WikiLeaks : History & Current Events aggregate thread

[Epsilon]

WIRED reports :

By Kim Zetter  July 30, 2010 | 3:09 pm

In the wake of strong U.S. government statements condemning WikiLeaks' recent publishing of 77,000 Afghan War documents, the secret-spilling site has posted a mysterious encrypted file labeled “insurance.”

The huge file, posted on the Afghan War page at the WikiLeaks site, is 1.4 GB and is encrypted with AES256. The file's size dwarfs the size of all the other files on the page combined. The file has also been posted on a torrent download site.

WikiLeaks, on Sunday, posted several files containing the 77,000 Afghan war documents in a single “dump” file and in several other files containing versions of the documents in various searchable formats.

Cryptome, a separate secret-spilling site, has speculated that the new file added days later may have been posted as insurance in case something happens to the WikiLeaks website or to the organization's founder, Julian Assange. In either scenario, WikiLeaks volunteers, under a prearranged agreement with Assange, could send out a password or passphrase to allow anyone who has downloaded the file to open it.

It's not known what the file contains but it could include the balance of data that U.S. Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning claimed to have leaked to Assange before he was arrested in May.

In chats with former hacker Adrian Lamo, Manning disclosed that he had provided Assange with a different war log cache than the one that WikiLeaks already published. This one was said to contain 500,000 events from the Iraq War between 2004 and 2009. WikiLeaks has never commented on whether it received that cache.

Additionally, Manning said he sent Assange video showing a deadly 2009 U.S. firefight near the Garani village in Afghanistan that local authorities say killed 100 civilians, most of them children, as well as 260,000 U.S. State Department cables.

Manning never mentioned leaking the Afghan War log to WikiLeaks in his chats with Lamo, but Defense Department officials told The Wall Street Journal that investigators had found evidence on Manning's Army computer that tied him to that leak.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen strongly condemned WikiLeaks' publication of the Afghan War log at a Pentagon press briefing on Thursday.

Gates said the leak was “potentially severe and dangerous for our troops, our allies and our Afghan partners” and said that “tactics, techniques and procedures will become known to our adversaries” as a result.

Mullen was even more direct and said that WikiLeaks “might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier” or an Afghan informant who aided the United States.

Several media outlets have found the names of Afghan informants in the documents WikiLeaks published, as well as information identifying their location in some instances. A Taliban spokesman told Britain's Channel 4 news that the group was sifting through the WikiLeaks documents to get the names of suspected informants and would punish anyone found to have collaborated with the United States and its allies.

Wired.com has sent a message to WikiLeaks inquiring about the file.

[Epsilon]

WIRED reports :

Pentagon Demands WikiLeaks ‘Return' All Classified Documents

By Kevin Poulsen  August 5, 2010 | 8:44 pm

A Pentagon spokesman on Thursday demanded that the secret-spilling website WikiLeaks return and delete all the classified Defense Department documents in its possession, and stop soliciting new ones.

“The Defense Department demands that WikiLeaks return immediately to the U.S. government all versions of documents obtained directly or indirectly from the Department of Defense databases or records,” said spokesman Geoff Morrell, opening the Pentagon's daily press briefing.

“WikiLeaks's public disclosure last week of a large number of our documents has already threatened the safety of our troops, our allies and Afghan citizens who are working with us to help bring about peace and stability in that part of the world,” said Morrell. “Public disclosure of additional Defense Department classified information can only make the damage worse.

“The only acceptable course is for WikiLeaks to take steps immediately to return all versions of all of these documents to the U.S. government and permanently delete them from its website, computers and records.”

Wikileaks responded on Twitter by calling Morrell “obnoxious,” followed by a second tweet urging WikiLeaks supporters to donate to the organization. “Now is a good time to send WikiLeaks all your money!”

The statements ratchet up the tension between the U.S. government and WikiLeaks, which began in earnest with the May arrest of 22-year-old Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning. Manning has been charged with leaking classified information, including video of a deadly 2007 Army helicopter attack in Iraq that claimed the lives of a number of civilians. WikiLeaks had released that video under the title “Collateral Murder” in April 2010.

On July 25, WikiLeaks angered U.S. officials at the highest levels with it published a detailed and mostly-classified log of 77,000 events in the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan from 2004 through 2009. The database, according to both the Pentagon and WikiLeaks, originated from the Defense Department's Secret-level wide area network SIPRnet. Manning remains a “person of interest” in the leak, Morrell said Thursday.

Since the Afghan war logs were published, it's emerged the records contain the names of some Afghan informants, who are now face potentially deadly reprisal from the Taliban, according to the Pentagon. In the wake of that discovery, WikiLeaks told the news website The Daily Beast that it was seeking the Pentagon's help in screening a final 15,000 records from the same database before publishing them in a redacted form.

Morrell disputed that claim Thursday. “Wikileaks has made no such request directly to the Department of Defense,” he said.

Morrell also slammed WikiLeaks' for a statement near the top of its submission page that claims submitting material to WikiLeaks is “protected by law.” Morrell called it a “brazen solicitation to U.S. government officials, including our military, to break the law” and said it was “materially false and misleading.”

“The Department of Defense therefore also demands that WikiLeaks discontinue any solicitation of this type,” he said.

WikiLeaks' claim of legal protection is explained further down on its submission page as referring to legal protections in Sweden and Belgium, through which the sites' electronic submissions are routed.

Asked if the Pentagon had any authority to act if WikiLeaks ignored its demands, Morrell responded “We will cross the next bridge when we come to it. … If doing the right thing isn't good enough for them, we will figure out what alternatives we have to compel them to do the right thing.”

There may be more at stake for the U.S. government than the Afghan war logs.

Bradley Manning's arrest came after he was turned in by an ex-hacker with whom he'd struck up an online friendship. In his chats with former hacker Adrian Lamo, Manning described leaking a database of 260,000 State Department diplomatic cables, and a classified Army event log from the war in Iraq covering 500,000 events from 2004 through 2009. WikiLeaks hasn't published those purported leaks, and has denied receiving the diplomatic cables.

On Saturday, WikiLeaks published without comment a 1.4GB encrypted file named “insurance.” The file is more than 19 times the size of the Afghan war log.

In his chats, Manning did not mention leaking information from the war in Afghanistan.

Manning faces up to 52 years in prison under the current charges against him. Earlier this week, Republican congressman Mike Rogers of Michigan made news by arguing that Manning should be charged with treason and face the death penalty instead — an argument that is not supported by U.S. law. Supporters of Manning plan a rally at Quantico on Sunday.

[Epsilon]

WIRED reports :

By Kevin Poulsen  August 13, 2010  | 7:25 pm

Should the U.S. government declare a cyberwar against WikiLeaks?

On Thursday, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told a gathering in London that the secret-spilling website is moving ahead with plans to publish the remaining 15,000 records from the Afghan war logs, despite a demand from the Pentagon that WikiLeaks “return” it's entire cache of published and unpublished classified U.S. documents.

Last month, WikiLeaks released 77,000 documents out of 92,000, temporarily holding back 15,000 records at the urging of newspapers that had been provided an advance copy of the entire database. On Thursday, Assange said his organization has now gone through about half of the remaining records, redacting the names of Afghan informants. That suggests the final release could still be weeks away.

Pundits, though, are clamoring for preemptive action. “The United States has the cyber capabilities to prevent WikiLeaks from disseminating those materials,” wrote Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen on Friday. “Will President Obama order the military to deploy those capabilities? … If Assange remains free and the documents he possesses are released, Obama will have no one to blame but himself.”

But a previous U.S.-based effort to wipe WikiLeaks off the internet did not go well. In 2008, federal judge Jeffrey White in San Francisco ordered the WikiLeaks.org domain name seized as part of a lawsuit filed by Julius Baer Bank and Trust, a Swiss bank that suffered a leak of some of its internal documents. Two weeks later the judge admitted he'd acted hastily, and he had the site restored. “There are serious questions of prior restraint, possible violations of the First Amendment,” he said.

Even while the order was in effect, WikiLeaks lived on: supporters and free speech advocates distributed the internet IP address of the site, so it could be reached directly. Mirrors of the site were unaffected by the court order, and a copy of the entire WikiLeaks archive of leaked documents circulated freely on the Pirate Bay.

The U.S. government has other, less legal, options, of course — the “cyber” capabilities Thiessen alludes to. The Pentagon probably has the ability to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks against WikiLeaks' public-facing servers. If it doesn't, the Army could rent a formidable botnet from Russian hackers for less than the cost of a Humvee.

But that wouldn't do much good either. WikiLeaks wrote its own insurance policy two weeks ago, when it posted a 1.4 GB file called insurance.aes256.

The file's contents are encrypted, so there's no way to know what's in it. But, as we've previously reported, it's more than 19 times the size of the Afghan war log — large enough to contain the entire Afghan database, as well as the other, larger classified databases said to be in WikiLeaks' possession. Accused Army leaker Bradley Manning claimed to have provided WikiLeaks with a log of events in the Iraq war containing 500,000 entries from 2004 through 2009, as well as a database of 260,000 State Department cables to and from diplomatic posts around the globe.

Whatever the insurance file contains, Assange — appearing via Skype on a panel at the Frontline Club — reminded everyone Thursday that he could make it public at any time. “All we have to do is release the password to that material and it's instantly available,” he said.

WikiLeaks is encouraging supporters to download the insurance file through the BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay. “Keep it safe,” reads a message greeting visitors to the WikiLeaks chat room. After two weeks, the insurance file is doubtless in the hands of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of netizens already.

We dipped into the torrent Friday to get a sense of WikiLeaks' support in that effort. In a few minutes of downloading, we pulled bits and piece of insurance.aes256 from 62 seeders around the world. We ran the IP addresses through a geolocation service and turned it into a KML file to produce the rough Google Map at the top of this page. The seeders are everywhere, from the U.S., to Iceland, Australia, Canada and Europe. They had all already grabbed the entire file, and are now just donating bandwidth to help WikiLeaks survive.*

Since the Afghan war logs were posted, it's emerged the 77,000 records already published contain the names of hundreds of Afghan informants, who now face potentially deadly reprisal from the Taliban. WikiLeaks' publication of those records has drawn criticism from human rights organizations and the international free press group Reporters Without Borders.

Those organizations are just urging WikiLeaks to be more careful with its releases. But the Pentagon has hinted it actually has some recourse against the site. “If doing the right thing isn't good enough for them, we will figure out what alternatives we have to compel them to do the right thing,” Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said last week. It's hard to see what that recourse might be, when Julian Assange, or someone in his inner circle, can spill 1.4 gigabytes of material with a single well-crafted tweet.

I had to    at this bit :

"The Pentagon probably has the ability to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks against WikiLeaks' public-facing servers. If it doesn't, the Army could rent a formidable botnet from Russian hackers for less than the cost of a Humvee."

[Epsilon]

WIRED has published a series of in depth articles regarding the latest WikiLeaks 'CableGate' revelations.

‘Chipped’ Detainees, Iran Mega-Missiles And More in Latest WikiLeaks
By Spencer Ackerman   November 28, 2010

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia told a senior White House official to consider surgically implanting homing devices under Guantanamo Bay detainees’ skin. That’s one of the many potentially embarrassing comments from diplomatic back rooms now being made public by WikiLeaks.
...

Perhaps the most worrisome news to come out the diplo doc dump is that North Korea secretly gave Iran 19 powerful missiles with a range of 2,000 miles. The missiles, known as the BM-25, are modified from Russian R-27s, which were submarine-based missiles carrying nuclear weapons. “If fired from Iran,” the New York Times notes, a missile with that range could “let its warheads reach targets as far away as Western Europe, including Berlin.” The BM-25, unveiled in a North Korean military parade last month, may be North Korea’s longest-range missile yet. Ares’ David A. Fulgham observed that its design “is showing second-stage and nose-cone design characteristics associated with Iran’s Shahab 3 missile,” indicating growing missile ties between the two rogue states.
...

Bahrain’s King Hamad argued last November “for taking action to terminate [Iran's] nuclear program, by whatever means necessary,” one cable reads. Sounding like George W. Bush, Hamad told General David Petraeus, “The danger of letting it go on is greater than the danger of stopping it.” In the same meeting with Brennan, Abdullah said he declined an invitation to visit Iran from its foreign minister, saying instead, “All I want is for you to spare us your evil.”
...

Newspapers Reveal Diplomatic Cables, While WikiLeaks Buckles Under Cyber Attack
By Kevin Poulsen   November 28, 2010  |  4:11 pm

The first news reports from WikiLeaks’ long-expected disclosure of a quarter-million State Department diplomatic cables appeared on major newspaper websites on Sunday, though WikiLeaks’ own website was unavailable, purportedly due to a traffic-flooding cyberattack.

WikiLeaks’ media partners report that the secret-spilling organization gave them 251,287 diplomatic cables from America’s 270 embassies and consulates around the world, and another 8,000 diplomatic “directives” from Washington. About the half the documents are unclassified; the remainder are mostly at the relatively-low classification level “Confidential.” About 11,000 are classified “Secret.”
...

Most prominently, a series of secret directives from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and her predecessor Condoleezza Rice, instruct U.S. diplomats to gather intelligence on their foreign counterparts at the United Nations, including, according to one cable, “internet and intranet ‘handles’, internet email addresses, web site identification-URLs; credit card account numbers; frequent-flier account numbers; work schedules, and other relevant biographical information.” A directive sent to U.S. embassies in Africa instructs foreign service officers to collect DNA from local government officials, without specifying a method.

Another cable appears to confirm that the Chinese hacker attacks against the Dalai Lama, Google and a host of U.S. companies detected that surfaced over the last two years was the work of the Chinese government. A Chinese source for the American embassy revealed that China’s Politburo directed the intrusions as part of a cyber-intelligence gathering program erected in 2002.
...

WikiLeaks Reveals Iran’s Secret, Worldwide Arms Hunt
By Noah Shachtman   November 28, 2010  |  8:58 pm

Guns and ammo from Turkey. Missile components from Germany. Guidance systems from China. Iran is on a global, clandestine mission to acquire weapons and weapons technologies of all sorts, diplomatic cables released Sunday by WikiLeaks reveal. And the Tehran regime is using a series of front companies in its attempt to assemble the arsenal.
...

[Epsilon]

Ars Technica reports:

By Nate Anderson

Early this morning, the WikiLeaks Twitter feed reposted a tweet from EFF cofounder John Perry Barlow. "The first serious infowar is now engaged," Barlow wrote. "The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops."

Barlow is no stranger to theatrical overstatement; this, after all, is the guy who in 1996 penned "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" that opened with the lines: "Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather."

Barlow was wrong about sovereignty. Despite its name, "cyberspace" runs on physical infrastructure that sits in various governmental jurisdictions, and when sites like Wikileaks start irritating those governments, sovereignty is quite powerfully brought to bear.

Still, his recent tweet is accurate. There's a war on for WikiLeaks, and it's being fought all over the world.

Whack that mole

Senator Joe Lieberman's staff called Amazon yesterday and asked the company to look into the fact that WikiLeaks had moved some of its operations to Amazon's cloud. Hours later, Amazon booted the site from its servers. Wikileaks.org retreated to its Swedish host, Bahnhof.

But late last night, the other shoe dropped: the WikiLeaks DNS provider EveryDNS.net also booted the site, which remains inaccessible. In a note on its site, EveryDNS explains what happened.

"The services were terminated for violation of the provision which states that 'Member shall not interfere with another Member's use and enjoyment of the Service or another entity's use and enjoyment of similar services.' The interference at issue arises from the fact that wikileaks.org has become the target of multiple distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks. These attacks have, and future attacks would, threaten the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure, which enables access to almost 500,000 other websites."

WikiLeaks was notified by e-mail and Twitter that it had 24 hours to find a new DNS provider; those 24 hours ran out on December 2 at 10pm EST.

Wikileaks.ch registration

The site switched to a Swiss domain, wikileaks.ch, which is currently registered to the Swiss Pirate Party (Piratenpartei Schweiz). The main servers, however, appear to be currently located in France—and the French government isn't happy.

According to Reuters, French Industry Minister Eric Besson has sent a letter to his colleagues, asking them to "indicate to me as soon as possible what action can be taken to ensure that this Internet site is no longer hosted in France. This situation is not acceptable. France cannot host an Internet site that violates the secrecy of diplomatic relations and endangers people." (French text here.)

English Internet research and security firm Netcraft, which has been following the Wikileaks hosting saga, notes that traffic to wikileaks.ch currently goes to Sweden, where it is redirected to the French servers. Should those be taken down, however, "WikiLeaks can make wikileaks.ch redirect to a different IP address at the drop of a hat. Even if the Swedish hosting location (where the redirection takes place) is taken down, the DNS for wikileaks.ch has a TTL of only 10 minutes, allowing the domain to be pointed elsewhere promptly, should WikiLeaks have alternative hosting prepared."

Oddly, the whois record for wikileaks.ch shows that it continued to use EveryDNS.net as its DNS provider even after the company stopped supporting Wikileaks.org. Only minutes ago, EveryDNS updated its public statement to say that "the secondary DNS hosted domains, including wikileaks.ch, were disabled" today.

Calling it a "difficult issue to deal with," EveryDNS says "it is following established policies so as not to put any one EveryDNS.net user’s interests ahead of any others." But "regardless of what people say about the actions of EveryDNS.net, we know this much is true—we believe in our New Hampshire state motto, Live Free or Die."

This morning, the WikiLeaks Twitter feed appears to put some of the blame for this situation directly on the US government, saying, "Utterly surreal: Pravda justifiably criticising US for trying to stifle a free press. How times change."

[Epsilon]

News24 reports:

2010-12-07 12:27

London - WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been arrested in London after he reportedly surrendered to British police on Tuesday, says a Sky News report.

According to the report, he will appear in court later on Tuesday.

Assange had been expected to surrender to British police on Tuesday as part of a Swedish sex-crimes investigation - one of a host of international legal, financial, and security challenges closing in on the secret-spilling website.

Earlier, lawyer Mark Stephens has said that Assange, who had been hiding out at an undisclosed location in Britain since WikiLeaks began releasing hundreds of US diplomatic cables to the web last week, would soon be meeting with officers from London's Scotland Yard.

The police force had also said earlier on Tuesday it wouldn't comment until an arrest had been made.

The internet-based organisation's room for manoeuvre is narrowing by the day. It's been battered by web attacks, cut off by internet service providers and been subjected to a barrage of muscular rhetoric out of the United States.

In the latest development, Swiss authorities closed Assange's bank account, depriving him of a key fundraising tool.

Mastercard has also pulled the plug on payments to the site, according to technology news website CNET. A European representative for the credit card company didn't immediately return a call seeking comment.

The attacks appeared to have been at least partially successful in staunching the flow of secrets - WikiLeaks has not published any new cables to the internet in more than 24 hours, although stories about the cables have continued to appear in the New York Times and The Guardian, two of the papers given advance access to all 250 000 documents.

- AP

[Epsilon]

News24 reports:

2010-12-08 10:17

Washington - The website of the Swedish prosecutor's office pursuing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange came under cyber attack on Tuesday in the latest salvo in a campaign by online supporters who have also struck PayPal and the Swiss Post Office bank.

PandaLabs, the malware detection laboratory for computer security firm Panda Security, said the prosecutor's website, aklagare.se, was brought down by members of the loose "cyber hacktivist" group called "Anonymous".

The attack on the Swedish prosecutor's website came as Assange, whose release of secret US diplomatic cables has sparked an international furore, was refused bail by a British judge over allegations of sex crimes in Sweden.

Sean-Paul Correll, a threat researcher at PandaLabs, said Anonymous had dubbed the attacks on the websites of the Swedish prosecutor's office, PayPal and the Swiss Post Office bank as "Operation Avenge Assange".

He said they were part of a battle being waged online between supporters and opponents of WikiLeaks, whose website has come under repeated cyber attack itself and has seen US companies gradually withdrawing their support.

Speculation

"We have two sides of this attack spectrum," the PandaLabs researcher said.

"We have the Anonymous guys on one side fighting for freedom of information and freedom of press," Correll said. "And we have other people who consider themselves patriots who are trying to defend the greater interests of the United States."

Asked if he believed there was US government involvement behind the cyber attacks on the WikiLeaks website, Correll said "it's tough to say".

"It would just be speculation because no one has come forward to say that there is some type of involvement," he said.

He noted that an early attack on the WikiLeaks website had been claimed by a known hacker who calls himself the "Jester". "The Jester doesn't necessarily have to be one person," he said. "It could be a group of people, of patriots."

WikiLeaks has been under cyber attack since Assange began releasing the first US documents last week, forcing it to repeatedly change addresses and web hosts.

Amazon dropped WikiLeaks from its servers last week and PayPal blocked financial transfers to the site while the Swiss Post Office bank on Monday closed accounts held by Assange, the Australian-born WikiLeaks founder.

No central authority

PayPal's official blog, ThePayPalBlog.com, came under distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack on Saturday and was down for at least eight hours, PandaLab's Correll said.

He said that as of 18:00 (23:00 GMT) on Tuesday, the Swiss Post Office bank site had been down for more than 20 hours.

"Someone actually posted on Twitter and asked the attackers to stop their attacks so they can conduct their banking," Carroll said.

In a classic DDoS attack, a "botnet" of zombie computers, machines infected with viruses, are commanded to simultaneously visit a website, overwhelming its servers, slowing service or knocking it offline completely.

Correll said the Swedish prosecutor's website was attacked by over 500 computers at the direction of Anonymous. "It literally went down the second they announced the target," he said.

The PandaLabs researcher said Anonymous included anti-copyright activists who took part in "Operation Payback", which began in September and involved cyber attacks on the websites of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

"This past weekend they decided they were going to fight against anybody anti-WikiLeaks," said Correll, adding that he has been following Anonymous "from Day One".

"Anonymous doesn't have a central authority, there's no hierarchical structure," he said. "People describe it as having a kind of hive mind mentality."

"They use social networks to recruit members and chat infrastructure," he said, adding that "right now there's over 1 000 people in their chat room participating in their attacks."

"These guys are very resourceful," Correll said, adding that he expects their retaliatory activities to go beyond just DDoS attacks.

"I expect a laundry list of targets," he said. "They'll research security vulnerabilities on a website. They've defaced websites in the past so I expect to see all sorts of things coming in the future."

- AFP

[Epsilon]

The New York Times reports:

British Court Denies Bail to Assange

By JOHN F. BURNS and RAVI SOMAIYA   Published: December 7, 2010

LONDON — After months of posting troves of classified American documents on the Internet, Julian Assange, founder of the WikiLeaks Web site, surrendered to British authorities and was jailed on Tuesday after a judge reviewing a Swedish extradition request found him to be a flight risk and denied him bail.

For Mr. Assange and his supporters, as well as for those who have condemned him for the brazen leak of American secrets, there was a bizarre twist in the fast-moving events at a London courthouse. Instead of being arrested for punching a gaping hole in the secret worlds of American military and diplomatic power, an outcome he has long predicted, Mr. Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, found himself ensnared in allegations stemming from brief sexual encounters this summer with two young Swedish women.

What lies ahead, beyond a new court appearance on Dec. 14, when Mr. Assange’s bail bid will be renewed, is a legal battle that could last weeks, or much longer.

That contest will focus on whether the Swedish request for Mr. Assange’s extradition to face questioning on charges of “rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion” is unrelated to WikiLeaks, as Swedish prosecutors and the women themselves say — or whether they are linked, in what Mr. Assange has called a smear campaign to punish him for his WikiLeaks activity.

The reaction among those Mr. Assange has made his adversaries was predictably enthusiastic. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who was in Afghanistan, reacted to the arrest by saying, “I hadn’t heard that, but it sounds like good news to me.”

But how Mr. Assange’s arrest on the Swedish charges might affect the Obama administration’s continuing deliberations about how — or whether — to charge him for publicizing leaks of classified information remains uncertain. It is also unclear whether Mr. Assange will follow through on his past threats to retaliate for an arrest by releasing new batches of secret information, possibly in a less measured way than the organization has to date.

Officers from Scotland Yard arrested Mr. Assange after he went to a central London police station by agreement with the authorities. In a packed courtroom hearing lasting nearly an hour, Gemma Lindfield, a lawyer acting for the Swedish government, outlined some of the detailed allegations made by the Swedish women, both WikiLeaks volunteers. They involved three incidents in August, including one in which Mr. Assange was alleged to have had unprotected sex with one of his accusers as she was asleep.

Mr. Assange has denied wrongdoing, saying that he had consensual relations with the two women, whom he met during a trip to Sweden that he made in a bid to establish a haven for himself and WikiLeaks under Sweden’s broad press freedoms.

Outside court, Mark Stephens, Mr. Assange’s lead lawyer, described the allegations of sexual impropriety as “very thin indeed,” and predicted the case would “go viral” as the argument for its being a political vendetta was pressed.

Mr. Assange, in a dark blue suit and flanked by two uniformed security officials, was characteristically defiant in court. When he was arrested Tuesday morning, the hearing was told, he refused requests that he submit to a photograph, a DNA swab and fingerprinting, standard procedures for all those arrested in Britain.

In court, proceedings were interrupted when, having confirmed his name and date of birth, he refused to give a current address, giving first a post office box, then an address in Parkville in the Australian state of Victoria, where he lived before adopting a nomadic lifestyle since founding WikiLeaks in 2006.

The exchange appeared to have weighed against his bid for bail, which his lawyers had initially seemed confident of securing. The bid was supported by financial guarantees of more than $150,000 from a cast of well-known supporters who appeared in court, including the filmmaker Ken Loach and Jemima Khan, a socialite and political activist.

There was audible dismay as the judge, Howard Riddle, agreed with Ms. Lindfield that there were “significant grounds” for thinking Mr. Assange posed a flight risk, because of his “nomadic lifestyle,” his lack of ties in Britain, his network of international contacts and his access to substantial sums donated by WikiLeaks supporters.

As Mr. Assange was loaded into an armored police truck in the bitterly cold afternoon and driven to Wandsworth prison in south London, one sure thing was that his long months as a self-described refugee were over.

Accustomed to a life in the shadows, staying with friends, paying cash and communicating mainly by Twitter, he has added a sense of mystery to the celebrity — or notoriety — that has developed around him. The passions he has aroused among followers were evident as dozens chased the police truck as it pulled into traffic, banging on its sides and shouting, “We love you, Julian!”

Now the authorities he has reveled in provoking will have a new degree of control over his movements, though not necessarily over WikiLeaks. In a reaction to the events in court, a message on the WikiLeaks Twitter feed said the group was “let down by the U.K. justice system’s bizarre decision to refuse bail” to its founder, but added that the releases of secret State Department cables that began last week would “continue as planned.”

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said on Monday that American officials were conducting “a very serious, active, ongoing investigation that is criminal in nature” into the WikiLeaks releases, a position the Obama administration has held for months, since WikiLeaks began releasing secret Pentagon documents on the Afghan and Iraq wars in summer.

But the London arrest could complicate matters for Washington, backing up any criminal case it might begin against Mr. Assange behind the Swedish investigation. Sweden and Britain have extradition treaties with the United States, but both allow extradition rulings to be appealed to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France.

Of more immediate concern to Washington, Mr. Assange had threatened for weeks to respond to legal action by speeding the release of secret documents. He had warned that “over 100,000 people” worldwide had downloaded an encrypted version of the 251,287 State Department documents the group holds, a small fraction of which has been released, and that “if something happens to us, the key parts will be released automatically.”

That warning appeared to be suspended, with one of Mr. Assange’s closest aides, Kristinn Hrafnsson, an Icelandic journalist, saying outside the court that the organization had no plans to mount a retaliatory release. Mr. Stephens, the lawyer, also said there would be no change in WikiLeaks’s scheduled releases.

“WikiLeaks will continue, WikiLeaks is many thousands of journalists around the world,” Mr. Stephens told a crush of reporters on the courthouse steps. He added, “I am sure justice will out, and Mr. Assange will be vindicated in due course.”

In an interview with The New York Times in October, Mr. Assange seemed prepared for an eventual arrest, saying he occasionally savored the prospect of imprisonment on the basis that he “might be able to spend a day reading a book” away from the stresses of his WikiLeaks life.

But, he said, no legal action would deter him. “Retiring on some sunlit upland for some 15 years is not in my nature,” he said.

Reporting was contributed by Scott Shane, Charlie Savage and Brian Knowlton from Washington, and Ravi Somaiya from London.

I'm personally siding with Assange on the whole WikiLeaks affair. Is it the whistleblower's fault or those who committed something they wanted to keep secret that this information was leaked and published? As for how the U.S. is planning to try him and on what charges remains a total mystery since Mr. Assange is not even a U.S. citizen. As far as I know the files were not hosted on U.S. servers either. As for the charges he currently faces in Sweden only a court can determine the validity of those. The timing of it seems suspicious though.

It's also rather strange that bail was denied despite the fact that he had voluntarily handed himself over to the U.K. police and that a substantial financial guarantee was offered.
All of this following an alleged DDOS attack on the WikiLeaks web site when the so called 'CableGate' documents were released and subsequently PayPal and Mastercard suspending services to WikiLeaks...

[Epsilon]

The Register reports:

Anyone from Anonymous using a name is a 'CHARLOTEN'!
By Lewis Page • Get more from this author

Posted in Enterprise Security, 8th December 2010 12:25 GMT

Online hacktivist collective Anonymous, operating under the banners Operation:Payback and "Operation Avenge Assange" have launched a series of DDoS attacks against organisations and people seen as being opposed to Wikileaks and its spokesman Julian Assange.

Meanwhile, Operation:Payback itself has been subjected to counter-DDoS attacks thought to originate with US "patriotic" contra-hacktivistas.

Sites attacked by the Anonymous group have included PostFinance.ch, belonging to the Swiss bank which recently froze an account controlled by Assange, and also ThePayPalblog.com - the main blog operated by PayPal, targeted for refusing to process Wikileaks contributions. DNS outfit EveryDNS has also come into the Operation:Payback gunsights for cutting off Wikileaks' DNS service, saying that online attacks targeted at the leak site were crippling its other customers.

Over the last couple of days, other sites have been DDoS'd for various reasons by the Anonymous group, including the Swedish lawyers representing the women Assange is alleged to have committed sexual offences against. Charges made by Swedish prosecutors have since resulted in the issue of a European arrest warrant and Assange was yesterday cuffed in London: British judges have elected to refuse bail and the colourful Wikileaks impresario is now in jail pending an extradition hearing.

This process has angered the members of Operation:Payback sufficiently that they have also elected to mount strikes against the website of the Swedish prosecutors' office and briefly, according to anonymous* claims received by the Reg, against Interpol. (Interpol did issue a "Red Notice" calling for Assange's arrest at the behest of Swedish authorities, but in fact this has no relevance for British police dealing with a request from another EU nation: in such cases a European warrant is required for the UK cops to act.)

Yesterday, the Anonymous hacktivists decided to attack the site of US Senator Joe Lieberman as well, presumably as a result of remarks he has made describing Wikileaks operations as crimes violating the US Espionage Act - and hinting that Wikileaks' mainstream-media partners, collaborating on trawling and redacting files prior to public release, have violated the law also.

Some Operation:Payback members also elected to attack the site of former Alaska governor and vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin for suggesting that Assange should be hunted down like a terrorist.

The Anonymous attacks have been run on through a chatroom, with users attaching their computers to a voluntary botnet for use in the DDoS strikes. Panda Security reported that as the Lieberman attacks began there were almost 1,000 users in the chatroom and nearly 600 machines in the botnet.

Naturally enough Operation:Payback itself has been subject to counter-DDoS efforts of varying strength almost since it began, but following the decision to attack Lieberman's official US government site the Anonymous operation began to be hit much harder and suffered dozens of outages itself, one lasting almost two hours. Panda Security analysts assessed that the intensified counter-DDoS attacks were coming from self-described American "patriot" hackers - playing contra to the Anonymous hacktivistas, perhaps.

Meanwhile US Army private soldier Bradley Manning, believed to have supplied not only the vast stash of diplomatic cables now being drip-fed by Wikileaks but most of its previous significant material as well (the Baghdad gunship videos, Iraq and Afghanistan "war logs" etc) remains in military prison charged with an array of security violations. His name is seldom mentioned any more in the ongoing saga of Wikileaks, Assange and the online scufflers aligned with and against them.

Operation:Payback uses a banner quote from John Perry Barlow, a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

"The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops."

Some context for the online teacup "war" might be provided by the tiny size of the Anonymous volunteer botnet compared to today's heavyweight criminal bot networks. There wasn't even an attempt to actually attack PayPal, just its corporate blog. ®

Bootnote
*These emails were purportedly from Anonymous, but naturally we can't vouch for their authenticity. As the faceless informant put it (this is verbatim):

Anyone using a name and claiming to represent Anonymous is a charloten, a fraud, a 13 year old basement dweller surrounded by crusty socks and empty Dew bottles, seeking glory among his friends on Tumblr.

[Epsilon]

The Register reports:

Unspecified criminal activity cited
By Dan Goodin in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Posted in Music and Media, 8th December 2010 19:05 GMT

A PayPal executive said his company's decision to suspend payments to Wikileaks came after the US State Department said the whistle-blower site was engaged in illegal activity.

Press accounts from The Guardian and TechCrunch differ, but both claim that PayPal's move was influenced by statements from the State Department.

“State Dept told us these were illegal activities,” PayPal VP of platform Osama Bedier told the LeWeb conference in Paris, according to this report from The Guardian. “It was straightforward. We ... comply with regulations around the world, making sure that we protect our brand.”

TechCrunch reported much the same thing but later updated its post to say: “After talking to Bedier backstage, he clarified that the State Department did not directly talk to PayPal.” He went on to say that the online payment service was influenced by a November 27 letter State Department officials sent Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and his attorney.

“As you know, if any of the materials you intend to publish were provided by any government officials, or any intermediary without proper authorization, they were provided in violation of US law and without regard for the the grave consequences of this action,” the letter, signed by State Department legal adviser Hongju Koh, stated. “As long as WikiLeaks holds such material, the violation of the law is ongoing.”

The letter didn't cite any specific US statutes WikiLeaks was violating.

WikiLeaks went on to release a trove of State Department memos that aired confidential diplomatic communications.

PayPal representatives didn't respond to emails seeking clarification about the influence of the State Department.

Over the past few days, other financial services, including Visa, MasterCard, and the Swiss bank Post Finance, have also suspended services to Wikileaks and Assange. The move has prompted criticism on Twitter and elsewhere by users who point out that Visa and MasterCard still permit payments to Ku Klux Klan groups but not to a group that so far has been charged with no crime.

Distributed denial of service attacks by people sympathetic to Wikileaks soon took out MasterCard and were also reported against EveryDNS.net, which suspended one of WikiLeaks domain names. US Senator Joe Lieberman and Sarah Palin – both outspoken WikiLeaks critics – and Swedish prosecutors, who are investigating Assange for alleged sexual offenses, have also been targeted, according to reports. A PayPal blog was also disrupted by attacks.

The Register has asked Visa and MasterCard to comment. This post will be updated if either responds.

[Epsilon]

Sophos reports:

MasterCard, Visa, Paypal and 4chan - The furor of Wikileaks unleashed

by Chester Wisniewski on December 9, 2010

Today was certainly not a boring day in the annals of security news. Yesterday the forces of Anonymous (4chan) decided to take issue with the perceived censorship of government critics by performing DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks against entities involved in removing WikiLeaks from the internet.

The most prominent attacks by the legion of Anonymous began by targeting PayPalblog.com. Strangely, they did not attempt to take PayPal itself down, but went after the public mouthpiece of the company. Early on December 8th US Eastern time they began attacking MasterCard.com as noted by Carole Theriault.

For the most part, disrupting MasterCard.com didn't impact payment card processing. However, some MasterCard customers subscribe to a secondary form of authentication called SecureCode. This requires that you enter an additional security code when making online purchases using your credit card. The denial of service against MasterCard's web presence prevented customers using this technology from making online purchases during the attack.

After largely succeeding in the attack against MasterCard, Anonymous began to attack Visa.com. Despite 4chan's claims that they were bringing Visa to its knees, I was able to access their website throughout the attack. At the same time, Twitter began to suspend accounts related to the coordination of the attacks, such as @Anon_Operations and @AnonOperation.

As I have mentioned previously, it is against the law to participate in DDoS attacks, even if many people are angry about the coordinated efforts to shut down WikiLeaks.

The public has had its eyes opened to how easy it is for a small group of internet users to have a large impact on the functioning of major websites. Unfortunately the internet is still a growing entity and is not yet strong enough to defend itself against determined adversaries.

Don't let yourself be found in the position of US diplomats... Protect your data.

[Epsilon]

An article by Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks: His take on matters.
I tend to agree with him.

The Australian reports:

Don't shoot messenger for revealing uncomfortable truths

Julian Assange From: The Australian December 08, 2010 12:00AM

WIKILEAKS deserves protection, not threats and attacks.

IN 1958 a young Rupert Murdoch, then owner and editor of Adelaide's The News, wrote: "In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win."

His observation perhaps reflected his father Keith Murdoch's expose that Australian troops were being needlessly sacrificed by incompetent British commanders on the shores of Gallipoli. The British tried to shut him up but Keith Murdoch would not be silenced and his efforts led to the termination of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign.

Nearly a century later, WikiLeaks is also fearlessly publishing facts that need to be made public.

I grew up in a Queensland country town where people spoke their minds bluntly. They distrusted big government as something that could be corrupted if not watched carefully. The dark days of corruption in the Queensland government before the Fitzgerald inquiry are testimony to what happens when the politicians gag the media from reporting the truth.

These things have stayed with me. WikiLeaks was created around these core values. The idea, conceived in Australia, was to use internet technologies in new ways to report the truth.

WikiLeaks coined a new type of journalism: scientific journalism. We work with other media outlets to bring people the news, but also to prove it is true. Scientific journalism allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on. That way you can judge for yourself: Is the story true? Did the journalist report it accurately?

Democratic societies need a strong media and WikiLeaks is part of that media. The media helps keep government honest. WikiLeaks has revealed some hard truths about the Iraq and Afghan wars, and broken stories about corporate corruption.

People have said I am anti-war: for the record, I am not. Sometimes nations need to go to war, and there are just wars. But there is nothing more wrong than a government lying to its people about those wars, then asking these same citizens to put their lives and their taxes on the line for those lies. If a war is justified, then tell the truth and the people will decide whether to support it.

If you have read any of the Afghan or Iraq war logs, any of the US embassy cables or any of the stories about the things WikiLeaks has reported, consider how important it is for all media to be able to report these things freely.

WikiLeaks is not the only publisher of the US embassy cables. Other media outlets, including Britain's The Guardian, The New York Times, El Pais in Spain and Der Spiegel in Germany have published the same redacted cables.

Yet it is WikiLeaks, as the co-ordinator of these other groups, that has copped the most vicious attacks and accusations from the US government and its acolytes. I have been accused of treason, even though I am an Australian, not a US, citizen. There have been dozens of serious calls in the US for me to be "taken out" by US special forces. Sarah Palin says I should be "hunted down like Osama bin Laden", a Republican bill sits before the US Senate seeking to have me declared a "transnational threat" and disposed of accordingly. An adviser to the Canadian Prime Minister's office has called on national television for me to be assassinated. An American blogger has called for my 20-year-old son, here in Australia, to be kidnapped and harmed for no other reason than to get at me.

And Australians should observe with no pride the disgraceful pandering to these sentiments by Julia Gillard and her government. The powers of the Australian government appear to be fully at the disposal of the US as to whether to cancel my Australian passport, or to spy on or harass WikiLeaks supporters. The Australian Attorney-General is doing everything he can to help a US investigation clearly directed at framing Australian citizens and shipping them to the US.

Prime Minister Gillard and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have not had a word of criticism for the other media organisations. That is because The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel are old and large, while WikiLeaks is as yet young and small.

We are the underdogs. The Gillard government is trying to shoot the messenger because it doesn't want the truth revealed, including information about its own diplomatic and political dealings.

Has there been any response from the Australian government to the numerous public threats of violence against me and other WikiLeaks personnel? One might have thought an Australian prime minister would be defending her citizens against such things, but there have only been wholly unsubstantiated claims of illegality. The Prime Minister and especially the Attorney-General are meant to carry out their duties with dignity and above the fray. Rest assured, these two mean to save their own skins. They will not.

Every time WikiLeaks publishes the truth about abuses committed by US agencies, Australian politicians chant a provably false chorus with the State Department: "You'll risk lives! National security! You'll endanger troops!" Then they say there is nothing of importance in what WikiLeaks publishes. It can't be both. Which is it?

It is neither. WikiLeaks has a four-year publishing history. During that time we have changed whole governments, but not a single person, as far as anyone is aware, has been harmed. But the US, with Australian government connivance, has killed thousands in the past few months alone.

US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates admitted in a letter to the US congress that no sensitive intelligence sources or methods had been compromised by the Afghan war logs disclosure. The Pentagon stated there was no evidence the WikiLeaks reports had led to anyone being harmed in Afghanistan. NATO in Kabul told CNN it couldn't find a single person who needed protecting. The Australian Department of Defence said the same. No Australian troops or sources have been hurt by anything we have published.

But our publications have been far from unimportant. The US diplomatic cables reveal some startling facts:

• The US asked its diplomats to steal personal human material and information from UN officials and human rights groups, including DNA, fingerprints, iris scans, credit card numbers, internet passwords and ID photos, in violation of international treaties. Presumably Australian UN diplomats may be targeted, too.

• King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia asked the US to attack Iran.
• Officials in Jordan and Bahrain want Iran's nuclear program stopped by any means available.
• Britain's Iraq inquiry was fixed to protect "US interests".
• Sweden is a covert member of NATO and US intelligence sharing is kept from parliament.
• The US is playing hardball to get other countries to take freed detainees from Guantanamo Bay. Barack Obama agreed to meet the Slovenian President only if Slovenia took a prisoner. Our Pacific neighbour Kiribati was offered millions of dollars to accept detainees.

In its landmark ruling in the Pentagon Papers case, the US Supreme Court said "only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government". The swirling storm around WikiLeaks today reinforces the need to defend the right of all media to reveal the truth.

Julian Assange is the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks.

[Epsilon]

InfoWorld reports:

Does WikiLeaks need its 'defenders'? Or does it have its own cyber insurance?

By Paul Venezia | InfoWorld   DECEMBER 08, 2010

As cyber war rages against WikiLeaks' enemies, WikiLeaks itself may already have concocted an explosive contingency plan

Vengeful denial-of-service attacks on PayPal, MasterCard, and Visa in support WikiLeaks amount to an unprecedented cyber war. The "anonymous" vigilantes no doubt see themselves as valiant defenders of WikiLeaks and its freedom to let loose whatever it wants to disclose.

But does WikiLeaks really need help? As has been previously reported, WikiLeaks has taken out an insurance policy in the form of a 1.4GB AES-encrypted file that was originally released on various BitTorrent sites and is still available. Nobody knows what that file may contain except the creators.

This is pure speculation, but if I was planning this out, that big encrypted archive would contain several smaller encrypted archives. Each would have a different key, with inflammatory file names like "Proof of 9/11 coverup" or "Missing White House Emails, 2000-2007." There'd be little sense in making this insurance file a one-shot deal.

Then there's the method of key distribution. I imagine there are several servers socked away all over the globe, probably running services that have nothing to do with WikiLeaks, and each holding one or more decryption keys. The systems would be connected to one another via a series of heartbeats, and one or more of those servers would be able to cause the release of one or more keys -- triggered either by a direct signal, such as an email containing a passphrase, a Twitter post, or the absence of such a signal over a period of time.

I'd wager it's the latter. I wouldn't be surprised if WikiLeaks has created a dead man switch.

Perhaps Assange or another member of the group suppresses the release of these keys by sending an email or visiting a specific URL every 24 hours. As long as those signals are received, nothing happens. But if one is missed, the first decryption key would automatically be posted to Twitter and submitted to Reddit or any number of other public venues. Once that key sees daylight, it'll be all over the Internet in a matter of seconds, and the contents of the main file will be known forever.

If there were other encrypted files in that bundle, they'd each need their own key, which could be released in the same way, but would have to come from different servers and at least to different Twitter accounts or different sites altogether. You can be certain that once the first key hit the Net, there would be a deluge of guys in suits and dark sunglasses demanding the IP information from every site that got the direct information. Once a single key is out, the system that sent it can no longer be relied upon. To counter that, the system would erase all traces of its involvement in the key release and probably run a continuous DOD disk erase on the drive that contained the code and keys.

That's where the heartbeats come in. As the primary system releases a key, it stops sending and responding to the heartbeats, which triggers timers in the other systems, and they begin releasing their keys every 24, 48, or 72 hours. It would be like a series of political time bombs located all over the Earth, with no way to find them.

Naturally, there would also have to be an immediate release -- a kill switch -- and a self-destruct method baked into the code. This would cause all the participating systems to dump their keys, reset the timers, or self-destruct immediately.

But the trigger doesn't even need to be a manual step. There could be code out there parsing Twitter feeds, Google News feeds, the New York Times, and the Huffington Post looking for specific keywords and balancing that against the news saturation of a story containing those keywords. Once a threshold is eclipsed, the key release process begins.

There very well could be a few lines of Perl out there looking for "Julian Assange," "arrested," "state department," "trial," "bail," and so forth that has already started the process as you read these words -- all very fascinating from a computer science angle, but terrifying from the point of view of the U.S. State Department.

From WikiLeaks' point of view, it would simply be insurance.

This article, "Does WikiLeaks need its 'defenders'? Or does it have its own cyber insurance?," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog.

[Epsilon]

This keeps getting better by the day... I think a Hollywood movie is definitely in the pipeline because the script is great.

Sophos reports:

Dutch police website attacked after arrests of suspected hacker

by Graham Cluley on December 10, 2010



Just a day after Dutch police arrested a 16-year-old boy in connection with Wikileaks-related denial-of-service attacks, websites belonging to the Netherlands computer crime cops and prosecutors have been struck with a similar assault.

Dennis Janus, a spokesman for the National Police Service confirmed that both the police website, and that of the National Prosector's Office had been offline for much of the day, with many theorising that the likely reason is a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack similar to that which was launched against Mastercard, PayPal and other firms.



Janus didn't confirm that the downtime of the websites was definitely connected with the ongoing attacks by WikiLeaks supporters, but you would be a brave man to bet otherwise as sheer coincidence seems highly unlikely.

Members of the public, sympathetic with the actions of the controversial WikiLeaks whistle-blowing website, have been downloading a DDoS attack tool called LOIC, turning their home computers into an attack tool against websites in AnonOps' bad books.

Remember folks - if you assist in a denial-of-service attack you could be looking at a lengthy jail sentence.

The unnamed teenager, who is said to have confessed to playing a part in the attacks against the PayPal and Mastercard websites, is due to appear in a court in Rotterdam today.

[Epsilon]

More on this from News24:

Australia changes tune on 'outlaw' Assange

Sydney - The Australian government on Friday back tracked on its claim that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is an outlaw amid demonstrations by supporters in three cities calling for his release from custody in London.

...

WikiLeaks' Assange moved to isolation

London - WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has "for his own safety" been moved to a segregation unit of the London prison where he is being held pending extradition to Sweden, one of his lawyers said on Friday.

...