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Secret Plan To Kill Wikileaks With FUD Leaked

Posted by samzenpus on from the cyber-plumbers dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Three information security consultancies with links to US spy agencies cooked up a dirty tricks campaign late last year to destroy Wikileaks by exploiting its perceived weaknesses, reads a presentation released by the whistleblowers' (pdf) organization that it claimed to be from the conspirators. Consultants at US defense contractors Palantir Technologies, Berico Technologies and HBGary proposed to lawyers for a desperate Bank of America an alliance that would work to discredit the whistleblowers' website using a divide and conquer approach. Since the plan was hatched, disgruntled volunteers mentioned in the PDF broke away from Wikileaks, financial institutions withdrew services, [Jacob ] Appelbaum was harassed by the US government, and Amazon denied service to Wikileaks' website."

3 of 246 comments (clear)

  1. You misunderstood. by bigtallmofo · · Score: 5, Informative
    You're right that Aaron Barr was hoping to profit from this, but he didn't write the quote you attributed to him. His coder wrote that, making fun of him because he thought of no way to profit from the dumb information that Aaron was making his coder collect. What is written before the quote you provided is:

    His programmer had doubts, saying that the scraping and linking work he was doing was of limited value and had no commercial prospects. As he wrote in an e-mail:

    --
    I'm a big tall mofo.
  2. December 3rd? by kevinNCSU · · Score: 5, Informative

    The plan was pitched to Bank of America on the 3rd. Amazon and EveryDNS already had withdrawn services so I think it's a stretch to try to insinuate that Paypal doing the same on the 4th is somehow related to a proposal submitted to a separate financial institution on the 3rd. It's also not entirely surprising that people pointed out to be weak links and ready to leave Wikileaks turned out to be weak leaks and decided to leave Wikileaks. This sounds like a case of some defense companies ever looking to scrape up some profits pointing out the blindingly obvious and now when a couple of the obvious things happen on their own people trying to attribute it to a successful implementation of said plot.

  3. Spurious relationship - chronology by tmk · · Score: 5, Informative

    Since the plan was hatched, disgruntled volunteers mentioned in the PDF broke away from Wikileaks, financial institutions withdrew services, Apelbaum was harassed by the US Government and Amazon denied service to Wikileaks' website."

    It's always nice to have a good conspiracy - but chronology is a bitch. Even before the plan was hatched, Paypal has canceled Wikileaks accounts twice, disgruntled volunteers were gruntling very publicly, Wikileaks had to change providers several times and Julian Assange reported harrassment from every government he had to deal with.