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Pro-WikiLeaks cyber army gains strength; thousands join DDoS attacks
Volunteers download attack tool, organizers recruit hacker botnets, say researchers
Gregg Keizer, ComputerWorld
The retaliatory attacks by pro-WikiLeaks activists are growing in strength as hackers add botnets and thousands of people download an open-source attack tool, security researchers said today.
… Most of those participating in the attacks are using the LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Cannon) DDoS tool, said researchers with Imperva and Sophos.
The open-source tool, which is sometimes classified as a legitimate network- and firewall-stress testing utility, is being downloaded at the rate of about 1,000 copies per hour, said Tal Be’ery, the Web research team lead at Imperva’s Application Defense Center.
(9 December 2010)
Why WikiLeaks Is Winning Its Info War
Massimo Calabresi, TIME Magazine
There was a time when WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s voluntary surrender to the British authorities might have put an end to the crisis created by the Internet provocateur’s dissemination of tens of thousands of state secrets. But in the upside-down world of transnational crowdsourcing unleashed by WikiLeaks, in which thousands of activists around the globe can be rallied to defend and extend its work, Assange’s arrest is a win, not a loss, for his organization.
The asymmetrical info war initiated by the WikiLeaks dump of diplomatic cables is all about spectacle — the more Assange is set up by world powers, the more powerful his own movement becomes. “The field of battle is WikiLeaks,” wrote John Perry Barlow, a former Grateful Dead lyricist and founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the First Amendment advocacy group, in a message to his followers. “You are the troops.” WikiLeaks admiringly forwarded the post to 300,000 of its own followers. As the U.S. and other governments attempted to close down WikiLeaks over the past week, those “troops” have fought back. And so far, it doesn’t look like much of a contest.
(8 December 2010)
Analysts: WikiLeaks Following New Strategy in Document Release
Gary Thomas, Voice of America
… Only a fraction of the reported 250,000 documents in the organization’s possession has been released and published – less than one percent. In an online session last week on the website of the Guardian , a British newspaper that is collaborating with the group,WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said that his website posts documents after they have first been published by what he called “mainstream media partners.”
Former Washington Post managing editor Phil Bennett, who now teaches journalism at Duke University, says Assange is parceling the documents out because he was dissatisfied that stories about the previous documents fell from public attention relatively quickly.
“He was unhappy about the way those stayed in the news and wanted ‘more bang for the buck’ [more attention over a longer period of time],” said Bennett. “And I think there’s no doubt that they’re parceling out the information in a way to keep the story alive and sustain interest in it.”
This piecemeal release of classified cables has troubled U.S. officials.
Former CIA deputy director John McLaughlin says officials do not like surprises, and they are getting new ones every day.
(9 December 2010)
The 24-hour Athenian democracy (talking to “Anonymous”)
Babbage, The Economist (UK)
… I am talking to members of a group called “Anonymous”, using a web-based collaborative text-editing service. It is the first such interview for all of us, and their answers begin to collide on the page. One member comes from Norway; another shows surprise, then offers that she is from New Zealand. Another writes that group members come from Nepal and Eastern Russia. They all speak through pseudonyms, but I don’t even know which psuedonym comes from what country because shortly after I read these answers, someone who calls himself “Tux” erases them all and writes
We are Everywhere. We are everyone. We are Anonymous.
Members of Anonymous, whoever they are, have in the last week taken offline websites run by Postfinance, a Swiss bank that closed the account of Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks; PayPal, an online payments processor that halted donations to WikiLeaks; and the Swedish prosecutor who has brought a case against Mr Assange. As I followed some “anons” over internet relay chat (IRC) on Tuesday, they voted among themselves not to attack the “UK metro police”. I’m not sure which website they were referring to.
… Anonymous is not WikiLeaks, and the more famous whistle-blower does not seem to be pulling the strings. Nor, in fact, does anyone. At any point, anybody can show up in one of several IRC conversations and make a case for a target. Whoever else is there registers a vote, or an argument. During the attack on Mr Lieberman’s site, anons argued that America’s .gov domains would be difficult to take offline, and therefore were not a worthwhile target. One anon pointed out that the Senator does not do business through his website. One wrote, simply, that the site was down in Germany, and that they were all going to jail.
But there is order, of a sort, within Anonymous. Anons, though they know each other only by their pseudonyms, develop trust over time through constant participation in the organising chats.
(8 December 2010)
Twelve Theses on Wikileaks
Geert Lovink and Patrice Riemens, Le Monde Diplomatique
These 1.
…. When Wikileaks hit the mainstream early in 2010, this was not yet the case. In a sense, the ’colossal’ Wikileaks disclosures can simply be explained as a consequence of the dramatic spread of IT usage, together with a dramatic drop in its costs, including those for the storage of millions of documents. Another contributing factor is the fact that safekeeping state and corporate secrets – never mind private ones – has become rather difficult in an age of instant reproducibility and dissemination. Wikileaks here becomes symbolic for a transformation in the ’information society’ at large, and holds up a mirror of future things to come. So while one can look at Wikileaks as a (political) project, and criticize it for its modus operandi, or for other reasons, it can also be seen as a ’pilot’ phase in an evolution towards a far more generalized culture of anarchic exposure, beyond the traditional politics of openness and transparency.
These 2.
For better or for worse, Wikileaks has skyrocketed itself into the realm of high-level international politics. Out of the blue, Wikileaks has become a full-blown player both on the world scene, as well as in the national sphere of some countries. By virtue of its disclosures, Wikileaks, small player as it is, appears to carry the same weight as government or big corporations (its next target) – in the domain of information gathering and publicizing at least. But at same time it is unclear whether this is a permanent feature or a hype-induced temporary phenomenon – Wikileaks appears to believe the former, and that looks like to be more and more the case. Nonetheless Wikileaks, by word of its best-known representative Julian Assange, think that, as a puny non-state and non-corporate actor, it is boxing in the same weight-class as the U.S. government – and starts to behave accordingly. …
These 5.
The steady decline of investigative journalism due to diminishing support and funding is an undeniable fact. Journalism these days amounts to little more than outsourced PR remixers. The ever-ongoing acceleration and over-crowding in the so-called attention economy ensures there is no longer enough room for complicated stories. The corporate owners of mass circulation media are also less and less inclined to see the working of the neo-liberal globalized economy and its politics detailed and discussed at length. The shift of information towards infotainment demanded by the public and media-owners alike has unfortunately also been embraced as a working style by journalists themselves, thus making it difficult to publish complex stories. Wikileaks erupts in this state of affairs as an outsider within the steamy ambiance of ’citizen journalism’ and DIY news reporting in the blogosphere and even faster social media like Twitter. What Wikileaks anticipates, but so far has not been able to organize, is the ’crowd sourcing’ of the actual interpretation of its leaked documents. That work, very oddly, is left up to the few remaining on-staff journalists in select Œquality¹ news media. …
These 7.
… Wikileaks is also an organization deeply shaped by 1980s hacker culture combined with the political values of techno-libertarianism that emerged in the 1990s. The fact that Wikileaks has been founded, and is still to a large extent run, by hard-core geeks, forms an essential frame of reference to understand its values and moves. This, unfortunately, comes together with a good dose of the somewhat less savoury aspects of hacker culture. Not that idealism, the desire to contribute to making the world a better place, could be denied to Wikileaks, quite on the contrary.
These 8.
Lack of commonality with congenial ’another world is possible’ movements drives Wikileaks to seek public attention by way of increasingly spectacular – and risky – disclosures, thereby gathering a constituency of often wildly enthusiastic, but usually passive supporters. Assange himself has stated that Wikileaks was resolutely moving away from the ’egocentric’ blogosphere and assorted social media and nowadays only collaborates with professional journalists and human rights activists. Yet following the nature and quantity of Wikileaks exposures from its inception up to the present day is eerily reminiscent of watching a firework display, and that includes a ’grand finale’ in the form of the doomsday-machine pitched, waiting-to-be-unleashed, ’Insurance’ document (³.aes256²). This raises serious doubts about the long-term sustainability of Wikileaks itself, but possibly also, that of the Wikileaks model. Wikileaks operates on a ridiculously small size – probably no more than a dozen of people form the core of its operation. While the extent and savviness of Wikileaks’ tech support is proved by its very existence, Wikileaks’ claim to several hundreds, or even more, volunteer analysts and experts is unverifiable, and to be frank, barely credible. This is clearly Wikileaks Achilles’ heel, not only from a risk and/or sustainability standpoint, but politically as well – which is what matters to us here. …
These 11.
… What is being overlooked in this call for a proliferation of Wikileaks is the amount of specialised expert knowledge required to run a leak site successfully. Where is the ABC tool-kit of Wikileaks? There is, perhaps paradoxically, a lot of secrecy involved in this type of making-things-public. This is why simply downloading a Wikileaks software kit and get going is not a realistic option. Wikileaks is not a plug ’n’ play blog application like WordPress, and the word ’Wiki’ in its name is really misleading, as Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales is at pains to stress. Contrary to the collaboration philosophy of Wikipedia, Wikileaks is a closed shop run with the help of an unknown number of faceless volunteers. One is forced to acknowledge that the ’how-to’ expertise to run a facility like Wikileaks is pretty arcane. Documents not only need to be received anonymously but also need to be further anonymized before they are released online. And they also need to be ’edited’ before being dispatched to the servers of international news organizations and trusted, influential ’papers of record’.
Wikileaks has built up a lot of trust and confidence over the years. Newcomers will need to go through that same, time-consuming process. The principle of Wikileaks is precisely not to ’hack’ (into state or corporate networks) but to facilitate insiders based in these large organisations to copy sensitive, confidential data and pass it on to the public domain – while remaining anonymous. …
These 12.
We do not think that taking a stand in favour or against Wikileaks is what matters most. Wikileaks is there, and is there to stay till it either scuttles itself or is destroyed by the forces opposing its operation. Our point is rather to (try to) pragmatically assess and ascertain what Wikileaks can, could – and maybe even, who knows, should – do, and help formulate how ’we’ could relate to and interact with Wikileaks. Despite all its drawbacks, and against all odds, Wikileaks has rendered a sterling service to the cause of transparency, democracy and openness. We might wish it to be different, but, as the French would say, if something like it did not exist, it would have to be invented.
Geert Lovink is founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures, author of Zero Comments — Blogging and Critical Internet Culture (Routledge, 2007). Patrice Riemens is a social geographer, advocate of free and open source sorftware and member of the Dutch hackers club ’Hippies from Hell’.
(9 December 2010)
James Fallow of the Atlantic likes this post. Also at ZNet
-BA
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