Wikileaks Payback - Offensive and Defensive

[Magda Hassan]

Anonymous Attacks Tunisian Government over Wikileaks Censorship

Anonymous, the loosely-organized band of hacker activists and vigilantes, has chosen its next victim: The government of Tunisia. (They've taken down its official website.) Why? In part, because it tried to block access to secret-sharing website Wikileaks.
Sometime in early December, according to The Next Web Middle East, the Tunisian government blocked not just Wikileaks but any news source publishing or referencing leaked cables that originated or referenced Tunisia—including Tunileaks, a Tunisia-specific exploration of the massive cache of diplomatic communication. In one of the cables, an American diplomat referred to the country as "a police state"; currently, anti-government protests have wracked the country in the wake of an unemployed man's self-immolation.
The block of Tunileaks wasn't the first time the Tunisian government had attempted to censor the internet. But it seems to have been noteworthy enough to have spurred, or at least raised the profile of, a semi-organized effort to, well, mess with the Tunisian government's web presence. (It doesn't hurt that Wikileaks is the current internet cause célèbre.) A "recruiting" call went up on AnonNews.org, a user-edited clearing house for information and news by and about the disorganized, decentralized "hacktivist" group:

A time for truth has come. A time for people to express themselves freely and to be heard from anywhere in the world. The Tunisian government wants to control the present with falsehoods and misinformation in order to impose the future by keeping the truth hidden from its citizens. We will not remain silent while this happens. Anonymous has heard the claim for freedom of the Tunisian people. Anonymous is willing to help the Tunisian people in this fight against oppression. It will be done. It will be done.
This is a warning to the Tunisian government: attacks at the freedom of speech and information of its citizens will not be tolerated. Any organization involved in censorship will be targeted and will not be released until the Tunisian government hears the claim for freedom to its people. It's on the hands of the Tunisian government to stop this situation. Free the net, and attacks will cease, keep on that attitude and this will just be the beginning.

"#optunisia" so far seems to have taken the same kind of disruptive strategy that Anonymous hackers used in December against PayPal and MasterCard when those companies announced they wouldn't do business with Wikileaks anymore. But while in those cases the "hacking" was limited to DDoS attacks that took down the sites temporarily, there is some evidence that the hackers involved in #optunisia have been a little more sophisticated—specifically, this screenshot taken of the Tunisian Prime Minister's website (courtesy WL Central):

The Prime Minister's site, as well as official government site Tunisia.gov.tn and several others, are, as of this blog post's publication, down.
[WL Central; AnonNews; Wikileaks Forum via Michael Hastings]
Send an email to Max Read, the author of this post, at max@gawker.com.

[Peter Lemkin]

Anonymous Attacks Tunisian Government over Wikileaks Censorship

Anonymous, the loosely-organized band of hacker activists and vigilantes, has chosen its next victim: The government of Tunisia. (They've taken down its official website.) Why? In part, because it tried to block access to secret-sharing website Wikileaks.
Sometime in early December, according to The Next Web Middle East, the Tunisian government blocked not just Wikileaks but any news source publishing or referencing leaked cables that originated or referenced Tunisia—including Tunileaks, a Tunisia-specific exploration of the massive cache of diplomatic communication. In one of the cables, an American diplomat referred to the country as "a police state"; currently, anti-government protests have wracked the country in the wake of an unemployed man's self-immolation.
The block of Tunileaks wasn't the first time the Tunisian government had attempted to censor the internet. But it seems to have been noteworthy enough to have spurred, or at least raised the profile of, a semi-organized effort to, well, mess with the Tunisian government's web presence. (It doesn't hurt that Wikileaks is the current internet cause célèbre.) A "recruiting" call went up on AnonNews.org, a user-edited clearing house for information and news by and about the disorganized, decentralized "hacktivist" group:

A time for truth has come. A time for people to express themselves freely and to be heard from anywhere in the world. The Tunisian government wants to control the present with falsehoods and misinformation in order to impose the future by keeping the truth hidden from its citizens. We will not remain silent while this happens. Anonymous has heard the claim for freedom of the Tunisian people. Anonymous is willing to help the Tunisian people in this fight against oppression. It will be done. It will be done.
This is a warning to the Tunisian government: attacks at the freedom of speech and information of its citizens will not be tolerated. Any organization involved in censorship will be targeted and will not be released until the Tunisian government hears the claim for freedom to its people. It's on the hands of the Tunisian government to stop this situation. Free the net, and attacks will cease, keep on that attitude and this will just be the beginning.

"#optunisia" so far seems to have taken the same kind of disruptive strategy that Anonymous hackers used in December against PayPal and MasterCard when those companies announced they wouldn't do business with Wikileaks anymore. But while in those cases the "hacking" was limited to DDoS attacks that took down the sites temporarily, there is some evidence that the hackers involved in #optunisia have been a little more sophisticated—specifically, this screenshot taken of the Tunisian Prime Minister's website (courtesy WL Central):

The Prime Minister's site, as well as official government site Tunisia.gov.tn and several others, are, as of this blog post's publication, down.
[WL Central; AnonNews; Wikileaks Forum via Michael Hastings]
Send an email to Max Read, the author of this post, at max@gawker.com.

LOVE the "Payback Is A Bitch" - would have loved to see the look on the grand-poohbah of Tunisia's face! :lol:

Seems to be a trend::flypig:
The Saudi Arabia Ministry of Culture and Information has adopted regulation for internet publishing, including electronic newspapers, forums, and blogs. aitnews.com outlines the regulations in an article.

Besides the electronic press, forums and blogging, the thirteen forms of internet publishing include websites, electronic ads, mobile phone or other broadcasts, email groups, electronic archives, room dialogues, and "any form of electronic publishing the ministry wishes to add".

There are ten terms required to obtain a license, including good conduct and behaviour.

NB - I dont suggest you try to mirror this site in SA

[Peter Lemkin]

2010-12-27 Wikileaks writers killed in Kenya March 5, 2009
Submitted by GeorgieBC on Tue, 12/28/2010 - 05:04

In a recent BBC interview Julian Assange stated: "People affiliated with our organization have already been assassinated." This was not pursued by the BBC interviewer, but apparently caused consternation among other members of the media who had not heard this story. So here it is for reference.

Wikileaks writers killed in Kenya

On Thursday afternoon March 5, Oscar Kamau Kingara, director of the Kenyan based Oscar legal aid Foundation, and its programme coordinator, John Paul Oulo, were shot at close range in their car less than a mile from President Kibaki's residence. The two were on their way to a meeting at the Kenyan National Commission on Human Rights.

Both had been investigating extrajudicial assassinations by the Kenyan Police. Part of their work forms the basis of the "Cry of Blood" report Wikileaks released on November 1 last year and subsequent followups, including the UN indictment last month. ...

Two men got out, approached the vehicle of Oscar Kamau Kingara and John Paul Oulu, and shot them through the windows at close range. According to eyewitnesses, the driver of the minibus was in police uniform whilst the other men were wearing suits. The closest eyewitness to the incident was shot in the leg and later taken away by policemen.

[Peter Lemkin]

2011-01-06: Observations on Israel Shamir in Counterpunch: Julian Assange's Deal With the Devil
Submitted by x7o on Thu, 01/06/2011 - 05:21

Israel Shamir, the subject of some controversy in a recent Guardian piece has published an interesting article at Counterpunch, which not only tries to address many of the concerns raised in the Guardian, but takes the battle to the Guardian, and takes up the cause of Wikileaks quite forcefully.

The piece is very interesting, for a number of reasons. It provides new developments in the Shamir-Wikileaks story. Shamir claims to have no official or professional relationship with Wikileaks. He also points out a pre-publication page on Amazon that may or may not indicate that the Guardian is preparing a book on Wikileaks called "The Rise and Fall of Wikileaks." Shamir alleges that the Guardian is engaged in a smear campaign against Assange in anticipation of this "fall."

Certainly, over the last week, we at WL Central have had the opportunity to catch The Guardian falling short of what one might expect of an exemplary journalistic publication. Nick Davies was seen to propagate a straightforward falsehood when he alleged that Julian Assange had been using the Wikileaks Twitter account to smear the alleged victims of his alleged crimes. And on Monday the Guardian published an article by James Richardson which accused Wikileaks of potentially fatal negligence in the clearance for publication of a cable from Harare, when it was in fact the Guardian that cleared this cable.

There is certainly more to this story, but perhaps the most interesting thing about Shamir's piece is the analytic he offers. The article offers some very intriguing, and I would say accurate, analysis of the structural limitations of the media, and its effects on a story of the magnitude of Cablegate.

Shamir invokes this analysis to explain the recent apparent cooling of relations between the Guardian and Wikileaks. But what he says raises some interesting broader questions about whether the world actually has an information infrastructure adequate to something like Cablegate. Shamir's criticism of the mainstream media's approach to Cablegate is colourful, but seductive:

So here we are: in order to get valuable data to the people, Julian Assange had to make a deal with the devil: the mainstream media. It was most natural for him to deal with the liberal flank of the mainstream, for the hardliners would not even touch it. But since the liberal papers are also embedded, they freely distort the cables by attaching misleading headlines and misquoting from the text.

What arises out of Shamir's analysis is that the information biases at work in something like the mainstream media hamstring the accuracy of any dissemination of information through any such infrastructure. The information resource of Cablegate is vast. Newspapers, journalists, employ a selection bias towards "newsworthy" material. Even credible or careful analysis by a journalist is often swept to the side by an editorial headline which primes a reader to employ an interpretive bias while reading.

These US State Department cables are double-edged swords. They are full of rumors, trial balloons, and hopeful thinking. Worse, the newspaper headlines often declare that Wikileaks is the source of the rumor, and leave it to the discerning reader to discover that an embassy staffer was the real source of the story. Readers often do not understand that headlines are little more than come-ons, and reflect a very loose interpretation of the article content. They tend to believe the misleading headline that says, "Wikileaks: Iran prepares nuclear weapons" or, "Wikileaks: all Arabs want the US to destroy Iran". Wikileaks never said it! It was the Guardian and the NY Times that said it, and loudly. A corrected headline would look like this:

"Wikileaks reveals that US diplomats spread unsubstantiated rumours on the Iran nuclear program in order to ingratiate themselves with the State Department"

But you will not live long enough to see this headline. Such is the price for using mainstream media: they will eventually poison the purest source.

Media organizations are overwhelmed by Cablegate. Because of the sheer quantity of information, Cablegate has become a maelstrom of sensational headlines. Readers rely on the selection efforts of the media. Eventually, the headlines and editorial emphases occlude the actual content of the cables, and their impact is muted, their meaning distorted. We are inclined towards a broad analogy with data encoding technology. An extremely large amount of high resolution data is given, but the only available technique for transmitting it involves lossy compression. The result is a huge loss in potentially valuable data. As the stories disseminate, generation loss occurs.

Shamir in fact describes the breakdown of the traditional media in its attempts to accurately report on a deluge of information many times more vast than it was ever built to accommodate. And this is quite a valuable insight. One of the most fascinating stories of the last month (and in fact, the last year of Wikileaks activity) has been the sheer incompetence of the media, faced with a story like this. Glenn Greenwald documents how the media voraciously passes on unkillable falsehoods. At a certain point, mendacity ceases to be a credible explanation. We revert to the stark inadequacy of existing media structures. Our media has been breaking under the strain of too much news, and of too pure a grade of news.

It raises the question, to what extent could the world ever fully comprehend the magnitude of the information contained in Cablegate, or indeed, any of Wikileaks' previous "megaleaks?" Much of the coverage has explored the ethics of leaking, but we have had little mention of the idea that there is an information threshold, above which any leak will diminish in impact proportional to its magnitude. Is it possible to have a media apparatus that transmits news with the ideal fidelity? Is our best possible media analogous only to some lossy compression technique? And what of citizen journalist efforts, such as CrowdLeaks or CableWiki?

One of Shamir's final comments is timely. Assange has given us reason to believe, in the past, that theory on the transmission of information such as this plays a strong role in the design of Wikileaks. It seems unlikely that the present performance of the mainstream media will escape someone with these interests and concerns.

However, I would rather place my bet on Assange. He is smart, and he has a mind of a first-class chess player. He has many surprises up his sleeve. It is possible that the Guardian will have to rename their book The Rise and Rise of Wikileaks.

[Magda Hassan]

We've been censored by PRWEB.com!!!

That's how much the corporate internet cares about YOUR FREE SPEECH! To quote "PRWeb cannot distribute, nor link to, such content involving or relating to the subject of WikiLeaks and its website."

[Peter Lemkin]

Talk about Infowars! LeakySearch Sounds like a good idea, but they need access to the full range of cables Aftenposten and Others have.....not the 30 year wait for Wikileaks themselves to post them. Why am I not surprised by PRWEB.....anything mainstream is toilet stream in the end.

[David Guyatt]

One of the most fascinating stories of the last month (and in fact, the last year of Wikileaks activity) has been the sheer incompetence of the media, faced with a story like this.

(my italics). The sheer incompetence of the media is a little like designer stubble. If there is a will to use a razor then it'll go away fast.

But there is no such will. On the contrary, the media favour press handouts from governments and corporations and are happy, nay delighted, to publish them without any sort of fact checking at all.

Because they favour the status quo.

It's all very comfy.

[David Guyatt]

Talk about Infowars! LeakySearch Sounds like a good idea, but they need access to the full range of cables Aftenposten and Others have.....not the 30 year wait for Wikileaks themselves to post them. Why am I not surprised by PRWEB.....anything mainstream is toilet stream in the end.

PRWEB has joined Mastercard, Visa, Paypal and all the others who are pliable to state pressure and/or blackmail.

I hope someone is keeping a list of these entities for the future when the whole Wikileaks issue dies down. Because their participation in this campaign of suppression of free speech should be remembered.

[Magda Hassan]

US tells Twitter to hand over WikiLeaks supporter's messages

Icelandic MP to fight attempts by the US department of justice to access her private information

• Dominic Rushe in New York
  
• The Guardian, Saturday 8 January 2011 Birgitta Jonsdottir, the Icelandic MP and former WikiLeaks volunteer, who is now fighting a US justice department attempt to get hold of her private messages on Twitter Photograph: Halldor Kolbeins/AFP/Getty Images An Icelandic member of parliament and former WikiLeaks volunteer says the US justice department has contacted Twitter and asked the company to hand over her private messages.
  Birgitta Jonsdottir, an MP for the Movement in Iceland, said last night on Twitter that the "usa government wants to know about all my tweets and more since november 1st 2009. Do they realize I am a member of parliament in Iceland?" She said she is starting a legal fight to stop the US getting hold of her messages. She wrote: "department of justice are requesting twitter to provide the info I got 10 days to stop it via legal process before twitter hands it over."
  She said the justice department was "just sending a message and of course they are asking for a lot more than just my tweets."
  Jonsdottir told the Guardian she was demanding a meeting with the US ambassador to Iceland. "The justice department has gone completely over the top," she said. She added the US authorities had requested personal information from Twitter as well as her private messages and that she was now assessing her legal position.
  "They are sending a message, it's not just about my information. It's a warning for anyone who had anything to do with WikiLeaks," she said. "It is completely unacceptable for the US justice department to flex its muscles like this. I am lucky, I'm a representative in parliament. But what of other people? It's my duty to do whatever I can to stop this abuse."
  Twitter would not comment on the case. In a statement the company said: "We're not going to comment on specific requests, but, to help users protect their rights, it's our policy to notify users about law enforcement and governmental requests for their information, unless we are prevented by law from doing so."
  Most of Twitter's messages are public but users can also send private messages on the service.
  Marc Rotenberg, president of online watchdog the Electronic Privacy Information Centre (EPIC) in Washington, said it appeared the justice department was looking at building a case against WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange over its recent publication of masses of secret US documents.
  EPIC has already requested that the US authorities hand over information about their investigations into people who have financially contributed to WikiLeaks via Mastercard, Visa or PayPal.
  "The government has the right to get information but that has to be done in a lawful way. Is there a lawful prosecution that could be brought against WikiLeaks? It seems unlikely to me. But it's a huge question here in the US," said Rotenberg.
  In 2009 Jonsdottir invited Assange to a party at the US embassy in Reykjavik where he chatted with the ambassador to Iceland. WikiLeaks had recently published a secret report on the collapse of the country's banks.
  "I said it would be a bit of a prank to take him and see if they knew who he was. I don't think they had any idea," Jonsdottir said last year.
  Jonsdottir was involved in WikiLeaks' release last year of a video which showed a US military helicopter gunning down two Reuters reporters in Iraq. US authorities believe the video was leaked by Private Bradley Manning. Adrian Lamo, the hacker who reported Manning to the authorities, indicated that Manning had first contacted WikiLeaks sometime in late November 2009 a time period covered by the government's request for Jonsdottir's tweet history.
  The MP has recently distanced herself from Assange and WikiLeaks after arguing the founder should take a step back to deal with an investigation in Sweden. The 39-year-old is fighting extradition to Sweden, where two women have accused him of sexual misconduct. He denies the allegations.
  In Iceland she has championed the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative which is aimed at creating legislation to make Iceland a legal haven for journalists and media outlets.
  She is not the first WikiLeaks associate to be targeted by US officials. Last July Jacob Appelbaum, one of Assange's closest colleagues, was interrogated for three hours and had his phones confiscated upon entering the country at Newark airport. Customs officials photocopied receipts and searched his laptop.
  The justice department did not returns calls seeking comment last night.
  http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jan...s-messages
  
  
  

[Peter Lemkin]

US tells Twitter to hand over WikiLeaks supporter's messages

Icelandic MP to fight attempts by the US department of justice to access her private information

• Dominic Rushe in New York
  
• The Guardian, Saturday 8 January 2011 Birgitta Jonsdottir, the Icelandic MP and former WikiLeaks volunteer, who is now fighting a US justice department attempt to get hold of her private messages on Twitter Photograph: Halldor Kolbeins/AFP/Getty Images An Icelandic member of parliament and former WikiLeaks volunteer says the US justice department has contacted Twitter and asked the company to hand over her private messages.
  Birgitta Jonsdottir, an MP for the Movement in Iceland, said last night on Twitter that the "usa government wants to know about all my tweets and more since november 1st 2009. Do they realize I am a member of parliament in Iceland?" She said she is starting a legal fight to stop the US getting hold of her messages. She wrote: "department of justice are requesting twitter to provide the info I got 10 days to stop it via legal process before twitter hands it over."
  She said the justice department was "just sending a message and of course they are asking for a lot more than just my tweets."
  Jonsdottir told the Guardian she was demanding a meeting with the US ambassador to Iceland. "The justice department has gone completely over the top," she said. She added the US authorities had requested personal information from Twitter as well as her private messages and that she was now assessing her legal position.
  "They are sending a message, it's not just about my information. It's a warning for anyone who had anything to do with WikiLeaks," she said. "It is completely unacceptable for the US justice department to flex its muscles like this. I am lucky, I'm a representative in parliament. But what of other people? It's my duty to do whatever I can to stop this abuse."
  Twitter would not comment on the case. In a statement the company said: "We're not going to comment on specific requests, but, to help users protect their rights, it's our policy to notify users about law enforcement and governmental requests for their information, unless we are prevented by law from doing so."
  Most of Twitter's messages are public but users can also send private messages on the service.
  Marc Rotenberg, president of online watchdog the Electronic Privacy Information Centre (EPIC) in Washington, said it appeared the justice department was looking at building a case against WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange over its recent publication of masses of secret US documents.
  EPIC has already requested that the US authorities hand over information about their investigations into people who have financially contributed to WikiLeaks via Mastercard, Visa or PayPal.
  "The government has the right to get information but that has to be done in a lawful way. Is there a lawful prosecution that could be brought against WikiLeaks? It seems unlikely to me. But it's a huge question here in the US," said Rotenberg.
  In 2009 Jonsdottir invited Assange to a party at the US embassy in Reykjavik where he chatted with the ambassador to Iceland. WikiLeaks had recently published a secret report on the collapse of the country's banks.
  "I said it would be a bit of a prank to take him and see if they knew who he was. I don't think they had any idea," Jonsdottir said last year.
  Jonsdottir was involved in WikiLeaks' release last year of a video which showed a US military helicopter gunning down two Reuters reporters in Iraq. US authorities believe the video was leaked by Private Bradley Manning. Adrian Lamo, the hacker who reported Manning to the authorities, indicated that Manning had first contacted WikiLeaks sometime in late November 2009 a time period covered by the government's request for Jonsdottir's tweet history.
  The MP has recently distanced herself from Assange and WikiLeaks after arguing the founder should take a step back to deal with an investigation in Sweden. The 39-year-old is fighting extradition to Sweden, where two women have accused him of sexual misconduct. He denies the allegations.
  In Iceland she has championed the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative which is aimed at creating legislation to make Iceland a legal haven for journalists and media outlets.
  She is not the first WikiLeaks associate to be targeted by US officials. Last July Jacob Appelbaum, one of Assange's closest colleagues, was interrogated for three hours and had his phones confiscated upon entering the country at Newark airport. Customs officials photocopied receipts and searched his laptop.
  The justice department did not returns calls seeking comment last night.
  http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jan...s-messages
  
  
  

Well, well, well. No surprise. I sure hope she can prevail over Twitter, but fear they will cave in to the USG. 9 days is not a lot of time for something this complex and important.....but they knew that....and planned that. Who's next? None of us are safe in what we communicate to anyone by any means anymore. Big Brother is Watching and wants all the tapes.

Why can't we have some Members of Congress like her?! I went to her official webpage and what a wonderful surprise! There is a political cartoon, which she drew herself! She is cosmically further ahead of the kind of crud we get for most of our (sic) Representatives (sic).

I wish her well! I wish I was represented by someone with her values. Lucky Iceland.