Cyber War Over Wikileaks

I haven’t had much to say over the Wikileaks controversy so, mainly because I have been preoccupied with other issues that I considered more important at the time.  Now, however, online activists, for good or ill, have responded to Obama administration attempts to silence Julian Assange, using tactics reminiscent of Nixon’s pursuit of Daniel Ellsberg, with attacks on companies that have cooperated with the administration.  If the our government thinks that Assange has committed a crime, let them charge him.  However I must oppose attacking his means to operate by making allegations of criminality without specific charges to back them up.

Internet vigilantes stepped up attacks in support of WikiLeaks on Wednesday, downing Visa’s web site in a widening protest against a handful of companies that banned the secret-spilling site after it began publishing hundreds of secret U.S. diplomatic cables.

The outages, organized by the group Anonymous under the banner “Operation Payback,” have taken the battle between WikiLeaks supporters and opponents over web censorship to the streets, so to speak, sparking a series of tit-for-tat retaliations that appeared to be growing at the time this article was posted.

At stake is not just the future of WikiLeaks, the protesters seem to believe, but freedom on the net in general — a principle worth defending by any means possible, however dubious.

“There are people that want to send a message that the Internet is a sovereign territory,” according to Barrett Lyon, CEO of 3Crowd and one of the early pioneers in fighting DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks from 2000 to 2006.

Online speech and corporate attempts to control it have sparked firefights before, but the naked control of commercial service providers over WikiLeaks’ cash flow and internet presence has sparked an unprecedented reaction that may not be easily brought to heel… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Wired>

Keith Olbermann and author, Jim Moore, add depth.

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Bear in mind, that Assange is not directly responsible for the actions taken on his behalf.  The publication of innocent individuals’ credit card information is not in character with what Assange has done to date.

To the best of my knowledge, all the information published has been carefully redacted to avoid exposure of individual operatives and threats to national security.  Rather than using extreme measures against Assange, the administration might find that transparent, honorable behavior is a better way to avoid embarrassment.