Unlimited Wikileaks Shenanigans

[Lies]

Irony much?
After being attacked by anonymous Sarah Palin replied:

"No wonder others are keeping silent about Assange's antics," ABC News quoted Ms Palin as saying in an email.

"This is what happens when you exercise the First Amendment and speak against his sick, un-American espionage efforts."

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/in-depth/wikileaks/anonymous-hackers-hit-visa-mastercard-in-wikileaks-revenge/story-fn775xjq-1225968083650

[Nephew Twiddleton]

This is getting more and more interesting everyday

[Jasper]

Irony much?
After being attacked by anonymous Sarah Palin replied:

"No wonder others are keeping silent about Assange's antics," ABC News quoted Ms Palin as saying in an email.

"This is what happens when you exercise the First Amendment and speak against his sick, un-American espionage efforts."

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/in-depth/wikileaks/anonymous-hackers-hit-visa-mastercard-in-wikileaks-revenge/story-fn775xjq-1225968083650

How can this be?

[Faust]

Irony much?
After being attacked by anonymous Sarah Palin replied:

"No wonder others are keeping silent about Assange's antics," ABC News quoted Ms Palin as saying in an email.

"This is what happens when you exercise the First Amendment and speak against his sick, un-American espionage efforts."

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/in-depth/wikileaks/anonymous-hackers-hit-visa-mastercard-in-wikileaks-revenge/story-fn775xjq-1225968083650

How can this be?

4chan ddossed her website today as a warm up exercise.
To be honest I think they ddos her at the drop of a hat.

[Jasper]

That's what she gets for being a nearly unprecedented source of lulz.

[Cain]

The odd thing about Wikileaks is that their success has been assured, not by what they leaked, though there is some important information there, but by their enemies.

The massive and indiscriminant overreaction by both government and powerful corporate actors has ensured this, and includes but is not nearly limited to:

Shutting down Wikileaks servers, starting with the Amazon server
Stopping domain name server propagation
Paypal refusing to send payments
VISA and Mastercard refusing to process payments
The Swiss Bank PostFinance shutting down Assange's account
Senator Lieberman pressuring firms over Wikileaks
The odd behavior of prosecutors in the Assange rape accusations/case

Wikileaks and Assange have now been made in to cause celebres.  If corporations and governments can destroy someone's access to the modern economy as they have Wikileaks, without even pretending due process of the law (Paypal, VISA, Mastercard, Amazon, etc... were not ordered by any court to cut Wikileaks) then we simply do not live in a free society of law, let alone a society of justice.

Ironically the Wikileaks files reveal that the British fixed their inquiry into the war, and that the US pressured the Spanish government to stop a war crimes court case against ex-members of the Bush administration.  Assange and Wikileaks are subject to extreme judicial and extrajudicial sanctions, but people who engaged in aggressive war based on lies, tortured people and are responsible for deaths well into the six figures, walk free.

To be just, law must be applied to both the big and the small.  Thousands of executives at banks who engaged in systematic fraud were never charged, out and out war criminals are actively protected, and Wikileaks and Assange are hunted like animals?

This has enraged, in particular, the Hacktivist community, with Anonymous forming Operation Payback and shutting down both Mastercard servers and the Swiss Bank PostFinance's website.  As they themselves say, what enraged them was multiple companies attempting to shut Wikileaks down, both on the web, and financially.

While there is no comparison between what Assange has done and what happened on 9/11 (his actions are those of a free press), the rabid and indiscrimant overreaction of the the US in particular and the West in general is similar.   And what it has done is make Assange into a martyr, an icon for freedom of speech and a symbol of politically motivated repression.  It has done the same for Wikileaks and made Wikileaks a cause celebre.

It has proved that the West is run by authoritarian thugs with completely twisted priorities. Kill hundreds of thousands of people and engage in aggressive war?  No big deal.  Cause the greatest economic collapse of the post-war period sending millions into poverty?  We couldn't possibly prosecute the people who did that, but we will give them trillions!  Reveal our petty secrets and lies, and that we know the war in Afghanistan is lost, have known for years and continue to kill both Afghanis and our own soldiers pointlessly?  We WILL destroy you, no matter what we have to do.

Which leads us to the rape charges against Assange.  Given what we know right now about the case against him, it appears that is going to come down to he said/she said.  Unless the Swedish prosecutors have a smoking gun, even if Assange is convicted, most of his supporters will never believe the case wasn't at the least heavily tainted by political pressure, and at worst, a set up.  And if he is extradited from Sweden to the US to face some sort of charges, the howling will reach the high heavens.  He will be a martyr for the cause.  The more he is persecuted, the more many will rally around both him, and his child, Wikileaks.

Because of the massive overreaction to Wikileaks, the case against him is completely tainted.  He might be guilty as sin, but justice can no longer be seen to be done, because it is far too evident that too many powerful people, corporations and governments want him taken out.

And so he has won.  Whether he winds up free, in prison in Sweden or the US, or winds up dead, he has won this round.  He will be a martyr and an icon, and his child, Wikileaks, whether it lives or dies, will become a rallying point and a symbol of how corrupt and unjust western society is.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/IanWelsh/~3/tWTVUSZxsPs/

[Jasper]

Fuuuck yes.

[geekdad]

Analysis: Wikileaks Battle: A New Amateur Face Of Cyber War?

From TFA:
It looks to have surprised even Barlow, whose "declaration of independence for cyberspace" has been increasingly shared over Twitter by Anonymous supporters. He says he himself opposes distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks aimed at knocking down sites, viewing them as anti-free-speech.

"I support freedom of expression, no matter whose, so I oppose DDoS attacks regardless of their target," he told Reuters in an email. "They're the poison gas of cyberspace.... All that said, I suspect the attacks may continue until Assange is free and WikiLeaks is not under continuous assault."

FUCK BARLOW

"The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops"

"We'll see if an army without officers can be effective against the combined Meatspace military. I bet on us."

"World War III will be a global information war w/ no division between civilian & military participation. - Marshall McLuhan"

"When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty."

If you make a declarations like that, then come out against a DDoS, you are a prick. DDoS participation is one of the few ways somebody can make direct action.

We're not talking about some small website being DDoSed. It's MasterCard, Visa, Sara Palin, Joe Lieberman, Amazon, and PostFinance. It's not like they don't have other ways to get their side out. Press releases being one of many many ways. DDoSing a major corporation or political figures with a heavy web presence is very effective, even if only to show that there is a dissenting opinion to politicians' words.

All those tweets are only platitudes anyway.

Somebody should tell him that this is what an internet army looks like:

From TFA:
"This whole... episode is causing a snowball effect," said Noa Bar Yosef, senior security strategist from Imperva. "The more attention it is receiving, the more people who are joining the voluntary botnet to cause the DDoS."

[Cain]

LOL, yet another NYT hack writing about "cyberwarfare" as if he has a clue what he is talking about (hint: if Bruce Schneier says he doesn't know what cyberwarfare might mean yet, then you probably don't either).

I mean, seriously, by the most common standard meaning of the term, the Nizari sect were engaging in "information warfare" during the Crusades.

But I guess those billions of dollars worth of government contracts for "cyberwarfare defense systems" aren't just gonna hand themselves out now.

[Cain]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11945514

Saudi Arabia proposed an Arab-led military force to destroy Hezbollah in Lebanon two years ago, a US diplomatic cable published by Wikileaks suggests.

Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal presented a senior US diplomat with a plan for a force backed by US and Nato air and sea power.

The US responded by expressing scepticism about the military feasibility of the plan.

Hezbollah is a Shia paramilitary group and political movement.

While Syria and Iran are Hezbollah's main regional allies, Saudi Arabia has strong ties with the country's Sunni community and the current Prime Minister Saad Hariri, son of the murdered ex-prime minister.

The cable is describes a meeting in May 2008 between David Satterfield, a senior US State Department official, and Prince Saud al-Faisal.

At the meeting the prince "argued for an 'Arab force' to create and maintain order in and around Beirut. The US and Nato would need to provide transport and logistical support, as well as 'naval and air cover'. Saud said that a Hezbollah victory in Beirut would mean the end of the Siniora government and the 'Iranian takeover' of Lebanon".

The cable came days after armed Hezbollah members took over parts of central Beirut threatening to overthrow the government of Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora.

According to the cable, the Saudi foreign minister argued that a Hezbollah victory against the Siniora government "combined with Iranian actions in Iraq and on the Palestinian front would be a disaster for the US and the entire region".

He argued that the situation called for an "Arab force drawn from Arab 'periphery' states to deploy to Beirut under the 'cover of the UN'".

Saud al-Faisal said Mr Siniora strongly backed the idea.

Or the Saudis could just charge $400 a barrel for oil and collectively set themselves on fire.  It would have roughly the same result, but save time.

[Cain]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/dec/08/wikileaks-cables-shell-nigeria-spying

Basically, Shell owns Nigeria.  If you didn't already know.  They have "access to everything".

[Adios]

This just keeps giving, doesn't it?

Cain, the feedproxy post was excellent.

[Adios]

Both Facebook and Twitter have closed accounts corresponding to Anonymous, a formerly 4chan-linked group organizing a string of DDoS attacks on organizations that refuse to work with WikiLeaks.
{snip}
Of course, Anonymous is expected to keep creating new accounts as quickly as Facebook and Twitter squash them; it's a bit like Whack-a-Mole or doing battle with a hydra, in that sense. Fighting Anonymous is a task we wouldn't wish on anyone.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/web/12/09/wikileaks.facebook.twitter/index.html?hpt=T2

[Requia ☣]

Apparently Panda Security has been suffering DDoS attacks ever since they started covering the anon DDoS attacks, they aren't sure who is responsible.

http://pandalabs.pandasecurity.com/tis-the-season-of-ddos-wikileaks-editio/ <-- most of the story available here, its up right now.

The absolute funniest part of this whole thing has been the inability of Mastercard and Visa to defend themselves.  Lieberman's website was down for a whole 12 minutes, Mastercard was down for 11 hours (and was still down when the call went out to switch to Visa), Visa is *still* down, even though the target was switched back to PayPal according to Panda.

[Remington]

Paypal.com was down last night. Winnar.