“We will fire at anyone or anything that tries to censor WikiLeaks, including multi-billion dollar companies such as PayPal. … The major shitstorm has begun.”
That’s the message currently posted by the hacker group calling themselves “Anonymous”, as part of what they call “Operation Payback”.
The group has already reportedly succeeded in taking down both MasterCard and Visa’s servers following the two corporations freezing the credit card transactions of WikiLeaks.
Earlier, according to RAW STORY, Anonymous issued a statement which read:
We can not let this happen. This is why our intention is to find out who is responsible for this failed attempt at censorship. This is why we intend to utilize our resources to raise awareness, attack those against and support those who are helping lead our world to freedom and democracy.
What appears to be the first real and serious — at least the first known and serious — “all-out cyber war”, as Secure Computing Magazine is now calling it, seems to be underway. In this case, however, it wasn’t the hackers or even a foreign government who appear to have fired the first shots, but the U.S. Government who did so via apparently successful tactics used to intimidate both Amazon and PayPal into cutting off service to WikiLeaks, the international media organization which has leaked thousands of classified U.S. documents, but has been charged with breaking absolutely no U.S. laws.
The entire episode reveals a number of very serious concerns, and at least one that may not be quite as obvious…
Last week we learned that Sen. Joe Lieberman’s office, in his capacity as Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, intimidated Amazon into dropping their services to WikiLeaks with little more than a phone call. Other, smaller Internet sites were asked to, and did, follow suit.
Today we learn that PayPal Vice President Osama Bedier confirmed his company shut off WikiLeaks’ account due to pressure from the U.S. State Department, telling an audience at a web conference this morning, according to Christian Science Monitor:
But, in fact, whatever those “illegal activities” are, they have yet to be spelled out to anyone, as no criminal charges have been brought by the U.S. against either WikiLeaks or its founder Julian Assange.
[Update: More egg on PayPal’s face in regard to this.]In short, these tactics appear to be little more than out and out McCarthy-esque style intimidation by the U.S. Government against supposedly private companies which led them to comply with the government’s political agenda. Hollywood Black List anyone?
This, of course, should outrage not only all members of the media and the entirety of the Progressive blogosphere, but even all of those who claim to support the U.S. Constitution, including the far Right from Fox “News” to Glenn Beck to Sean Hannity to the “Tea Party”. Incredibly, very few among any of those groups have spoken up against what is clearly an extra-legal, extra-constitutional assault on both a media organization and the private companies with whom they worked.
[We discussed these matters at length with Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, a great transparency advocate and supporter of WikiLeaks, during a live interview with him on KPFK on Monday, even before the latest volleys were fired in this rapidly growing, all-out cyber/information war. That interview can be heard here.]There have been a few who have spoken out in favor of WikiLeaks/Assange from among the media, the blogosphere and even on the Right, though surprisingly few. Here are a few examples:
- Spain’s El Pais editorialized: “We are, in a sense, freer now than we were before, which is as much as journalism can hope to achieve.”
- “Pentagon Papers” whistleblower Dan Ellsberg — who we interviewed on this last week — joined with a number of other whistleblowers and well-known transparency advocates today to issue a statement today in support of WikiLeaks and Assange in which he said: “EVERY attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time.”
- And really the only voice on the Right to speak out loudly to our knowledge, is Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) who said “What we need is more WikiLeaks”.
There are more, of course, but remarkably few, particularly given the all-out assault that is now coming down on WikiLeaks with the extra-legal power of the U.S. Government apparently brought to bear as its intimidating engine.
RAW STORY’s thrice-updated report says that late this afternoon, credit card company Visa has now been hacked by “Anonymous” in response to the “censorship” they see from both corporations and governmental bodies:
A Twitter account connected to the hackers declared the start of the attacks and the site was unavailable less than 16 minutes later.
Earlier, RAW reported that MasterCard had similarly had their services interrupted by the group (right in the middle of the Christmas Season, for whatever that’s worth):
“Please be advised that MasterCard SecureCode Support has detected a service disruption to the MasterCard Directory Server,” MasterCard said. “The Directory Server service has been failed over to a secondary site however customers may still be experiencing intermittent connectivity issues. More information on the estimated time of recovery will be shared in due course.”
Why did MasterCard and Visa cut off services to WikiLeaks, despite all lack of due process in charging them with any criminal wrongdoing whatsoever? A clue may be found in one of the diplomatic cables, dated February 1, 2010, released via WikiLeaks and reported on by the UK’s Guardian this afternoon. Both Visa and MasterCard work very closely with the U.S. Government, which has lobbied foreign countries on their behalf, according to the cable. That certainly offers to support to the notion that such companies would likely be loathe to risk that friendly relationship if called upon by the government to cut off ties to the media outlet:
A state department cable released this afternoon by WikiLeaks reveals that US diplomats intervened to try to amend a draft law going through Russia’s duma, or lower house of parliament. Their explicit aim was to ensure the new law did not “disadvantage” the two US companies, the cable states.
The Guardian goes on to report that both MasterCard and Visa “have justified their decision to stop donations on the grounds that WikiLeaks is acting ‘illegally'”.
But again, there are no details on what “illegal” activities WikiLeaks has carried out. And, in any case, if they are acting illegally, so too would be the New York Times and other media outlets who have published the very same documents, often before WikiLeaks does, even as no such Governmental oppression seems to have been brought to bear on them or the private companies with whom they do business — at least as far as we know.
All of this, of course, catches our eye for not simply the obvious (or what should be obvious) outrage that it is, as well as the bright red flag being waved (if ignored by too many) in regard to the vulnerability of our Internet and the ease at which Big Government muscle can be brought to bare over private companies and individuals who have committed no legal wrong-doing, but also for another reason, another concern near and dear to The BRAD BLOG.
Despite the proven ability of a small group of hackers to take down several of the most secure financial sites in the universe, with ease, in what appears to be incredibly short notice, there remain those who believe that voting over the Internet and e-voting at local polling places, can be carried out safely and securely — even with, often, trillions of dollars riding on the outcome of such elections.
As we’ve reported hundreds if not thousands of times over the past nearly-seven years, with an enormous amount of support from both computer scientists and cyber security experts (here’s our recent report on just one such recent incident in which hackers took complete control of an Internet Voting scheme within a matter of hours, and even reportedly discovered both Iranian and Chinese computers also hacking into the same system) all of this underscores the madness of relying on polling place e-voting systems and its insanely-emerging brethren “Internet Voting”, for the very core of our democratic elections.
Such systems are not safe from those who may wish to malevolently, and secretly, manipulate our elections and our democracy. And that would include even e-voting systems which use paper ballots, but are tabulated by easily-hacked computer systems rather than the transparent and overseeable process of counting by human beings in public. And the fact that those systems e-voting systems are created, serviced, program and run by corporate, rather than public, entitities only underscores the menace they pose to our democracy.
As Dr. David Jefferson, a computer security expert from Livermore National Laboratories and an expert on e-voting systems as CEO of VerifiedVoting.org, has been arguing for many years, along with many other colleagues, “election security is a matter of U.S. national security”.
He explained to us during a recent interview following the extraordinary hack of the Internet Voting system in D.C., that “it’s really important that it not be possible for foreign governments or crazy self-aggrandizing hackers in other countries — or in our own — to be able to modify votes and get away with it.”
Unfortunately, as this new “all-out cyber war” over WikiLeaks reveals, it is not “possible” for that to be the case under the current system of voting we currently use. If the threats mentioned by Jefferson, and reported on these pages for years, are not finally apparent in light of all of this, it remains unclear to us, at least, what it will take for the American people to finally “get it”.
For pete’s sake!
It’s been obvious for years
Hand count paper ballots!
Brad’s ‘Gold Standard’ …
NO machines
Anonymous = Awesomnymous
I was discussing the Amazon/Ellsberg statement with some people through email, and I got a very concise and prophetic response from one friend, I’ll paste below, it’s worth sharing:
There are important lessons here, for segments of the left or progressive community. The first and most overwhelmingly important principle is the principle of physical power. What Amazon did is a coercive act, and it was forced by the emerging coercive response by the US government. Amazon would soon enough be compelled to kick out Wikileaks– have you all been listening to the fact that technically, some of the material was classified information? It’s rather baffling that the USG hasn’t acted coercively, before now. There are other essential lessons for you all, if you didn’t already know: the Internet is a physical infrastructure, made out of physical computers, and physical wires running under the streets, on microwave radio, etc. It has *ALWAYS* been a part of the physical apparatus of social organization– just like the money system, and the press and TV and radio that came before. If you expect the Internet to survive even remotely free or open, you better recognize this is going to be a long and very bitterly fought struggle. The Amazon thing is not the battleground that matters. That’s a corporate server, for christs sakes, get a brain. You’re going headon against both the government, the law and the fact that it’s private property owned by a wall street corporation. That’s stupid. Ellsberg shouldn’t have been buying books from them in the first place. Look, this is a war. It’s called, the info-war, and it will run for 100 years. And the battlefield is over who’s going to OWN and CONTROL the servers, fiber and routers, and just exactly where your packets are going to flow, and what are the protocols, who’s running the domain name service. There are three things the Dominators want to do to you: they can
1. Snoop, surveil, exploit what they learn.
2. Censor, block, deny service, etc. or,
3. Extract fees and rents.
There are things they cannot do, indefinitely. Such as lie. That’s over. For example in all those 100s of thousands of war diaries and the embassy cables, there has not been one single thing we didn’t already know. They are all clamping down on Wikileaks *ONLY* because it plans to reveal bank information. Someday I hope you all join me in calling for completely public bank records for *everybody*. We need to know the names and transactions of our tormentors, the oligarchs right in our city.
I’ve found this story to be the most disturbing one I’ve followed since Sibel Edmonds. The hackers should shift from DDoS attacks to actually getting and posting dirt. Sleazy business deals, conflicts of interests, past improprieties. That is, muckraking. That is, journalism, sorta. Some of these pukes need to be gang-stalked and paparazzid until they cry uncle.
Indeed Brad, the internet is very, very vulnerable.
All the more reason why as a rock-bottom baseline EVERY VOTE in America needs to be on a voter-marked, voter-verfied paper ballot ASAP, so that counting elections outside of software will even be possible. And internet voting needs to be stopped NOW.
We have been living on borrowed time with DRE voting machines. The DREs purchased under HAVA in 2006 are aging rapidly, and most of our states and counties are facing hellish budget shortfalls that makes prudent replacement of them difficult and unlikely. If nothing changes, sooner or later we’ll either face a disaster during a national election or the push for internet voting will succeed and we’ll be in a much worse mess.
We should have long ago passed a realistic, baseline federal bill that would dump DREs nationwide and outlaw voting over the internet. A bill that would serve as a floor for activists in the states to move ahead and work for other reforms such as better audits, hand-counting, or whatever. You and I both know the bill I have in mind. And right now I have neither the time nor the inclination to argue over it.
Those who seek all or nothing usually end up with nothing.
Marybeth
Imagine, if you will, how our courts and our people would have reacted if the Nixon administration had cut off all sources of funding to The New York Times in the wake of the release of the Pentagon Papers.
You don’t really have to imagine. Back then the Supreme Court ruled that the government had no right to prevent publication.
How far down the rabbit hole have we traveled since then?
Great post.
Marybeth @ 4:
The bill of which you speak did not ban DREs until its most recent iteration in this Congress (and even then, only years from). Prior to that, the versions u strongly supported would have allowed and even institutionalized both 100% unverifiable DRE/touch-screen voting and proprietary corporate secret source code forever. Even the most recent version would have institutionalized secret source code into law at the federal level.
Those who seek panaceas usually get them. Thankfully, this time they didn’t 😉 (So far anyway)
And also, Marybeth – U have missed it in the article above, but I also noted:
Soul Rebel @ 2:
Just one point in response to your friend who wrote:
That’s actually not true at all. We learned much that was not known previously and there has been nothing like “100s of thousands of war diaries and embassy cables” yet released. To date, just about 1000 of the purportedly 250,000 diplomatic cables have been released by WikiLeaks and only after each of those cables had already been released and redacted by one of it’s media partners (such as UK Guardian, Germany’s Der Spiegel, NYTimes, etc.)
Why don’t we organize a carrotmob on an upcoming weekend. Is there a good company that everybody could use instead of paypal either this weekend or next. This would really assist in getting exposure in the mainstream media.
Thanks Brad. I’ll make a note and pass it on.
…the DDoS attacks / flash-mobbing server tactic is not new to those of us who followed the 2009 Iran Election on Twitter.
God Bless Wikileaks.
Being alive just got a lot more gratifying.
Please keep in mind that supporters of internet voting, voting machines, and computer tabulators, are motivated solely by what they see as a chance to make some money.
It’s like Michael Chertoff and those who invested in the TSA scanners. They don’t care if they work or not, just that money can be made.
To live in a capitalist country and forget that money is a prime motivating factor, is a big mistake. You can use reasoned arguments all you wish, but if somebody’s in it for the money, they’ll stand by their investment opportunity.
I personally wasted years of my life trying to argue with people who supported electronic voting machines, central tabulators, and/or internet voting. To my knowledge, no matter how badly their arguments were demolished by me and by others, not a one of them has changed their position.
Vested interests and identity politics (my candidate and my party, right or wrong) aren’t susceptible to reason or logic.
Unfortunately for those of us who love democracy, they do have one very good argument. They know that no matter how unreliable our electoral process may be, people will continue to vote. As long as voters don’t care, those who stand a chance to profit from that apathy certainly won’t care.
John, what does it mean? Attacking a credit card company does not infringe upon the freedom of speech. If these guys tried to take down a newspaper, etc, you would have a point. This is a simple retaliation: you hurt us, we will hurt you. Simple and not morally complicated. Hoepfully this is just the beginning… imagine how much traffic can be generated for DOS attack if all people unhappy with these companies decisions installed and activated the appropriate tools… these corporate fools could be down premanently.
Go hackers! I’m sitting this war out, so far, but cheering for the hackers. But I have no doubt that our government will be trying to find hackers of their own…
It seems the “Hackers” have the “script-kiddies” doing the damage now. But just wait till they get involved. Then the real shit will hit the fan.
Just canceled my PAYPAL account here:
https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_close-account
…easily replaced them, @ “17 alternative to PAYPAL”, here:
http://blog.webdistortion.com/2010/07/28/paypal-alternatives-e-commerce/
(tho’ it’s really ’16’ alternatives, as one of the ones listed @ above link is Amazon…)
…then for good measure, and since it’s impossible to get anyone from PAYPAL on the horn @ 1-402-935-2050 – I posted my bald-faced outrage on their message board, which has over 500 similar posts, here:
https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/Watercooler/WikiLeaks/td-p/147615/page/2
Yes, done with AMAZON, too. And Visa is going over m’ knee for the belt. The LEATHER belt.
…this is disgusting.
I hope everyone keeps a truly open mind about what is going on here while considering all the possibilities. This could, at least in part, be part of an active “cyber war game” Various governments throughout the world are struggling to get a handle on how best to control and monitor the internet. What’s going on now may be comparable, or at least somewhat similar to, what we’ve already seen in Iran and China. While I’m not a hacker, those who are would do well to consider this remember the concept of “honeypots.”