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WikiLeaks Under Fire
kan0r writes "The transparency group WikiLeaks.org currently seems to be under heavy fire. The main WikiLeaks.org DNS entry is unavailable, reportedly due to a restraining order relating to a series of articles and documents released by WikiLeaks about off-shore trust structures in the Cayman Islands. The WikiLeaks whistle blower, allegedly former vice president of the Cayman Islands branch of swiss bank Julius Baer, states in the WikiLeaks documents that the bank supported tax evasion and money laundering by its clients from around the world. WikiLeaks alternate names remained available until Saturday, when there seems to have been a heavy DDoS attack and a fire at the ISP. The documents in question are still available on other WikiLeaks sites, such as wikileaks.be, and are also mirrored on Cryptome. Details of the court documents have also been made available."
Wikileaks is an interesting website, and I can see no reason why anyone would want to take a site hosting confidential leaked documents from governments and big business offline...
Speaking seriously here, I wouldn't doubt it being a corporate or political DDoS attack, considering the confidentiality of the documents, and how damaging they could be to said companies/governments' reputations. Not a bad thing in my opinion, but they would think otherwise.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
To those behind the attacks: It's too late!
Remember: What's once on the internet stays on the internet...one way or another.
Just deal with it.
When you're slapped with a restraining order, you get hit with a dDOS, and one of your UPS units "accidentally" ignites , you know you must be doing something right.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Could the people leaked about on WikiLeaks really be this dumb? Is there anything that will guarantee that this information will be more broadly distributed and read and more likely to come to the attention of the main stream media?
Why don't they just go the whole hog and DDoS the BBC and CNN at the same time to close the loop.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
You know it could always be some 14 year old prankster who figured out how to DDOS a server, and correctly thought "Hey, if I can effectively shut off WikiLeaks, everyone will assume that groups which suffer from WikiLeaks were responsible." I mean it takes alot of brains to maintain a big business, I doubt the CTO or CIO of a giant firm suggested DDOSing a fairly well-known website in order to prevent access to content.
Yeah, but there are problems with FreeNet :
1/ It's slow
2/ No one uses it
3/ No one uses it because it's so slow
4/ It's so slow because no one uses it
5/ It's not preinstalled on all computers
6/ Its installation is as much jumping through hoops as a first use of Windows Vista
So yeah, backups on FreeNet is a good idea, but hosting the main site? Not if they want to be acessed sometimes.
I'd rather d/l the full archive off The Pirate Bay or Mininova, though. A lifetime of reading about "why all the systems should all be completely transparent to any one in the general public".
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
Offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands are used for tax fraud???? I thought they were there for decoration. Seriously; I was under the opinion that their reputation along these lines was well-established?
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
By "psychological operations" you mean "operations by lunatics" amiright?
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
The exact same argument goes for piracy as well. You can have one of 2 things : privacy or piracy. Privacy OR thepiratebay.org.
Just killing the privacy of "the rich" (like e.g. the riaa currently is) will unfortunately cause the elimination of everyone's privacy (and this is not "Bush's fault", not even China's, and not anyone's, it's a somewhat-less-obvious truth of the world we live in, like gravity is). Enforcing everyone's privacy rights, including the right of "the rich" to keep their ideas limited to whoever they choose (and profit by that mechanism), will indeed protect everyone's privacy, but obviously will enforce copyright to a rather extreme degree.
(and the same thing goes for "racism", either you allow racism, and it's consequences, or you disallow it, including any racist ideologies (like islam and communism), you can't have it both ways, muslims or tolerance, choose ONE)
You can't mount a decent psychological or intelligence-based warfare against an enemy if you publish what you're going to do every step of the way. I'm not trying to advocate censorship here but I'd love to hear a *serious* answer as to how you expect any country to mount this sort of effort under the limitations of full disclosure.
Some specific points I'd like to discuss:
- What is the point of publishing Coalition "soft spots" to the public? Aren't you just begging for terrorists to attack them? It makes perfect sense to publish this to a limited group of trusted people that can fix the problem but not to the general public. Again, I understand there are times where publishing this information might be appropriate, but for the vast majority of the time it is not.
- What is the point of publishing real-time army positions and schedules to the public? Is anyone benefiting from this except from the terrorists?
etc.
My point is that Wikileaks or others have published certain information in the past that has absolutely no benefit to anyone except the very people trying to kill our troops. It's one thing to publish information which embarrasses governments or big companies, it's another thing altogether to publish information whose sole use is the killing of our people.
This court order has blocked the Wikileaks.org DNS. But the site is still up and running at its IP number, which is 88.80.13.160 .
Spread the word. DNS can be replaced, with some inconvenience, with manual labor.
--
make install -not war
I think this is a false choice. Why should we be forced to choose between a complete lack of transparency within government-chartered and/or publicly-traded organizations and no privacy--for anyone--at all?
There can be a reasonable balance between transparency and privacy. Trade secrets, proprietary processes, and national secrets, I agree, should be undisclosed, but should things like financial records, safety/environmental studies, and so on should be publicly available. If businesses don't like that, then they could easily remain private, un-incorporated entities.
Well, of course wikileaks can be used as a political tool. But if that leads to the exposure of corruption and fraud--who cares?!? I would expect that, over time, organizations like wikileaks, even if they are biased, would come to compete in exposing dirt from opposing sides. In fact, I see no reason why anyone should be against such a situation, because all true capitalists love competition (right?) and everyone wants to end corruption and fraud (right?). So what's the problem?
-Grym
I have, for a long time, advocated the idea that if the concept of privacy was done away with, a good deal of the angst in the world could be done away with. It's a permutation of the 80/20 rule. 80% of what everyone fears anyone else could ever learn about them is dreck they share with the majority. And the remaining 20% would be far less shameful when it comes to light that everyone has their own personal 20% to deal with.
All of the power of shame is based in the belief that somehow, you are the only one. And most of the power of secrets is based in the idea that you have more power derived from them the fewer in the loop.
However, you present a false dichotomy. You make a fair representation for legal entities to have no right to privacy, but then make the spurious leap that it would then follow that no one should have privacy. Regardless of my agreement of that view, there are numerous shades of grey between a corporation/government group and an individual.