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."

Comments

But why?

[jrothwell97]

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.

Re:But why?

[utnapistim]

I think it was a bad move on the part of whoever did the attack, if their intention was censorship: it only created more publicity for the documents.

Re:But why?

[erroneus]

I think they are simply attacking something they don't understand.

"The internet is a bunch of TUBES!!!"

Re:But why?

[smittyoneeach]

It's just convenient for the people in power to convince the public otherwise.

Suspending disbelief momentarily, pending legal review, I have this question:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Are you really sure about the document's scope?
I suppose if you mean the physical territory of these United States, then anyone standing within the borders could be seen as "People of the United States".
Too, WRT Guantanamo Bay, the fact that the detainees are not in CONUS may be seen as keeping them out of legal theory range.
Not here to shill for anybody: it's a debate that reasonable people can chew on for a while.

To those behind the attacks...

[Loibisch]

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.

Re:To those behind the attacks...

[petermgreen]

the /. effect is WAY overrated, if you are suffering from it you either have big file downloads, really shitty hosting (think home DSL/cable or similar) or a badly designed dynamic site (this last one is probablly the most common).

Re:To those behind the attacks...

[TheThiefMaster]

After all, "The Slashdot Effect" can't be more than what Slashdot itself feels, and it survives fine. It's even dynamic.

Still, Slashdot has been designed to handle this much load. Those poor webservers that feel "The Effect" have probably been running perfectly fine at a lower use for years until someone uses them to announce a breakthrough of some sort with images and video and, shortly afterwards they burn out.

Though you missed the 4th possibility: The webserver is a Commodore 64. We only linked to that one once :(

Must be doing someting right...

[TripMaster Monkey]

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.

Winner: Counter-productive move of the year

[MosesJones]

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.

Re:Winner: Counter-productive move of the year

[TripMaster Monkey]

Could the people leaked about on WikiLeaks really be this dumb?

Fortunately, yes, they can, and it seems they are. Not 'dumb' per se, mind you, but operating without any idea of how things work in this day and age, when any information that finds its way onto the Internet is effectively immortal, and any attempts to suppress that information only succeed in calling even more attention to it.

There's no way to silence the truth directly anymore in this new medium. Indirect methods, however, like repeating a lie loudly and often enough, can still be effective.

Re:Winner: Counter-productive move of the year

[mOdQuArK!]

There's no way to silence the truth directly anymore in this new medium. Indirect methods, however, like repeating a lie loudly and often enough, can still be effective.

Actually, the simplest way to "silence: the truth is to drown it in misinformation (one of the applications of the indirect methods you referred to). Once nobody can tell what the truth is, and what the lies are, then someone trying to hide the truth can breath a little easier.

Modern-day PR hacks are really good at this kind of thing, Third World repressive regimes are still learning how to do it effectively.

Doesn't necessarily have to be big business/ gov't

[usul294]

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.

Re:This is What Freenet Was Made For

[Corwn of Amber]

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".

Missing something

[griffjon]

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?

Re:Doesn't necessarily have to be big business/ go

[Lehk228]

By "psychological operations" you mean "operations by lunatics" amiright?

WikiLeaks.org at IP#: 88.80.13.160

[Doc Ruby]

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.

Re:Privacy for all or nothing

[Grym]

For this reason, if you want truth, and are that interested in the truth, then you should advocate the full public disclosure of all corporate, charitable and government documents. Since this covers just about everyone, it follows that there should be no privacy at all and we ought to live in a world where everything is online.

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.

The alternative is to accept that there is a right to privacy, and if so, then institutions such as wikileaks ought to be viewed with a well deserved deep distrust, as the outcome can only be ultimately political.

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

Re:Privacy for all or nothing

[Chyeld]

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.