wikileaks

WikiLeaks backers threaten more cyber attacks

 Internet activists defied on Thursday efforts to end their online assaults on companies seen as enemies of WikiLeaks, even as one Dutch teenager was arrested in the wave of cyber attacks.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said U.S. authorities are looking into cyber attacks on companies like Amazon.com and others. "We are aware of the incidents," he said.

The 16-year-old boy was arrested by a high-tech crime unit in The Hague after admitting to attacks on the websites of two credit card companies, MasterCard and Visa, the prosecution in the Netherlands said on its website.

The suspect, whose details were not disclosed, was believed to be part of a larger group of hackers under investigation that participated in so-called denial of service attacks, the prosecution said. Data and computer equipment were confiscated during his arrest.

The loosely organized campaign to avenge WikiLeaks against those who have obstructed its operations, calling itself Operation Payback, has already temporarily brought down the websites of credit-card giants Visa and MasterCard, and of the Swedish government.

A succession of U.S. institutions has withdrawn services from WikiLeaks after the website published thousands of sometimes embarrassing secret U.S. diplomatic reports that have caused strains between Washington and several allies.

In Moscow, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange showed the West was hypocritical in its criticism of Russia's record on democracy.

When asked about leaked U.S. diplomatic cables which cast him as Russia's "alpha-dog" ruler of a corrupt bureaucracy, Putin questioned whether the U.S. Foreign Service was a "crystal clean source of information."

WikiLeaks activists instructed their followers on Thursday to mount a distributed denial of service attack on a PayPal website that manages the integration of the company's payment processing technology with independent online merchant websites. Paypal is a subsidiary of eBay.

A PayPal spokesman said the company had detected an attack on the site, http://api.paypal.com, but that it appeared to be operational, although various attempts to access the website by Reuters on Thursday were unsuccessful.

Online retail and web-hosting powerhouse Amazon last week stopped hosting WikiLeaks' website, and on Thursday it briefly became the main target of the pro-WikiLeaks campaigners — before they admitted it was too big for them, for the moment.

"We cannot attack Amazon, currently. The previous schedule was to do so, but we don't have enough forces," read one message on Twitter.

The activists said they would instead attack PayPal, which has suspended the WikiLeaks account that the organization had used to collect donations. MasterCard and Visa had also become targets after stopping processing donations.

At 1:10 p.m. EST (1810 GMT), the websites of PayPal, Amazon — a key Christmas shopping destination — MasterCard and Visa all appeared to be functioning normally.

OPERATION PAYBACK

Facebook said it had removed the activists' Operation Payback page on Thursday because it was promoting a distributed denial of service attack — a form of freezing websites by bombarding them with requests that is illegal in many countries.

The campaign also disappeared briefly from Twitter before reappearing in a different guise. Twitter declined to comment.

In an online letter, Anonymous, a loose-knit group, said its activists were neither vigilantes nor terrorists. It added: "The goal is simple: Win the right to keep the Internet free of any control from any entity, corporation, or government."

Some of the motivation for the cyber campaign appears to stem from anger at the arrest in Britain of Assange over alleged sex crimes committed in Sweden. He is in jail in London, awaiting an extradition hearing.

Assange said last week he had expected clampdowns in countries such as the United States that championed free speech, and had deliberately picked providers like Amazon to host its data to test that theory.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay voiced concern on Thursday at reports of pressure being exerted on private companies to halt financial or Internet services for WikiLeaks.

"The campaign is not over from what I've seen, it's still going strong. More people are joining," a spokesman for the Anonymous group calling himself "Coldblood" told BBC Radio 4. The speaker, who had an English accent, said he was aged 22 and was a software engineer.

"Anonymous has targeted mainly companies which have decided for whatever reason not to deal with WikiLeaks. Some of the main targets involve Amazon, MasterCard, Visa and PayPal."

LIMITED INTERRUPTION

In a statement on Thursday, MasterCard said although there was a limited interruption of some online services, cardholders could continue using cards for transactions worldwide. Its main processing systems were not compromised, the statement said.

The campaigners also claimed responsibility for bringing down Visa Inc's site, which was temporarily unavailable in the United States, but later restored. Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet said the Swedish government's website was down for a short time overnight in the latest apparent attack.

Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, has been hailed as an advocate of free speech by supporters, but now finds himself fighting serious sexual allegations made by two women in Sweden.

Assange will have another court appearance next Tuesday and his supporters assert he is being victimized for his work.

WikiLeaks Revelations
Create Problems
Tensions in the Middle East are increasing as the fallout from the
latest WikiLeaks revelations spreads. Previously reticent Arab
states have been exposed as having discussed strikes on Iran with
the U.S.
Hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. Embassy dispatches and
documents, made public by the whistleblower website WikiLeaks on
Sunday, included transcripts of conversations between Middle Eastern
leaders and U.S. diplomats and military officials.
The documents show the level of concern within the Middle East of
Iran’s nuclear ambitions and, contrary to the public declarations of a
number of Arab states, the apparent willingness to deal with the threat
militarily. …
A particular danger to stability now lies in the perception that Arab
states named in the documents are on the same page as the U.S. and
Israel in regard to policy toward Iran. [Mehrdad Khonsari, senior research
consultant at the Center for Arab and Iranian Studies in London,
said that the Iranians] “know how the Saudis as well as all the other
Arabs feel about them. But the fact that these disclosures have become
public is an embarrassment for the Saudis in their future dealings with
Iran and a reminder to them of what the Iranians have been saying that
you can never trust the Americans.”
However, while Iran may not be shocked into action by the revelations,
factions within Saudi Arabia may be. There is an escalating unease
in the kingdom itself over its allegiance to the United States, and
its willingness to support the U.S. and even join in with any military
action it mounts against Iran.
Outwardly, the Saudis have been telling the United States that under
no circumstances should it bomb Iran, or allow Israel to do so. Riyadh
has publicly told the U.S. that Saudi Arabia and its neighbors would not
support such actions, that U.S. support in the region would evaporate
if it attacked Iran and that Saudi Arabia and its oil-rich allies would not
make up any shortfall of crude production which would follow a U.S.
strike on Iran, opec’s second-highest oil producer behind the Saudis.
The WikiLeaks’ documents appear to contradict these public statements,
a situation that may anger factions within Saudi Arabia. …
[Kristian Ulrichsen, a Middle East expert at the London School of
Economics and Political Science, told Deutsche Welle,] “Iran could use


the revelations to signify that the gloves are now off, and ratchet up its
overt and covert activities, including the presumed existence of sleeper
cells in Saudi Arabia and throughout the gcc which could be activated
to sow political and regional instability.” … A Saudi kingdom in chaos
would be hugely destabilizing to the wider region, not to mention the
world’s oil industry. …