What WikiLeaks shows us about the Net
Just as there are “patriotic” hackers trying to take down WikiLeaks, there are many anti-establishment hackers fighting back. One of them, a grouping called “Anonymous” has called on supporters to attack the sites of companies like PayPal for cutting off WikiLeaks. The group has even disseminated a seven-point manifesto on Twitter, pledging to “kick back for Julian.”
Oon Yeoh, The Sun Daily
THE sensational WikiLeaks saga offers many lessons. After the publication of just a fraction of the 250,000 secret US documents, it’s very clear that the US government has to rethink its strategy of information sharing.
The source of the leaks seems to be a US Army officer, one of about a million people with the security clearance to access such information. The reason so many people have access to such documents has to do with the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
The US government decided that information sharing was important and made the diplomatic cables accessible to a wide range of government personnel. It’s now obvious that providing greater access has its drawbacks. New controls and clearance policies have to be drawn up.
It’s widely assumed that it’s impossible to suppress information on the Internet. The WikiLeaks saga is testing this premise to the max.
Shortly after the publication of some of the documents, the WikiLeaks website experienced a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks where its servers were hit with multiple simultaneous requests for information, causing it to crash. This is widely to be the work of a group of “patriotic” hackers who disagree with what WikiLeaks is doing.
In response, WikiLeaks moved to back-up servers provided by Amazon whose cloud computing service allows companies to rent servers. Amazon’s servers were able to resist the DDoS attacks but the company decided to cut off WikiLeaks citing a violation of its terms of service.
No matter, WikiLeaks moved its servers elsewhere and the site was up again. But not for long. The company that hosted WikiLeaks’ Domain Name Service – everyDNS.com – decided to cut off WikiLeaks citing concerns that the attacks on its servers would affect other customers.
The DNS is what translates a domain name into a number that represents a server on the Internet. Without it, a website won’t show up when someone types in its address.
Wikileaks.org went down but soon enough a new one with a new name (wikileaks.ch) emerged. So have hundreds of mirror sites with different domain names. So, the information is out there, just a little harder to find.
That’s not the end to WikiLeaks’ troubles. To sustain itself it relies on donations. The payment gateway was provided by PayPal which also decided to cut off WikiLeaks due to violation of its terms of service.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is now accepting direct donations into a Swiss bank account held with the financial arm of the Swiss postal service. It’s not clear how long that will last though; a spokesman for the financial arm of Swiss Post, Marc Andrey, has said it was “reviewing” its relationship with Assange subject to proof that he has Swiss residency, owns property or does business in the country.
For sure, this cat and mouse game will go on. “Cut us down,” said a message on the WikiLeaks’ Twitter page, “and the stronger we become.”
Just as there are “patriotic” hackers trying to take down WikiLeaks, there are many anti-establishment hackers fighting back. One of them, a grouping called “Anonymous” has called on supporters to attack the sites of companies like PayPal for cutting off WikiLeaks. The group has even disseminated a seven-point manifesto on Twitter, pledging to “kick back for Julian.”
The New Yorker’s recent feature article on Assange said that “a government or company that wanted to remove content from WikiLeaks would have to practically dismantle the Internet itself.”
That’s probably not an exaggeration. As Washington Post’s tech columnist Rob Pegoraro pointed out, even if you could get every single web-hosting company and domain name registrar in the world to refuse to do business with WikiLeaks, the group could still release the documents through BitTorrent and other file sharing services.
“The Internet can do a lot of things, but making information disappear is not among them,” he says. I’m sure somewhere in England, Raja Petra Kamarudin is smiling.
