Advertise On EU-Digest

Annual Advertising Rates

12/7/10

Has the Cyber War begun?: WikiLeaks founder arrested in Britain on Swedish warrant - counter action set in motion by activists

Police In London, England say WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been arrested on a Swedish warrant. Assange was arrested at 4:30 a.m. EST today and is due to appear at Westminster Magistrate's Court later in the day. His lawyer had been arranging to deliver the WikiLeaks founder to British police for questioning in a sex-crimes investigation. The 39-year-old Assange is wanted on suspicion of rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion in Sweden.

In the meantime it is being reported that WikiLeaks is being propped up by a barrage of mirror sites created by activists following moves by Amazon to stop hosting its site and Domain Name System provider EveryDNS.net to cut off its DNS services, according to The New York Times. Such mirrors can replicate an entire Web site, ensuring that all content and documents remain online and accessible even if WikiLeaks' own site is taken down.

But some of WikiLeaks supporters are adopting an even more hostile tone. Supporters of WikiLeaks called on hackers to take down the operations of Internet companies that are refusing to do business with rogue Web site WikiLeaks. On Saturday PayPal restricted access to WikiLeaks' account to prevent fund raisers from donating money to help the site. In return, the PayPal blog page that announced the decision to shut off WikiLeaks' account was taken offline for around eight hours last night by a distributed denial- of-service (DDoS) attack.

Experts at Panda Labs pointed to a statement from the "hacktivist" group Anonymous, which said that the PayPal blog would be the target of its first DDoS counterattack on behalf of WikiLeaks. Panda also cited comments from a Twitter account named AnonyWatcher, which released several statements related to the attack.

Among the targets are PayPal, which suspended WikiLeaks' account for violating its terms of service for promoting illegal activities. Other organizations that could be in the hackers' cross-hairs are Amazon Web Services and EveryDNS.net, both of which booted WikiLeaks as a customer last week.

The offensive against PayPal could be a sign of bigger things yet to come. A poster on a file upload site has issued a rallying cry for further action on Anonymous' DDoS campaigns. Twitter has also come under criticism from some who believe the microblogging site may be censoring trends devoted to WikiLeaks. Twitter trends reveal the most popular topics being tweeted. But Web site blogs such as OSNews, OSDir, Safety First, and StudentActivism.net have reported findings that terms such as #wikileaks and #Assange have not been trending nearly as heavily as they should given the amount of news and discussions surrounding WikiLeaks. "The reason for counter-action is amazingly simple," said Anonymous member Gregg Housh. "We all believe information should be free, and the Internet should be free," said Housh, in an interview with The New York Times published Monday. 

WikiLeaks, which has been in trouble with the U.S. government before, has come under intense fire lately over its release of classified and in some cases embarrassing U.S. State Department documents. While activists have been spurred to fight for the site, government officials have been up in arms, with several calling for WikiLeaks to be classified as a terrorist group.

And what of WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange? The U.S. government is demanding his head on a platter over the leaks of sensitive information, while Sweden still wants him on charges of sex crimes. But he may yet find refuge in his own country of Australia. The country's attorney general Robert McClelland said today that Assange would be allowed back in Australia and would be accorded the same protections given to any other citizen, according to CNN. In making the offer public, McClelland was responding to comments from Assange last week that Australia would not only prevent him from returning home, but that the nation was working with the U.S. government to attack WikiLeaks.


No comments: