Wikileaks and different avatar of the US

WIkileaks*, a band of computer whizkids and journalists, evaded the dark territory of diplomatic archieves of US and others on 28^th Nov 2010 by publishing 251,287 leaked United States embassy cables. The US having no place to shade its face makes sure that the knives are out and the whole armory of the dirty tricks department is in full display. Though few people believe on the fact that the confidentiality of government communications is the lifeblood of diplomatic comfort, still I believe freedom of speech knows no comfort to cushion on.

Here is a short guide to how the US, and some of its allies, are trying to join the two lips of freedom by crushing Wikileaks and its editor in chief, Julian Assange. Don’t be surprised, a group of hackers, named ‘Anonymous’ have already buckled up to stand as a fance to help Wikileaks.

Steps by the US authorities:

1. Attack on host: stop the website:-

• Server and domain owners hosting Wikileaks bombarded with ‘Distributed-Denial-Of-Service’ attacks, that is, artificially generating a traffic overload on their servers to crash them
• Congressional staffers and leaders in govt reportedly called up these companies and threatened them

1. Attack on funding: unplug paypal and master card money transfer:-

• PayPal, an online money transfer service reportedly arm-twisted into stopping receipt & delivery of donations to Wikileaks
• Another report says that MasterCard too decided to stop dealing with Wikileaks.
• Swiss govt told to freeze the accounts of Wikileaks.

1. Drag into legal cases

• US launches criminal investigation against Julian Assange
• Sweden has been allegedly pressurized into opening up a criminal case on the basis of an obscure law drawing on an alleged incident of ‘condom breaking during intercourse’. An international arrest warrant was issued for this ‘crime
• Interpol issued a ‘Red Corner’ notice for the same ‘crime’

1. Disinformation & threat blitz

• All govt employees prohibited from viewing leaked documents
• Viewing these documents in public libraries banned
• Several universities told to tell their students that they won’t get jobs in the govt if they comment on leak
• Leaders, army officials, and other public figures threaten dire consequences and even call for Assange’s assassination

Action by ‘Anonymous’:

1. Creating multiple host: Anonymous is helping to create hundreds of mirror sites for WikiLeaks, allowing users to continue to access the website’s content via a different server. Till now more than 1300 mirror sites available for wikileaks.
2. Attack on Money transfer portals: Anonymous ‘hacktivists’ attacked Master card, Visa, PayPal and Amazon and stopped the online payment for about 6 hours on 8^th Dec 2010.

Yesterday a spokesman for Anonymous, calling himself ‘Coldblood’, a 22-year-old computer programmer based in London, said: ‘Websites that are bowing down to government pressure have become targets.

‘As an organisation we have always taken a strong stance on censorship and freedom of expression on the internet and come out against those who seek to destroy it by any means. ‘We feel that WikiLeaks has become more than just about leaking of documents, it has become a war ground, the people versus the government. ‘The idea is not to wipe them off but to give the companies a wake-up call.’

In a further communique online, Anonymous warned: ‘We will fire at anything or anyone that tries to censor WikiLeaks, including multibillion-dollar companies such as PayPal.’

Time will only be the witness to the chaos whether power will seal the lips of the freedom or people will start questioning the red-tapism of federal government.

Wait n watch.

*WikiLeaks is an international new media non-profit organization that publishes submissions of otherwise unavailable documents from anonymous news sources and leaks. Its website, launched in 2006, is run by The Sunshine Press.

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