more than just about leaking of documents, it has become a war ground, the people vs the government."

The Man of La Mancha fought off more than "100 legal attacks" before his arrest, including one by Swiss banks whose illicit offshore activities were exposed. That case too was dismissed and left the bankers to scramble to protect their ill-gotten gains.

The show goes on. Wikileaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson said Assange's arrest was an attack on media freedom but assured, "Wikileaks is operational. We are continuing on the same track as laid out before." Assange — or his colleagues still at large — hopes to set up a number of "independent chapters around the world" as well as to act as a middle-man between sources and newspapers.

Strangely, he has been attacked on the left as a stooge of the CIA or Israel, though the former makes no sense at all. True, the latter comes off relatively clean amidst the diplomatic cesspool. But what the few tight-lipped US diplo leaks relating to Israel really show is the fear that US diplomats have of saying anything negative about Israel. Perhaps they fear they will be passed over for their "anti-Semitism" or perhaps they fear that all their missives are read by Mossad as a matter of course.

A terse cable from the US embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan compares Israeli-Azeri relations ominously to an "iceberg with nine-tenths unseen". Another polite one from Tel Aviv reveals that several "OT" (organised crime) figures applied for visas to attend a "security conference" in Los Vegas but thankfully didn't come back when asked for their prison records in Russia.

An interesting comparison is between Assange and another exposer of US military secrets, Jonathan Pollard, the (only) US-Israel spy serving a life sentence he received in 1987 for revealing US military secrets. The big difference, of course, is Pollard did not apply the "open diplomacy" principle. If he had blacked out the sensitive names, and exposed the secrets to broad daylight, like Assange, he could have had a beneficial influence on world politics. Instead he sold the secrets to Israel, and uncounted CIA agents lost their lives in the Soviet Union as a result.

Another worthy comparison is with the legendary Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, who like Assange, gave himself up and faced the music, which turned out to be sweet. The judge dismissed all charges against him in 1973 and the New York Times pompously applauded him in 1996, saying that the papers demonstrated "that the Johnson Administration had systematically lied" about "a subject of transcendent national interest and significance."

Ellsberg and Assange, following the advice of Woodrow Wilson, are heroes. Pollard, truly a villain, is worshipped today in Israel, where his 9000th day in prison last year was commemorated with a light show on the walls of the old city of Jerusalem. Last month 39 Congressmen petitioned US President Barack Obama to pardon him. Last summer, Netanyahu had the gall to offer to hold off a few more months on settlements if Obama freed him.

Will Assange suffer the fate of Pollard or Ellsberg? The US military machine was in disarray in 1971 and Ellsberg gave it a brave shove and helped bring the troops home. But this is 2010. The open calls to free Pollard are treated as a matter of course. While the Hillaries and Sarahs are calling to assassinate Assange for doing something noble, their like are calling to free a traitor who was responsible for betraying his country and causing untold deaths of US officials.

The sides are lining up, much like Bush predicted in 2001 with his "You are with us or against us." A brave Aussie, a principled French judge, an American libertarian congressman, a youthful computer nerd — the enemies of empire come in all shapes and sizes.

Eric Walberg writes for Al-Ahram Weekly. You can reach him at www.geocities.com/walberg2002/

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Hacktivists strike back at illegal U.S. Government hacking and spineless corporations

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Hackers hit Mastercard and Visa over Wikileaks rowMastercard and Visa both say their customers' accounts are not at risk


Wikileaks Revelations

Hackers have attacked the websites of credit card giants Mastercard and Visa.

The attacks came after the Anonymous group of hackers pledged to pursue firms that have withdrawn services from Wikileaks.

Mastercard payments were disrupted but the firm said there was "no impact" on people's ability to use their cards.

Visa's website also experienced problems. The attacks came after both companies stopped processing payments to the whistle-blowing site.

Entries on the Twitter page of Operation Payback, the Anonymous campaign, said the Visa site had been taken down.

Visa's website was later restored and spokesman Ted Carr said its processing network, which handles cardholder transactions, was working normally.

But in a day of fast-moving developments, the Anonymous Twitter page then went down, replaced by a message from Twitter saying the account had been suspended.

Twitter say they do not comment on "the actions we take on specific user accounts". However, a source told the BBC that the last tweet sent out by Anonymous included a link to a file containing consumer credit card information.

Paul Mutton at the security firm Netcraft, who is monitoring the attacks, said Visa is considered a more difficult target and the attack on it required a much larger number of "hacktivist" - politically motivated hackers - 2,000 compared with 400 for Mastercard.

Earlier the BBC was contacted by a payment firm linked to Mastercard that said its customers had "a complete loss of service".

In particular, it said that an authentication service for online payments known as Mastercard's SecureCode, had been disrupted.

Click to play

PayPal's Osama Bedier: "Our policy group had to make the decision of suspending the account"

Other readers have also said that they have had problems with online payments. The scale of the problems is still unclear.

Mastercard acknowledged there had been "a service disruption" involving its SecureCode system, but it added: "Our core processing capabilities have not been compromised and cardholder account data has not been placed at risk.

"While we have seen limited interruption in some web-based services, cardholders can continue to use their cards for secure transactions globally."

False account

Anonymous, which claimed to have carried out the attack, is a loose-knit group of hacktivists, with links to the notorious message board 4chan.

It said that it has hit several targets, including the website of the prosecutors who are acting in a legal case against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

"Websites that are bowing down to government pressure have become targets” - Coldblood Anonymous

An Anonymous member told AFP news agency the group would extend their campaign to anyone with "an anti-Wikileaks agenda".

PayPal, which has stopped processing donations to Wikileaks, has also been targeted.

The firm said Wikileaks' account had violated its terms of services.

"On 27 November the State Department, the US government, basically wrote a letter [to Wikileaks] saying that [its] activities were deemed illegal in the United States," PayPal's Osama Bedier told the Le Web conference in France.

"And as a result our policy group had to make the decision of suspending their account.

"It's honestly, just pretty straightforward from our perspective and there's not much more to it than that," he said.

Other firms that have distanced themselves from the site have also been hit in the recent spate of attacks including the Swiss bank, PostFinance, which closed the account of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

The bank said Mr Assange had provided false information when opening his account.

Swamp site

Security experts said the sites had been targeted by a so-called distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS), which swamp a site with so many page requests that it becomes overwhelmed and drops offline.

Click to play


Kristin Hrafnsson, from Wikileaks, condemned companies such as Mastercard for cutting ties with the website.

Noa Bar Yosef, a senior analyst at Imperva said the attacks were "very focused".

"It is recruiting people from within their own network. They are actually asking supporters to download a piece of code, the DDoSing malware, and upon a wake-up call the computer engages in the denial of service," he said.

Before the Mastercard attack, a member of Anonymous, who calls himself Coldblood, told the BBC that "multiple things" were being done to target companies that had stopped working with Wikileaks or which were perceived to have attacked the site.

"Websites that are bowing down to government pressure have become targets," he said.

"As an organisation we have always taken a strong stance on censorship and freedom of expression on the internet and come out against those who seek to destroy it by any means."

"We feel that Wikileaks has become more than just about leaking of documents, it has become a war ground, the people vs. the government," he said.

Some of the early DDoS hits failed to take sites offline, although that was not the point of the attacks, according to Coldblood.

"The idea is not to wipe them off but to give the companies a wake-up call," he said. "Companies will notice the increase in traffic and an increase in traffic means increase in costs associated with running a website."

DDoS attacks are illegal in many countries, including the UK.

Coldblood admitted that such attacks "may hurt people trying to get to these sites" but said it was "the only effective way to tell these companies that us, the people, are displeased".

Anonymous is also helping to create hundreds of mirror sites for Wikileaks, after its US domain name provider withdrew its services.

Coldblood said that the group was beginning to wind down the DDoS attacks so that it could concentrate on using "other methods which are more focused on supporting Wikileaks and making sure the Internet stays a free and open place".

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Tuesday, December 7, 2010

wikileak roundup

Is assange the worlds most wanted man? newsweek

the middle east reads wikileaks

ellsberg [leaker of the pentagon papers] on wikileaks

pure authoriatarianism [glen greenwald/ assange
on Democracy NOW!]

poison pill

9 weirdest things
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Consider this a counter-revolution brainstorm #1.1 : california ballot initiative to recognizing the incorrigible illegality of the federal government

As a Californian, I am forced to also be an American, even though to the more than casual observer of American politics, it may occur that we have had a coup. Corporations have bought, fooled, cajoled or for all we know blackmailed our elected federal government andseemingly the current leadership of congress and the white house. And we might as well include the supreme court, with it's 'united' pro-corporate ruling.

Somehow, bit by bit, we have lost our country to the leaders of the democrats and republicans: to whom only lying about consensual sex is worthy of impeachment not lying us into illegal wars, not colluding to bury invsetigations of WH authorized torture [add link]. Since Clinton and even more so under Bush and now Obama, every President has been clearly in need of war crimes [or related criminal miltiary-industrial crimes] investigation.

Both Democratic and Repulbican Congresses have been unwilling to investigate the crimes we all read about. The Supreme Court has given unconstitutional political election rights to not private citizens but instead corporations, allowing them to donate without disclosure[?] or limit!!!

There may be only one way to wipe the blood from our hands, that of our own soldiers to fight wars that are not ours; that of each tax-paying citizen forced to fund wars founded on lies that are not in our countries interest,

[add links for each]
  • Clinton with the bombing of civilian water facilities and yugo factories and state dept buildings in Yugoslavia.
  • Bush with his lying the country into war with Iraq, fully revealed by our closest allies Downing St. memos
  • and testified to by Bush Cabinet members [o'neil and ?],
  • and now with Obama colluding with republicans to sweep under the very stuffed rug, any prosecution of Bush's unconstitutional and anti-geneva convention torture policies,
  • with illegally spying on, secret detention of,
  • and now Obama's order of extra-judicial assasinations of american citiizen's.


Anyone can be declared a terrorist and killed, american or not, without a trial or even judicial review. This is no longer recognizably America, as each day passes and billions of middle class and working poor's dollars and transferred by illegal wall st. schemes to their retirement funds, bonuses and dividends. Made in America is becoming a rare curioso for the wealthiest to afford.

There are many more charges [link to kucinich's articles of impeachment], essentially factually incontravertable, widely disseminated outside of the mainstream corporate controlled media but nonetheless, ignored completely by our various branches of the federal government charged with oversight.

All this coupled with cleptocratic monetary policy, sham wall street reform, corporate boondoggle mandatory health-care 'reform'. Dubious elections in 2000 and moredisturbingly Ohio 2004 where lawsuits are in process over the diebold machines involved. All of these things spell to many that our federal government has been stolen. A coup, a nearly silent revolution.

If approved we the people of California direct our Governor and Congress and Courts to declare California a free state until such time as a law-abiding, clean election holding federal government can be re-formed, without the incorrigibly corrupt influence of corporate financed elections, a sclerotic, ossified corrupt, electorally unresponsive congress made up almost exclusively of campaign cash beholden Cleptocrats, and those to weak to weak or scared to oppose them. IF this fails to happen within 4 years: we the people authorize a special election to choose a constitutional assembly of 1 rep. per county [to be elected via a public financed equal access election] to attend a new constitutional convention either within the state or with other states that have suspended their particiption in a dysfunctional, criminal, Federal government.


Only the most serious and egregious entrenched law-breaking by virtually parties concerned, could impel patriotic Americans to seize back the people's power. The America of the founding fathers and our revolution, has been stolen in all but name and shape.



President Eisenhower warned us as he left office of a possible coup of our very democracy by the Military Industrial Complex. It has come. This is clear to many and even most americans. This

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please forgive the typos, working draft
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