Latest Wikileak Faces Cyberattacks, Censorship and Interpol Arrest Warrant

Thursday, 02 December 2010 02:04

The latest leak being released by a whistleblower web site Wikileaks.org beats a record set by the previous leak of Iraq War Diaries. The new leak includes 251,287 United States embassy cables dating from 1966 up to February 2010 containing confidential communications between Washington DC and 274 embassies in other countries. Wikileaks says these cables "show the extent of US spying on its allies and the UN; turning a blind eye to corruption and human rights abuse in "client states"; backroom deals with supposedly neutral countries; lobbying for US corporations; and the measures US diplomats take to advance those who have access to them". They also reveal "the contradictions between the US’s public persona and what it says behind closed doors". Almost immediately after making the first documents release on sunday Wikileaks.org web site came under a DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, a type of cyberattack that overloads a web server with traffic in an attempt to make it crash. The attackers were not identified. A second and stronger DDOS attack came on tuesday which overloaded the site with 10 gigabits per second of traffic and made the site unavailable. Such a huge amount of traffic implies a larger effort. To evade further attacks Wikileaks turned to Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) service for hosting, but that didn't last for long. The next day, wednesday, US Congress pressured Amazon into booting Wikileaks off their cloud which forced them to switch to hosting in Europe. "WikiLeaks' illegal, outrageous, and reckless acts have compromised our national security and put lives at risk around the world," US Senator Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee said, "No responsible company - whether American or foreign - should assist WikiLeaks in its efforts to disseminate these stolen materials. I will be asking Amazon about the extent of its relationship with WikiLeaks and what it and other Web service providers will do in the future to ensure that their services are not used to distribute stolen, classified information." Needless to say, governments, and US Government in particular, were never quite happy with what Wikileaks was doing as is evident from their rhetoric, which brands these leaks as illegal and as threatening to national security while simultaneously ignoring the crimes and corruption that the leaks actually expose. This puts governments in an essentially no-win position in which the only choices they have are to admit to their crimes and corruption, which are vast and many, or proceed with an unpopular task of repressing the flow of this information and shutting down Wikileaks. They appear to be pursuing the second option. While US Congress was pressuring Amazon to boot Wikileaks off their cloud servers Interpol was busy issuing an European arrest warrant, and an international Red Notice against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange over rape allegations made earlier by the two women in Sweden, the circumstances of which are fairly controversial. As the OSNews editor Thom Holwerda explained this appears to be an ongoing smear campaign against Julian Assange. "First, the two Swedish women flip-flop on whether or not to press any charges", Holwerda said. "Then, the Swedish courts retract the case - Assange was even explicitly allowed to leave Sweden. Then, right after the latest Wikileaks reveal, the case is taken out of the freezer again, and Assange is put on Interpol's list for something you normally would not end up on this list for." The context of the case would seem to lend some credibility to this theory. Two cyberattacks, US Congress pushing Amazon to oust Wikileaks from its servers, and now an arrest warrant, all happening within just three days of the latest leak, are a good example of "strange coincidences". The saga of the latest wikileaks is undoubtedly to continue and the full extent of its repercussions are yet to be seen. As Thom Holwerda aptly put it, "The internet is changing the very distribution of power in the world, the same way the printing press did before it". This  is also evident in a previously talked about battle against internet censorship in the name of combating copyright infringement. The late stages of internet's disruption of power structures are here.