[Aptorian]

So, America's government is working to crush Wikileaks internet presence.

http://www.guardian....et-dns-everydns

Quote

WikiLeaks fights to stay online after US company withdraws domain name
Everydns.net says attack against leaks site endangered other customers' service – effectively pushing site off the web

The US was today accused of opening up a dramatic new front against WikiLeaks, effectively "killing" its web address just days after Amazon pulled the site from its servers following political pressure.

The whistleblowers' website went offline for the third time in a week this morning, in the biggest threat to its online presence yet.

Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate's committee on homeland security, earlier this week called for any organisation helping sustain WikiLeaks to "immediately terminate" its relationship with them.

On Friday morning, WikiLeaks and the cache of secret diplomatic documents that have proved to be a scourge for governments around the world were only accessible through a string of digits known as a DNS address. The site later re-emerged with a Swiss domain, WikiLeaks.ch.

Julian Assange this morning said the development is an example of the "privatisation of state censorship" in the US and is a "serious problem."

"These attacks will not stop our mission, but should be setting off alarm bells about the rule of law in the United States," he warned.

The California-based internet hosting provider that dropped WikiLeaks at 3am GMT on Friday (10PM EST Thursday), Everydns, says it did so to prevent its other 500,000 customers of being affected by the intense cyber attacks targeted at WikiLeaks.

The site this morning said it had "move[d] to Switzerland", announcing a new domain name – wikileaks.ch, with the Swiss suffix. However, the new address still only points to an IP address, suggesting WikiLeaks has been unable to quickly find a new hosting provider.

The Wikileaks.ch domain name, which only surfaced on Friday morning, is being served by the Swiss Pirate Party. And the routing to it is still being done by everydns.

Late yesterday evening Tableau Software, a company which published data visualisations, pulled one of its images picturing the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables at the request of Senator Lieberman. Writing on the company's blog, Elissa Fink said: "Our decision to remove the data from our servers came in response to a public request by Senator Joe Lieberman, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, when he called for organisations hosting WikiLeaks to terminate their relationship with the website."

Mark Stephens, the London-based lawyer acting on behalf of Assange, wrote on Twitter after the shutdown: "Pressure appears to have been applied to close the WikiLeaks domain name."

Andre Rickardsson, an expert on computer security at Sweden's Bitsec Consulting, told Reuters: "I don't believe for a second that this has been done by everydns themselves. I think they've been under pressure," he said, apparently referring to US authorities.

A new Germany-based WikiLeaks domain – wikileaks.dd19.de – also appeared on Friday morning, with its data apparently hosted in California. People have also taken to setting up alternative domain names that point to the WikiLeaks address. Robin Fenwick, a UK-based web services director, this morning launched Wikileeks.org.uk – a "joke domain" that points to the WikiLeaks DNS address.

In a statement on its website, the free everydns.net service said that the "distributed denial of service" (DDOS) attacks by unknown hackers – who are trying to knock WikiLeaks off the net – meant that the leaks site was interfering with the service being provided to other users. That in turn meant that WikiLeaks had broken everydns.net's terms of service, and it cut the site off at 3am GMT on Friday (10PM EST Thursday).

DNS services translate a website name, such as guardian.co.uk, into machine-readable "IP quads" – in that case 77.91.249.30, so that http://77.91.249.30 will show the Guardian site. If the DNS fails, the site is only reachable via IP address – but WikiLeaks has not yet provided one via Twitter or other means.

Everydns.net said that the attacks – which have been going on all week, and led the site to temporarily host its services on Amazon's more resilient EC2 "cloud computing" service – "threaten the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure, which enables access to almost 500,000 other websites".

WikiLeaks was given 24 hours' notice of the termination, and everydns said: "Any downtime of the wikileaks.org website has resulted from its failure to use another hosted DNS service provider."

The move comes after several days of WikiLeaks coming under a determined DDOS attack, apparently from hackers friendly to the point of view of the US government, which has disparaged the site's leaking of thousands of US diplomatic cables.

US companies have also come under intense political pressure to remove any connection to, or support for, WikiLeaks. Amazon ended its hosting of the cables on its EC2 cloud computer service earlier this week, but last night insisted in a blogpost that its decision was not due to pressure from Senator Joe Lieberman, who has called for the removal of the data – and who has influenced at least one other US company to withdraw support for WikiLeaks data.

In a blogpost late on Thursday, Amazon said reports that government inquiries prompted it to remove the data were "inaccurate".

Amazon said:

"[Amazon Web Services] does not pre-screen its customers, but it does have terms of service that must be followed. WikiLeaks was not following them. There were several parts they were violating. For example, our terms of service state that "you represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content… that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity". It's clear that WikiLeaks doesn't own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content. Further, it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren't putting innocent people in jeopardy."

It noted that:

"When companies or people go about securing and storing large quantities of data that isn't rightfully theirs, and publishing this data without ensuring it won't injure others, it's a violation of our terms of service, and folks need to go operate elsewhere."

But as commentators have pointed out, that stance is contradicted by the fact that Amazon has previously hosted the "war logs" from WikiLeaks which contained data about the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Connecting to WikiLeaks is presently not possible until it gets a new DNS service. WikiLeaks itself said on Twitter that the ending of DNS services was allegedly due to "claimed mass attacks" and called for further donations to "keep us strong".

Meanwhile Sweden working with Interpol has issued an arrest order on Assange for that Rape business a couple of months ago.

http://www.nytimes.c...ikileaks&st=cse

And the right wing wants the whistleblowers dead or put in prison for life:

http://www.huffingto...d_n_789654.html

Quote

O'Reilly: WikiLeaks Leakers Are Traitors, Should Be Executed Or Spend Life In Jail (VIDEO)
Bill O'Reilly took a hard line against the leakers of the classified State Department cables released by WikiLeaks this week, saying they were traitors who "should be executed or put in prison for life."

Speaking on his Monday show, O'Reilly said that the leaking of the cables, which have sparked a global diplomatic crisis and unearthed scores of revelations about the inner workings of the State Department, was an outrage.

"Whoever leaked all those State Department documents to the WikiLeaks website is a traitor and should be executed or put in prison for life," he said. "The guy who runs the website is a sleazeball named Julian Assange, who is bent on damaging America. Since he's not a U.S. citizen, it's hard for American authorities to move against him. But we can prosecute those who leak the documents to Assange."

O'Reilly then turned to Bradley Manning, the intelligence analyst who has been widely tipped as the source for WikiLeaks. If guilty, he said, Manning "is a traitor and should be given life and hard labor in a military prison."

-------------------------------------------

What do you think about all this?

Personally I am disgusted by the media spin on this. Instead of focusing on the enourmous amount of bullshit and fuck ups our governments have been committing, the focus is on these dangerous wiki people who are hurting these poor governments by airing their dirty laundry.

Guys like Mike Huckabee are calling for the death of the people who are revealing the dirty deeds of the governments. Claiming that all these secrets can cost lives, well, what about all the lives that have already been lost because of the lies of the Governments?

As somebody else mentioned in a thread in Reddit, I think we are witnessing an important moment in modern history. Free speech and Internet neutrality making the secret acts of Big Brother transparent. What will happen? Will Wikileaks be squashed or will the actions of wikileaks become a trend forcing the worlds governments to start keeping their act clean?

I certainly doubt it, but one could hope.

EDIT:

What I wanted to discuss was:

Do you think what Wikileaks has done and continues to work for is destructive or criminal?
Do you think that the safety of the citizens are really affected by these leaks?
Are the actions taken against Wikileaks wrong or right?
How should morals and ethics dictate the way a government acts?

This post has been edited by Jenisand Rul: 03 December 2010 - 06:05 PM

[Obdigore]

Here is my take:

1) That material is not rightfully wikileaks, and whoever got it for them can be tried in the US as a lawbreaker.
2) If the material will not name any names regarding spies or agents or even just friendlies to the US, I have no problem with it being posted for all the world to see.
3) The only reason Amazon pulled it down is because they don't want Homeland Security to go to a conservative judge and get a warrant to both remove any wikileaks info and turn over any info they have on it to the Department. It seems to me that it is possible that Amazon was actually moving to protect wikileaks in this matter, as if the data is stored on servers in the US (I believe nearly all of Amazon's server farms are in the US) it would become free domain for the department of nazi security to take over.
4) Is anyone at WikiLeaks a traitor? Not unless they divulge information related to my second point.
5) As for where the DDS attacks are from, I do not know, nor will I speculate.

The only government pressure I see here are from the Senators. I see nothing else the US can be confirmed to have done regarding this information.

I also support the UK Investigator who requested Sweden give them more details in the 'rape' case against the founder.

I believe that the documents released regarding the Afghanistan war were about battalions and goals, not naming any names or possibly putting any specific people in jeapordy.

As for the right-wing fuckjobs currently in office (if not yet in power), they will have their time and then the Democrats will return, try to clean up the mess, and get blamed for the whole thing.

PS - I do 'enjoy' that in your article most of the people they talked to have statements listed, and then the article claims they were talking about pressure from the government or USA, but the people themselves never said that. Not that I disagree with that, but hinting at something and then allowing the journalists to sensationalize your statements is a good way of avoiding lying or being asked to provide proof.

[stone monkey]

Just on the "traitor" point, I hate to belabour the obvious but; how can Wikileaks, unless they're a US based corporation, or in the employ of the US, or have made a deal not to release the information and then reneged upon it be considered traitorous or treasonous exactly? A word in the shell-like of Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee et al; that word does not mean what you think it does...

Oddly enough, this has been bugging me.

This post has been edited by stone monkey: 03 December 2010 - 08:47 PM

[Avatar]

Quote

Just on the "traitor" point, I hate to belabour the obvious but; how can Wikileaks, unless they're a US based corporation, or in the employ of the US, or have made a deal not to release the information and then reneged upon it be considered traitorous or treasonous exactly? A word in the shell-like of Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee et al; that word does not mean what you think it does...

Oddly enough, this has been bugging me.

I totally agree.

And although I wouldn't like to see American spies to be in danger when these document go online, I tend to say that it is a good thing that Wikileaks is posting this. I think it is good when governments try to be as open and transparant as possible. The more secrets you keep from the people who chose you to lead their country, the more trouble you will have when the shit hits the fan like this.

[Avatar]

Quote

Personally I am disgusted by the media spin on this. Instead of focusing on the enourmous amount of bullshit and fuck ups our governments have been committing, the focus is on these dangerous wiki people who are hurting these poor governments by airing their dirty laundry.

Very different from the press in Holland, not a big focus on the dangers, more on the bullshit and the fuck ups

[Slow Ben]

My favorite part of all this is our government is taking "aggressive steps" to make sure this never happens again. If this information is so important, why the fuck wasn't that already done?

[Aptorian]

Well by "aggressive steps" I believe they mean that they are funneling even more money into one of the branches of their Star Wars project.. Something about robots. I believe they nicknamed it Cloudnet or something like that.

That should take care of that pesky "human decency" problem.

This post has been edited by Jenisand Rul: 03 December 2010 - 09:30 PM

[Tavvar]

Most of the information in the Leaks was already known to people who actually look at this stuff (one of my professors included), so they didn't reveal all that much. I've read the coverage in the NY Times (except Fri. haven't gotten around to it yet; I recall on Tuesday that SOS Clinton was apologizing to someone, who responded with something like "never mind, you should see what we say about you." Most of what I have read is not that shocking, though there may be some else where.

Q1. I think that whoever leaked the documents is a criminal because he took Secret documents and released them, which I believe is illegal, but WikiLeaks itself is a bit harder to judge because they just published what they got (unless Assange asked for leaks, then it would be a different story)
Q2. I don't think that anyone will be hurt by the Leaks published and redacted by the NY Times and other news agencies, problems may occur if people get a hold of the un-redacted versions.
Q3. I think that this kind of information shouldn't have to be leaked, I read an article today that said that other countries diplomats are not as secretive as ours are, so I don't think that it would do too much harm if most of the information was released on a regular basis. (According to the NY Times editor the State Department's release of similar information is all the way up to 1974, so I think that they should speed that up a little.)
Q4. This is a very difficult question, which philosophers have been arguing over since Machiavelli, and no one has a really good answer (I've spent the last semester read several views on morality and politics). I think that governments should act morally, but it is difficult for them to do so because if one other country does not, then it would hurt the moral government(s). I could probably say more but it is very complicated and I would have to spend a lot more time thinking about it.

[HoosierDaddy]

stone monkey, on 03 December 2010 - 08:45 PM, said:

Just on the "traitor" point, I hate to belabour the obvious but; how can Wikileaks, unless they're a US based corporation, or in the employ of the US, or have made a deal not to release the information and then reneged upon it be considered traitorous or treasonous exactly? A word in the shell-like of Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee et al; that word does not mean what you think it does...

Oddly enough, this has been bugging me.

The only traitors here are those Americans who willingly passed along Classified information to Wikileaks. Everything else is just word sewage. Right-wing politicians can't tell the difference between socialism and fascism. Expectations for their political knowledge is set pathetically grossly high.

[Aptorian]

But is it treason when an informant reveals missinformation or outright lies? I think there comes a point where the traitor becomes the savior.

[MTS]

I think his point was that in terms in law, the only people who can be tried as traitors are the people who leaked the documents, not Wikileaks or Julian Assange. The morality of it is murky, but wholly dependent on your definition of 'patriotism'.

[HoosierDaddy]

Jenisand Rul, on 04 December 2010 - 09:24 AM, said:

But is it treason when an informant reveals missinformation or outright lies? I think there comes a point where the traitor becomes the savior.

That's an interesting philosophical question, but not an interesting criminal question. It's criminal treason, whether the information is valid or not, the moment it's made Classified and leaked by a U.S. national.

[Morgoth]

To me the only difference between Wikileaks and any other media organization (say for instance the New York Times) is scale. If you support freedom of the press you cannot simultaneously argue for the destruction of Wikileaks.

Ironically, a big part of the spin these days is that the leak was no big deal. It didn't damage the US or tell us anything new about the dealings of the US diplomatic branch (apart from gathering dna and such from highly placed members of the UN etc, which seemingly is not such a big deal). To me, this view shows a lack of understanding regarding the size of the world and the US' position in it.

If I was from Yemen I'd be pretty angry to learn that my elected president allowed American drones to drop bombs on my country, especially as this same president denied having done so in a parliamentary hearing.

If I was Pakistani I certainly would want to know about my elected representatives' dealings with the US, and the abysmal state of my country's nuclear weapons and power plants.

If I was Italian i'd be pretty angry to learn that my president has been receiving private gifts of quite substantial value from Vladimir Putin.

If I was S. Korean I'd be rather shocked to learn that the US and China (with help I'm sure from my own government) have decided to form a united Korean nation out of N. & S. Korea. If I was Japanese or Chinese, I would similarly have been a little angry. Even someone as far away as Norway might be a little shocked at the casualness of disbanding a sovereign nation just like that.

If I was Swedish I might also be a little annoyed at Norway for tricking them into thinking they were a serious contender for a massive military contract that seemingly had been decided in the US' favour quite some time before the swedes were told.

and so on and so forth.

[HoosierDaddy]

By far the most interesting leaks to me were the Middle Eastern states pushing for a more aggressive policy against Iran, and what effect that might have in the future.

Diplomacy is messy business, but it's always cleaner when it isn't yours that's being dug through.

[Shinrei]

Morgoth, on 04 December 2010 - 10:01 AM, said:

If I was S. Korean I'd be rather shocked to learn that the US and China (with help I'm sure from my own government) have decided to form a united Korean nation out of N. & S. Korea. If I was Japanese or Chinese, I would similarly have been a little angry. Even someone as far away as Norway might be a little shocked at the casualness of disbanding a sovereign nation just like that.

This wasnt, as far as I know, exactly secret. And plenty of S. Koreans would like to see a reunified Korea. I can see how that would upset Japan though.

[Morgoth]

Oh, I'm not saying many people in S. Korea wouldn't welcome it. Yet it's hardly something ones politicians should be allowed to do without at least opening it to debate first.

[Thelomen Toblerone]

I'm just glad we can pull all our troops out of Afghanistan now, as they're apparently doing such a shit job. Thanks America, you can take care of it yourself now!

Facetiousness aside, is it still a criminal act to release secret documents if you haven't signed the Official Secrets Act (or equivalent in whatever country)? I'm sure there's something specific in it on that, which begs the question why would you have to sign up to it if it was already breaking the law to release docs?

The thing that pleased me most was the assessment of the ConDem coalition's chances of lasting, though. Zip.

This post has been edited by Thelomen Toblerone: 04 December 2010 - 01:19 PM

[stone monkey]

The Data Protection Act will do you on that in this country, if the CPS are willing to push it. And given that most of the Home Civil Service now has its Conditions of Service enshrined in law, they'll probably do you on that too if you're the whistle blower - no need to sign the Official Secrets Act at all.
The problem with the ConDems getting kicked out office at the next election is that by that time they'll have effectively broken everything beyond repair. When this set of austerity measures doesn't work (or even doesn't begin to look like working before the next General Election) I can pretty much see them going after everything else that's left with a chainsaw. After they've butchered the NHS (which you just know they're absolutely dying to do) we'll be even worse of than the Americans...

This post has been edited by stone monkey: 04 December 2010 - 05:26 PM

[Bauchelain the Evil]

Morgoth, on 04 December 2010 - 10:01 AM, said:

If I was Italian i'd be pretty angry to learn that my president has been receiving private gifts of quite substantial value from Vladimir Putin.

The fact that our president and Putin are very close isn't exactly secret and seeing what else he has done (of IMO much greater magnitude) the fact he has accepted gifts from him is not really that shocking ( but still obviously to be frowned upon)

[Ulrik]

Few OMG´s from Guardian


But the truly scandalous and shocking response to the Wikileaks documents has been that of other journalists, who make the Obama Administration sound like the ACLU. In a recent article in The New Yorker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Steve Coll sniffed that "the archives that WikiLeaks has published are much less significant than the Pentagon Papers were in their day" while depicting Assange as a "self-aggrandizing control-freak" whose website "lacks an ethical culture that is consonant with the ideals of free media." Channeling Richard Nixon, Coll labeled Wikileaks' activities – formerly known as journalism – by his newly preferred terms of "vandalism" and "First Amendment-inspired subversion."

Coll's invective is hardly unique, In fact, it was only a pale echo of the language used earlier this year by a columnist at his former employer, The Washington Post. In a column titled "WikiLeaks Must Be Stopped," Mark Thiessen wrote that "WikiLeaks is not a news organization; it is a criminal enterprise," and urged that the site should be shut down "and its leadership brought to justice." The dean of American foreign correspondents, John Burns of The New York Times, with two Pulitzer Prizes to his credit, contributed a profile of Assange which used terms like "nearly delusional grandeur" to describe Wikileaks' founder. The Times' normally mild-mannered David Brooks asserted in his column this week that "Assange seems to be an old-fashioned anarchist" and worried that Wikileaks will "damage the global conversation."

-----


Following the item at 7.47pm below – on how US government employees are barred from looking at WikiLeaks's site – comes chilling news that students are being warned not to go near the US embassy cables if they want a career working for the federal government.

This creepy discovery comes from a blogger at the Arabist.net website, Issandr El Amrani, who posts an email from the Office of Careers Service at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). "Hi students," the email begins:

We received a call today from a SIPA alumnus who is working at the State Department. He asked us to pass along the following information to anyone who will be applying for jobs in the federal government, since all would require a background investigation and in some instances a security clearance.

The documents released during the past few months through Wikileaks are still considered classified documents. He recommends that you DO NOT post links to these documents nor make comments on social media sites such as Facebook or through Twitter. Engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government.