Slashdot Mirror
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."
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
Mahatma Gandhi
Looks like were at part 3 now.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
It would appear that a variety of groups, representing a de-facto merger of state and corporate power, are allied to destroy you.
On a scale from "1" to "highly ironic" how would you describe this confirmation of your assertion that the "representative" goverments actually pend a lot of time doing dirty deeds in the shadows?
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.
The sudden appearance of rape charges, schisms and turmoil within the organization, etc. were pretty obviously concerted efforts to discredit the organization and Assange. Didn't take a genius to see it all coming after his big leaks started, or to know who was behind it. I knew a discrediting campaign was coming down back before Assange even met his "rape victims" or faced a schism.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Talk about a role-reversal...the discreditors become the discredited. Alas, this is a great blow to the future of the Wikileaks conversation. Now all critics legitimate and otherwise can be lumped together as part of a coordinated effort against Wikileaks. It's now easier than ever to accuse someone who demands more self-scrutiny from WL and its supporters as a "shill" or "operative". And this time we have these 3 companies to blame.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
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.
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.
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.
I'll say it again.
If US intelligence agencies and their actions, security, political connections and control of information are *REALLY* this bad, the US has a much bigger problem than a website.
If this is how a genuine intelligence agency acts and gets caught doing so by the equivalent of a back-bedroom UFO hunter, then the first ever *real* cyberwar will see them wiped off the planet.
The UK, in the middle of a war, infiltrated by spies, managed to capture, analyse, decrypt, monitor and intercept German communications for YEARS, to the extent that they could literally direct the enemy to move their defences to cover false "threats" while watching them do that. And most of exactly what happened took 50+ years to come out and we still don't know *all* of it.
The US, in peacetime (so no major distractions, counter-incentive, etc.), can't stop their own soldiers putting documents into the public domain, with HUGE fanfare, then "rubber-stamp" those documents as official by "hunting down" a civilian not really related to the leak, when the guy handed himself into a police station in an allied country and told the newspapers about it. If the US "anti-cyber-warfare" campaign is anywhere near as ineffective, you better hope nobody tech-savvy *bothers* to go to war with the US.
Wait a minute. Isn't Wikileaks reporting a leaked report that there was a conspiracy against them a little bit like saying God exists, because the Bible says so?
unlike journalism in the US and well known US propaganda, wikileaks actually validates information before they put it up.
Credibility with who? College Sophomore, standing at a lit table in the Student Center? Certainly!
Anybody else? Possibly.
Credibility with major newspapers across the world, who (re)publish content from wikileaks, and their readership.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Obvious to some perhaps, but an absurd conspiracy theory to others. However, these documents provide hard evidence of mafia-like activities by corporations.
The documents are the definitive proof that private companies engage in the shadiest and most scurrilous of activities in an effort to further their own goals. It is the definitive proof that even in our age, private interests abuse their privileges and powers. The proof that a corporate underworld exists, that it attacks and abuses citizens, and that the law does not protect us from it.
Our society is based on several things, among them free speech and the rule of law. If private companies actively undermine these principles in the ways that this document proves, then why should we tolerate their continued state of existence?
There are those who say that we should not tolerate communists or islamists because they actively seek to undermine our way of life. I wonder where those people are right now?
May the Maths Be with you!