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Secret Plan To Kill Wikileaks With FUD Leaked
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."
http://www.thetechherald.com/article.php/201106/6798/Data-intelligence-firms-proposed-a-systematic-attack-against-WikiLeaks
Can't say I'm surprised but the tactics and manipulation they discuss but I find it outrageous all the same.
However, the fact that they felt the need to present such a teach-yourself-how-to-destroy-wikileaks-in-21-days presentation in such a dumb manner is somewhat encouraging.
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
Small problem, for anyone but a idiot :
Wikileaks likely has more credibly than any lawmaker , politician or US based news agency or anything the government might say.or write
It's seems that ways of countering access to information are on the minds of many.
We certainly heard a few things about the significance of and attempts to control the flow in Egypt. We don't hear so much about Cuba. It got my attention when someone posted that the events in Egypt weren't getting covered there.
http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/national_world/stories/2011/02/07/u-s-attacking-cuba-through-wi-fi-hot-spots.html
(translated text of video)
http://translatingcuba.com/?p=7111#more-7111
(the video, in Spanish)
http://vimeo.com/19402730
If this document is genuine, this company "Palantir" has suggested and supports activities that are not only criminal in Europa but also in the US. We're talking about libel and slander, "cyber-terrorist" attacks on foreign it business and infrastructure (servers hosted in Sweden, France), and so on.
I don't know whether the document itself gives enough grounds for a lawsuits, probably not, but if these guys do anything of what they suggest or even aid in it, and it can be traced back to them, I feel a lawsuit coming in 3...2...1...
By the way, how are the investigations of the DoS attacks against Wikileaks server going? Any news on that?
It was obvious what to do. It was not that obvious that this was being implemented.
It is nice to sometime have a reminder that there ARE conspiracies happening out there. Not all of them are crackpot theories.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.