Bradley Manning for Nobel Peace Prize

Uploaded by RussiaToday on 6 Feb 2012

The name of Private Bradley Manning - a U.S. soldier accused of passing classified material to the whistle blowing website Wikileaks has consistently made it into the headlines, mostly in connection with his trial. But now his name is now on a different list - that of over 200 nominees for the Nobel Peace Prize. His nomination was put forward by the parliamentary group called "The Movement" in the Icelandic Parliament. One of its members Birgitta Yonsdottir says Manning deserves the nomination because it's not a crime to blogger-whistle on war-crimes.

RT on Twitter http://twitter.com/RT_com
RT on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/RTnews

New Song in support of accused U.S. Army whistleblower Bradley Manning

Written and Performed by Graham Nash and James Raymond

A companion video for “Almost Gone” — a new song by legendary singer-songwriter Graham Nash and musician James Raymond (son of David Crosby) — is being released today in support of accused U.S. Army whistleblower Bradley Manning. The free download is available on Nash’s website (www.grahamnash.com) and the Bradley Manning Support Network site www.bradleymanning.org.

The release is timed to Manning’s first judicial hearing scheduled for December 16th, following more than 17-months in custody, including a year in solitary confinement that Amnesty International has characterized as “harsh and punitive.”

Visually, the Almost Gone video is punctuated with bold graphics, disturbing images and harsh facts. Its release is scheduled to precede Manning’s pre-trial hearing on December 16, which is the day before his 24th birthday. The Bradley Manning Support Network has named the following day, December 17, its International Day of Solidarity (http://events.bradleymanning.org/). PFC Manning, an Army intelligence analyst who had been stationed near Baghdad, was arrested in May 2010 under suspicion of leaking classified information, including a video showing the killing of civilians, to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks.

Nash and Raymond composed the song “Almost Gone (The Ballad of Bradley Manning)” during this spring’s US tour of Crosby-Nash, and the new recording serves as the music bed for the video; it features an impassioned lead vocal by Nash, a two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted (Crosby, Stills & Nash, and The Hollies). “Bradley Manning is a hero to me,” he sings, acknowledging Manning’s role in making public videos and documents that shed light on such as issues as the true number and cause of civilian casualties in Iraq, human rights abuses by U.S.-funded contractors and foreign militaries, and the role that spying and bribes play in international diplomacy.

WikiLeaks parody of MasterCard ad... priceless

Uploaded by thejuicemedia on 1 Jul 2011

The banking blockade on WikiLeaks: not only is it illegal under current trade laws, it goes against the fundamental principles of freemarket capitalism. Another sign that the game is rigged?

The original upload of this video can be found at: http://vimeo.com/25412550

Help spread this video and increase public awareness of the banking blockade on WikiLeaks. Popular support will make a huge difference in the coming months as WL takes on the legal battle against the global guardians of financial portals.

Music composed by our friend, Jonathan Dreyfus

Wikileaks - a Trilogy

by Staff Report

Rep. Peter King (left) introduces anti-WikiLeaks legislation ... The bill, known as the SHIELD Act, would amend the Espionage Act to make publishing classified information "concerning the identity of a classified source or informant of an element of the intelligence community" an act of espionage. Sens. John Ensign (R-NV), Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Scott Brown (R-MA) introduced similar legislation in the Senate last week. "These organizations are a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States," Rep. King continued. "Julian Assange and his compatriots are enemies of the US and should be prosecuted under the Espionage Act. This legislation provides the Attorney General with additional authority to do just that." – Raw Story

Dominant Social Theme: The threat of WikiLeaks refocuses Peter King's pathologies.

Free-Market Analysis: WikiLeaks continues to be the gift that keeps on giving. We've analyzed WikiLeaks from the point of view of a power elite gambit and the pieces of the puzzle continue to fit together. Not only that, but the WikiLeaks sub dominant social theme was assembled relatively rapidly in our view with Julian Assange taking over WikiLeaks only about four years ago. That's a blink of an eye in terms of elite promotions, which can run 50 or even 100 years (see central banking). Here are links to three Assange-like stories, a trilogy if you will:

Comes a Blond Stranger...

Goes the Dark Leader? ...

CODA: Sayeth the Chosen One ...

WikiLeaks seems to talk a better leak than it offers. One thing it HAS been good at – as we would expect if it were ultimately an Anglosphere psyops – is generating pushback from Anglosphere political elites, especially in America (see excerpt above). There is of course no "security" measure that is too Draconian for someone like Peter King, chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, who has backed virtually every legislative disassembling of American civil rights for the past decade. WikiLeaks, conveniently, has given him a renewed opportunity to further polarize the US security debate and whittle away further freedoms. Here's more from Raw Story regarding King's latest jeremiad:

... King sent a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Attorney General Eric Holder ... demanding that WikiLeaks be deemed a "foreign terrorist organization" and it's founder declared a terror ringleader ... "Julian Assange and his associates who have operated and supported WikiLeaks not only damaged US national security with their releases of classified documents, but also placed at risk countless lives, including those of our Nation's intelligence sources around the world."

...MORE HERE...

Conclusion: Assange has however hardened the "terrorism" debate in the West and the United States, making it easier for the Peter Kings and Michele Bachmanns of the world to further restrict citizens' civil rights while expanding the grasp of Leviathan. If that is the point of WikiLeaks, Assange is seemingly succeeding. And perhaps it is.

Wikileaks - Psyop Boils Up

...OOH, What a Giveaway! World Renowned 911 Truth denier, Julian Assange releases Red Herring...

Phillip Brennan - If the FBI really wanted to get those who planned the September 11 attacks, they only need to arrest Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George W Bush, Henry A Kissinger, and the heads of the CIA and Mossad...

The FBI has launched a manhunt for a previously unknown team of men suspected to be part of the 9/11 attacks, the Daily Telegraph can disclose.

Steven Swinford, Robert Winnett & Nick Allen | The Telegraph | 1 February 2011:

Secret documents reveal that the three Qatari men conducted surveillance on the targets, provided “support” to the plotters and had tickets for a flight to Washington on the eve of the atrocities.

The suspected terrorists flew from London to New York on a British Airways flight three weeks before the attacks.

They allegedly carried out surveillance at the World Trade Centre, the White House and in Virginia, the US state where the Pentagon and CIA headquarters are located.

Ten days later they flew to Los Angeles, where they stationed themselves in a hotel near the airport which the FBI has now established was paid for by a “convicted terrorist”, who also paid for their airline tickets.

Hotel staff have told investigators they saw pilot uniforms in their room along with computer print outs detailing pilot names, flight numbers and times and packages addressed to Syria, Afghanistan, Jerusalem and Jordan.

Click here for the full disinformation piece...

Wikileaks - Dyncorp's Dancing Boys

To win over Afghan locals, American contractor DynCorp bankrolled 'bacha bazi' parties -- the culturally accepted practice of pedophilia by men against boys.

By Shirin Sadeghi

Every culture has its dark secrets, the practices that many people on the outside would frown on or shudder at. There’s Mormons and polygamy. Hindus and sati. Muslims and virgin brides. And many other cultures that have very specific practices associated with them.

The list is endless but it's also not comprehensive. Not all Mormons practice polygamy -- in fact a comparatively few percentage of them do. The same for Hindus and sati or Muslims and virgin brides. Over time, increased awareness of these issues and any problems associated with them, has led to laws that provide rights to the victims of these practices. But even more effective than laws are social changes. Society's rejection of these practices are a more powerful enforcement against them than laws can ever be, it seems. Which is why public awareness is critical to changing these practices from the ground up.

This week, the WikiLeaks cables publicized another culture's dark secret: the Pashtuns and bacha bazi, the ancient practice of pedophilia by men against boys. Not all Pashtuns practice it, but like other dark secrets in other cultures, it is an inescapable fact that it exists and is strongly associated with Pashtuns.

When the issue arises, so does the sensitivity. No one wants their culture to be known for a horrible thing. But the subject cannot and should not be avoided. Bacha bazi -- literally "playing with children" -- is practiced amongst Pashtuns in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere. Not all of them do it, but it is acceptable among certain sections of Pashtun culture, which is why it is openly practiced. And also why, as the WikiLeaks cables demonstrated, the American contractor DynCorp took advantage of the practice to appease local Pashtuns in an area of Afghanistan in which they needed to rein in the locals to be able to continue their work there.

It was very easy for DynCorp to bankroll bacha bazi parties for those local Pashtuns who practice it. They arranged for the boys to be purchased, for the venue, and for the guests who would attend the party. Some Pashtuns came. They saw. And they partied.

...MORE HERE...

It has never been cooler to be a conspiracy theorist

(And the only people not realizing it are the conspiracy theorists)
by David Rothscum

The situation as it stands is rather simple. Wikileaks released a bunch of documents that basically confirm every allegation that Truthers have made since the beginning of Trutherdom. Truthers reacted by accusing Wikileaks of being a CIA-Mossad-Cointelpro-Zionist-mockingbird-disinfo-agent-troll-provocateur-operation.

Unfortunately for them, evidence has so far been lacking. The only evidence Truthers have so far shown, are allegations of other people. I call it the Wikipedia principle. Someone posts a claim on Wikipedia. Someone else challenges the person to back up his claim. Meanwhile a news reporter reads the article, and accepts it as true and publishes it, without bothering to check for sources. Now the Wikipedia editor cites the news article as a source of his claim, and the circle has become complete. Truthers can do the same. We begin with a man called Wayne Madsen. He gives birth to a rumor.

He does this the Sorcha Faal method, but more successful. You come up with a ridiculous story. You first introduce the reader by citing a few remotely related events. You link to random article about these events. Then you claim these events are all interconnected. How do you know? Well, you have "anonymous sources" of course. Anonymous sources can of course claim anything. You might as well cite "the voices in my head" to prove your point. In reality, the "reports from the Kremlin" don't exist. Most likely the "anonymous sources" of Mr. Madsen don't exist either.

And yes, WebsterTarpley bashes Wikileaks as well. Why? All of you fail to realize one thing. You should be very happy about what's going on! After the masses of scandals and internet revolts that happened in the past weeks, it has never been cooler to be a conspiracy theorist! Wikileaks is legitimizing you. English doesn't have a good word for this, but I would argue that after Wikileaks, conspiracy theories have become "salon-fähig" as we call it, meaning that they can be discussed amongst polite company now. The people of world have become far more cynical because of these scandals and are now gradually approaching the epitome of cynicism, the conspiracy theorist.

Why is that? The answer is very simple, the Wikileaks documents have vindicated the conspiratorial weltanschauung. It doesn't even matter as much what Assange thinks, or what our brave martyr Bradley Manning thinks. You, the crazy conspiracy theorist who believed his own government did not have his best interests in mind and actively lied to you to try to keep you from finding out the truth, was right all along!

...MORE HERE...

Wikileaks - Pearl Harbour Event for the Kill-Switch?

Eric Blair
Activist Post

The establishment has been desperately trying to implement legal control over the Internet. They're attacking freedom of speech and the open Internet from all angles; through government tools, corporate methods, and even the courts. All three of these methods are converging in the WikiLeaks case, but that's not the only battle being waged in the so-called "all-out cyber war."

The government, through the DHS, has already shut down over 80 websites for copyright infringement without due process, in addition to floating the idea to tax information websites. Corporations like Google, Verizon, and others are making deals to tip the Internet in favor of major players. Finally, in the courts, ambulance-chasing copyright infringement lawyers are bullying blogs to pay settlements despite Fair Use rights -- while their ultimate goal is to set a golden precedent with which to attack all news aggregating websites.

Don't you see what's happening here as the media continues to hype this cyber war? Because of the fierce resistance to all proposed changes to the Internet, they need an Internet "Pearl Harbor" to usher in these draconian laws. As the hacktivist army of WikiLeaks defenders are now reportedly turning their focus on UK government websites, we can expect that after the first major Web interruption, governments will convene urgent meetings to demand better enforcement and more control over the Internet.

...MORE HERE...

Original Wikileaker on Fog of Infowar

Cryptome.org’s John Young, “the original Wikileaker,” warns that Assange is being set up to be the fall guy for a massive lurch towards Internet censorship.

Paul Joseph Watson | PrisonPlanet | 10 December 2010:

One of the original members of Wikileaks warns that a series of bigger bombshell revelations are in the pipeline and that the growing crisis being contrived around the group and its figurehead Julian Assange is greasing the skids for the cybersecurity agenda to regulate and censor the world wide web.

Cryptome.org founder John Young, who the New York Observer recently characterized as “the original Wikileaker,” told the Alex Jones Show how he volunteered to register Wikileaks.org in December 2007 under his name for Wikileaks members who wanted to remain anonymous, with the understanding that the site was merely for the public benefit. Young became suspicious when he was subsequently told that the aim was to raise $5 million dollars within the first six months.

“I said wait a minute, that doesn’t sound like public benefit to me, that sounds like a high value funded program,” said Young, likening the scenario to a George Soros-style outfit.

“This was a business operation not a public benefit operation and it’s turned out to be that,” said Young, concurring with the fact that Wikileaks was introduced into the public arena by Cass Sunstein in a Washington Post editorial. This is important because in a 2008 white paper, Sunstein, who is now Obama’s White House information czar, argued that government entities should pose as “conspiracy theorists” as part of a clandestine plot to discredit independent media voices and ultimately demolish free speech on the Internet.

Young said that Wikileaks provided the perfect pretext for government to raise funds for a cybersecurity infrastructure that would eventually be used to silence free speech and regulate the Internet.

“Some of the enthusiasts for Wikileaks seem to be operating in concert with some of its opponents, it looks like they’re in lock step to me,” said Young, noting that the whole fiasco was a display of theatre designed to test whether the cybersecurity agenda is ready to get traction. Given the fact that establishment Republicans are already introducing legislation aimed at criminalizing Wikileaks, circumstances clearly indicate that the crisis is being exploited to push Internet censorship.

Although George Soros’ Open Society Institute denies having any connection to Wikileaks, Young personally had conversations with Wikileaks founders who told him of their efforts to secure funding from the organization, at which point Young resigned from Wikileaks. Young said that Wikileaks were all but bankrupt when they were operating on their own but have now “raised millions by being on the inside.”

As to who is actually behind Wikileaks aside from Assange himself, Young pointed to a Wikipedia list of “Cypherpunks,” Internet gurus, some of whom now hold prominent positions in major technology companies, who were responsible for a mailing list that started in 1992 for people interested in privacy and cryptography.

Young said that Wikileaks was not an independent organization nor one controlled by government, but instead a “concept, an aspiration, a goal….not anything you’re going to be able to take down by the usual means,” which is why Young predicts Wikileaks will not be taken down. However, he cautioned that Wikileaks now redacting documents was a sign that they have been co-opted to a large extent.

“If you were offered a million dollar bribe and you were 39-years-old and had no other income, think about it, it’s called a government contract,” said Young, alleging that Assange has been bought off.

...MORE HERE...

GRITtv: The F Word: Forgetting Bradley Manning

lauraflanders

Julian Assange of WikiLeaks is out on bail—apparently headed for the 10-bedroom home of British former army officer Vaughan Smith, described by the Guardian as a rightwing libertarian. Assange's lawyer joked that it would not be so much "house arrest as manor arrest" while he fights extradition to Sweden on sexual assault charges. Distributed by Tubemogul.

...LEST WE FORGET!...

THIS is the footage the HERO Bradley Manning brought to the LIGHT

Breaking! - Assange Free

Speaking on the steps of the High Court to dozens of journalists, Mr Assange said: "It's great to feel the fresh air of London again."

He went on to thank "all the people around the world who had faith" in him, his lawyers, and anonymous for putting up a "brave and ultimately successful fight", members of the press and blogosphere, and the British justice system.

"If justice is not always an outcome, at least it is not dead yet," he quipped.

Mr Assange had spent the past eight nights alone in prison. He told the press he had been kept in solitary confinement in the depths of a Victorian prison.

WikiLeaks: Vatican Pressured Ireland On Sex Abuse Scandal

Newly released U.S. diplomatic cables indicate that the Vatican felt "offended" that Ireland failed to respect Holy See "sovereignty" by asking high-ranking churchmen to answer questions from an Irish government commission probing decades of sex abuse of minors by clergy.

That the Holy See-no-evil used its diplomatic immunity status as a tiny-city state to try to thwart Ireland's government-led probe has long been known. But the WikiLeaks cables, published by Britain's The Guardian newspaper on Saturday, contain delicate, behind-the-scenes diplomatic assessments of the highly charged situation.

The Vatican press office declined to comment on the content of the cables Saturday, but decried the leaks as a matter of "extreme seriousness."

The U.S. ambassador to the Holy See also condemned the leaks and said in a statement that the Vatican and America cooperate in promoting universal values.

According to the deputy to the Irish ambassador to the Holy See, the Irish government gave in to Vatican pressure and allowed the church officials to avoid answering questions from the inquiry panel, according to one of the cables from a U.S. diplomat.

Ambassador Noel Fahey apparently told U.S. diplomat Julieta Valls Noyes that the sex abuse scandal was a tricky one to manage.

"The Vatican believes the Irish government failed to respect and protect Vatican sovereignty during the investigations," read the cable from Noyes, deputy chief of mission.

Elsewhere in the cable the diplomat, citing a Holy See official, wrote that the inquiry commission's requests "offended many in the Vatican" because they were viewed as "an affront to Vatican sovereignty."

...MORE HERE...

Net neutrality, the FCC, Wikileaks and the future of internet freedom

Mike Adams
Natural News

Regardless of what you think about the Wikileaks release of state secrets, there’s no debating the astonishing fact that the internet made these leaks possible. Without the internet, no single organization such as Wikileaks would have been able to so widely propagate secret government information and make it public. In the old model of information distribution — centralized mainstream media newspapers and news broadcasts — such information would have been tightly controlled thanks to government pressure.

But the internet allows individual information publishers to bypass the censorship of government. In the case of Wikileaks, it allowed an Australian citizen to embarrass the U.S. government while sitting at a laptop computer in the United Kingdom.

Governments don’t like to be embarrassed. They don’t like their secrets aired on the internet. Sure, it’s okay for governments to tap all of your secrets by monitoring your phone calls, emails and web browsing habits, but every government seeks to protect its own secrets at practically any cost. That’s why the upshot of this Wikileaks release may be that governments will now start to look for new ways to censor and control the internet in order to prevent such information leaks from happening in the future.

What governments around the world are suddenly beginning to realize is that a free internet is ultimately incompatible with government secrets, and secrets are essential to any government that wants to remain in power. That’s because, as even Noam Chomsky stated in this DemocracyNow video interview (http://www.democracynow.org/2010/11…), most government secrets are based on information governments wouldn’t want their people to discover — secrets that might threaten the legitimacy of government if the people found out the truth.

How the FCC plans to seize authority over the internet
As part of a long-term plan to control content on the internet, the FCC is now attempting to assert authority over the internet in the same way it has long exercised content censorship authority over broadcast television and radio.

The reason you can’t say those seven dirty words on broadcast television, in other words, is because the FCC controls broadcast television content and can simply revoke the broadcast licenses of any television station that refuses to comply. This is the same tactic, in the internet world, of yanking a web site’s domain name, which the Department of Homeland Security has already begun doing over the last several weeks (http://www.naturalnews.com/030542_c…).

The FCC also controls content on the radio and can yank the broadcast licenses of any radio stations that refuse to comply with its content censorship. This is why operators of “pirate radio stations” are dealt with so harshly: For the government to allow any radio station to operate outside its censorship and control is to invite dissent.

The internet, of course, has been operating freely and without any real government censorship for roughly two decades. In that time, it has grown to be what is arguably the most influential medium in the world for information distribution. Most importantly, the internet is the medium of information freedom that is not controlled by any government.

The U.S. government wants to change all that, and they’ve dispatched the FCC to reign in the “freedoms” of the internet.

How to crush internet Free Speech
The first step to the FCC’s crushing of internet freedom is to assert authority over the internet by claiming to run the show. The FCC, of course, has no legal authority over the internet. It was only granted authority in 1934 over broadcast communications in the electromagnetic spectrum — you know, radio waves and antennas, that kind of thing.

There is nothing in the Communications Act of 1934 that grants the FCC any authority over the internet because obviously the internet didn’t exist then, and it would have been impossible for lawmakers in the 1930′s to imagine the internet as it operates today.

So instead of following the law, the FCC is trying to “fake” its way into false authority over the internet by claiming authority in the current “net neutrality” debate. By asserting its authority with net neutrality, the FCC will establish a beachhead of implied authority from which it can begin to control and censor the internet.

This is why “net neutrality” is a threat to internet freedom. It’s not because of anything to do with net neutrality itself, but rather with the FCC’s big power grab in its assertion that it has authority over websites just like it has authority over broadcast radio.

...MORE HERE...

6 Companies That Haven't Wussed Out of Working with WikiLeaks

Giants like PayPal, Amazon.com, Visa and MasterCard almost instantly crumbled under government (and p.r.) pressure to drop WikiLeaks, depriving the site of vital funding sources and online platforms. But other companies, some of them small, independent start-ups, have decided to risk the wrath of Joe Lieberman, the State Department, and their European counterparts and help keep WikiLeaks afloat by providing funding sources (yeah, you can now donate to WikiLeaks even if you only have Visa or MasterCard.) and hosting the site. Here's a list of companies that have stood by WikiLeaks:

1. Xipwire:

The Philly online payment company has announced that unlike PayPal they welcome customer donations to WikiLeaks. According to their site, they're even waiving fees and charges so that 100% of the money goes to the whistleblower site. "While people may or may not agree with WikiLeaks, we at XIPWIRE believe that anyone who wishes to support the organization through a donation should be able to do so," they say on their site. While the publicity advantages are obvious, there's also the threat of backlash. One of the founders told the tech blog BaltTech, "We're fully aware that not everyone likes what Wikileaks is. But we are prepared to accept the consequences."

(For the moment the money goes to an escrow account because they haven't been able to reach WikiLeaks.)

2. Flattr

Started by one of the founders of Pirate Bay, Flattr has also been bringing money to WikiLeaks. The site lets users put money into accounts; when they run into a website they want to support, they can click on their "flattr" button to donate money to site. According to TechCrunch, WikILeaks has used Flattr since August and they received over 3,000 Flattr donations when they released the Afghanistan war diary.

...MORE HERE...

WikiLeaks battle a new amateur face of cyber war?

By Peter Apps, Political Risk Correspondent

LONDON (Reuters) – The website attacks launched by supporters of WikiLeaks show 21st-century cyber warfare evolving into a more amateur and anarchic affair than many predicted.

While most countries have plowed much more attention and resources into cyber security in recent years, most of the debate has focused on the threat from militant groups such as al Qaeda or mainstream state on state conflict.

But attempts to silence WikiLeaks after the leaking of some 250,000 classified State Department cables seem to have produced something rather different -- something of a popular rebellion amongst hundreds or thousands of tech-savvy activists.

"The first serious infowar is now engaged," former Grateful Dead lyricist, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation John Perry Barlow told his followers on Twitter last week. "The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops."

Some of the more militant elements on the Internet clearly took him at his word. A group calling itself Anonymous put the quote at the top of a webpage entitled "Operation Avenge Assange," referring to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Online collective Anonymous appears to be using social networking site Twitter to coordinate attacks on websites belonging to entities it views as trying to silence WikiLeaks.

Targets have included MasterCard, Visa and a Swiss bank. All blocked payments to WikiLeaks on apparent U.S. pressure.

The Swedish government website and Swedish prosecutors behind Assange's arrest in London for extradition and questioning over sex allegations were also hit. Some WikiLeaks supporters view the accusations as politically motivated.

Twitter and Facebook shut down accounts apparently belonging to Anonymous. But with little to stop the attackers opening new ones, few believed it would be enough to stop the campaign.

"The genie is out of the bottle and it could be very difficult to put it back in," said Jonathan Wood, global issues analyst at Control Risks.

"In more authoritarian countries such as China and Iran, they have got around this by shutting down sites such as Twitter for a certain period of time. No one thinks that is politically possible in the West."

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."

...MORE HERE...

Spam-tastic!

Security experts see surge in downloads of spam used to attack sites hostile to WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks supporters on Friday downloaded increasing amounts of the spam-shooting software used to attack companies seen as hostile — a development that could challenge even Internet giants such as PayPal and Amazon.com during the crucial Christmas shopping season.

U.S. data security company Imperva says downloads of the attack program used to bombard websites with bogus requests for data have jumped to over 40,000, with thousands of new downloads reported overnight.

"It's definitely increasing," Imperva Web researcher Tal Be'ery said in a telephone interview from Israel.

The freely available software is a critical part of the campaign by "hacktivists" seeking to take revenge on sites they believe have betrayed WikiLeaks, the group that has outraged American officials by publishing hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. diplomatic cables and military intelligence reports.

Users who download the software essentially volunteer their computers to be used as weapons that volley streams of electronic spam at targeted websites. The more computers, the greater the flow of data requests, and the better chances are of overwhelming the targeted website.

The cyberguerillas, who gather under the name Anonymous, have generally been successful in foiling their enemies. Attacks directed at the main pages of Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. succeeded in making them inaccessible, in MasterCard's case for several hours. Attacks on online payment company PayPal Inc. have periodically rendered part of its website inoperative. Moneybookers.com, another targeted site, was inaccessible Friday.

All four sites have severed their links to WikiLeaks, often citing suspected "terms of use" violations, hurting the group's ability to accept donations. The moves angered WikiLeaks supporters and alarmed free speech advocates, whom claim the companies are caving in to U.S. pressure to muzzle the controversial website.

WikiLeaks has been careful to distance itself from Anonymous, saying "we neither condemn nor applaud these attacks."

...MORE HERE...

Operation:LEAKSPIN

This change of tactic is welcomed by PhilipBrennan.net as it is one that we can get behind both morally and physically. Over the coming days we will be writing summaries of cables and other documents that anyone can copy and paste in order to make things easier for everyone. We may also sneak in documents that are not in WikiLeaks possession, but damn well ought to be.

So it is time to get the coffee machine on and get to work.

Have fun...

Who is Anonymous
In their most recent public statement, WikiLeaks is the only group of people to identify Anonymous correctly. Anonymous is not a group, but rather an Internet gathering.
Both Anonymous and the media that is covering it are aware of the percieved dissent between individuals in the gathering. This does not, however, mean that the command structure of Anonymous is failing for a simple reason: Anonymous has a very loose and decentralized command structure that operates on ideas rather than directives.
We do not believe that a similar movement exists in the world today and as such we have to learn by trial and error. We are now in the process of better communicating some core values to the individual atoms that comprise Anonymous - we also want to take this opportunity to communicate a message to the media, so that the average Internet Citizen can get to know who we are and what we represent.
Anonymous is not a group of hackers. We are average Interent Citizens ourselves and our motivation is a collective sense of being fed up with all the minor and major injustices we witness every day.
We do not want to steal your personal information or credit card numbers. We also do not seek to attack critical infrastructure of companies such as Mastercard, Visa, PayPal or Amazon. Our current goal is to raise awareness about WikiLeaks and the underhanded methods employed by the above companies to impair WikiLeaks' ability to function.

What is Operation: Payback
As stated above, the point of Operation: Payback was never to target critical infrastructure of any of the companies or organizations affected. Rather than doing that, we focused on their corporate websites, which is to say, their online "public face". It is a symbolic action - as blogger and
academic Evgeny Morozov put it, a legitimate expression of dissent.

The background to the attacks on PayPal and the calls to attack Amazon.com
Amazon, which was until recently WikiLeaks' DNS provider, was one of the first companies to drop support for WikiLeaks. On December 9th, BusinessInsider.com reported that Amazon.co.uk were hosting the recently leaked diplomatic cables in e-book form. (Amazon.co.uk has since ceased selling the bundle of the diplomatic cables.)
After this piece of news circulated, parts of Anonymous on Twitter asked for Amazon.com to betargetted. The attack never occured. While it is indeed possible that Anonymous may not have been able to take Amazon.com down in a DDoS attack, this is not the only reason the attack never occured. After the attack was so advertised in the media, we felt that it would affect people such as consumers in a negative way and make them feel threatened by Anonymous. Simply put, attacking a major online retailer when people are buying presents for their loved ones, would be in bad taste.
The continuing attacks on PayPal are already tested and preferable: while not damaging their ability to process payments, they are successful in slowing their network down just enough for people to notice and thus, we achieve our goal of raising awareness.

...MORE HERE...

The Wikileaks scandal is more than just a diplomatic scuffle; it’s a war for the future of the Internet

You’ll have been following the Wikileaks saga, of course, because it is novel and interesting. Maybe you like it because it looks like a live action retelling of Enemy Of The State, or because history seems to be in the making. It feels big, doesn’t it? It is, but it’s bigger than that, too: what we’re witnessing right now is the opening of hostilities in the first big infowar. The war for the Internet is very big indeed.

If you’re not a digital native, or if you’re some kind of hearty outdoors type, this may not seem important, but you’re dead wrong. We could be spectators for the start of the cyber Great War – and they’ve just knocked over Franz Ferdinand.

We’ve seen cyber skirmishes before: Russian hackers targeted and sank Georgia’s internet infrastructure during their brief conflict in 2008, while there’ve been hints of Chinese muscle flexing for some time – especially last month, when traffic through US government sites was rerouted through Chinese servers for 18 minutes in November.

The difference now is that this battle is extra-national; it isn’t one country against another, so much as an establishment of nations fighting a global insurgency – with the soul of the Internet as the spoils.

At the moment, the greatest invention in human history is broadly free. It allows for unprecedented communication, truly free assembly, and with these, an unparalleled forum for the exchange of ideas. It’s a seat for radicalism, and it has the potential to usher in dramatic reorganisation of established power structures.

Up until now, the apple cart hasn’t been upset enough to incline governments to make overt changes. Wikileaks has changed that, and provoked the US into action: now the powers that be can see what the Internet can do, they want it changed.

It’s Internet power that lets us watch this unfold minute-by-minute, as the web’s corporate support structure crumbles before our eyes. One by one, companies we take for granted bow to pressure and desert the insurgents. First Amazon’s hosting, then Pay Pal, EveryDNS and Mastercard and Visa – betrayals all, robbing Wikileaks of the oxygen of hosting and funding. This is the old order’s first salvo, an old-fashioned show of power, using old-world intimidation tactics to bring down tangible assets and demonstrate the fragility of the Internet we thought we could trust.

Make no mistake, if they win here, online life will change. Expect tighter government control, more regulations and sanitised information flow. It won’t end the web as a place of freedom – but it will raise the technological barriers to entry, necessitating secrecy software and technical savvy. People without the IT skills may never be able to stumble upon radical ideas or free speech.

This leads us to the insurgency. There are people fighting against the constriction of the net, a rebel alliance of hackers and activists, and it is they who are causing such a ruckus.

Now Wikileaks has put its head above the parapet, myriad spontaneous groups are emerging from the soupy corners of the Internet, refusing to take all this authoritarianism lying down. Many of these are simple anarchists, like the infamous group Anonymous – a collective in the loosest possible sense of troublemakers and technophiles. Angry, porn-obsessed adolescents they might be, but they’re angry, obsessed adolescents with significant technological firepower – and a grudge.

Operation Payback is in full swing, lashing out with Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks – which flood a website with fake hits in order to overwhelm its servers. Armed with a simple hack tool called the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC), hackers have been attacking the websites of those companies who slighted Wikileaks and Assange with surprising success, knocking them offline for hours at a time.

The Swiss bank that deserted Assange was down for the whole day yesterday, while MasterCard – which, lest ye forget, still allows you to donate to subsidiaries of the KKK – has now lost control of its own homepage. If people can’t see www.mastercard.com, it’ll certainly cost them money; infowar is waged on the bottom line.

...MORE HERE...

True News: The Truth About Wikileaks

stefbot

Why are the neocons going insane with bloodlust? It's not about the past - it's about the future... From Freedomain Radio - http://www.freedomainradio.com

A Letter from Anonymous

LetterFromAnon

Anonymous on IRC: irc.anonops-irc.com #operationpayback - http://twitter.com/Anon_Operationn +++ the letter: http://pastebin.com/XYSN27EK +++ Anonymous' press release: http://bit.ly/fWIu88 +++ the soundfile in various formats: http://www.soundcloud.com/LetterFromAnon +++ if you support the message, please spread the word: http://bit.ly/anonletter91210