International campaign targets WikiLeaks web site

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International campaign targets WikiLeaks web site
By Joseph Kishore
4 December 2010

As part of efforts to block the release of documents obtained by WikiLeaks,
there is an escalating campaign, led by the US government, to bring down the
organization’s web site. This effort is taking place in parallel with an
international dragnet targeting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Late on Thursday US time, the domain name hosting service for WikiLeaks,
EveryDNS.net, announced that it had cut off WikiLeaks for violating its terms of
service. The DNS host links a domain name (e.g., wikileaks.org) to a specific
computer server address that holds the content of a web site.

As a consequence of the action of EveryDNS, wikileaks.org no longer directs to
WikiLeaks’ servers. The site was functionally inaccessible for about 6 hours,
before being reopened on Friday at several other domain names: wikileaks.ch,
wikileaks.de, wikileaks.fi, and wikileaks.nl. There were reports Friday that
EveryDNS also serviced wikileaks.ch and had blocked that address as well.

To justify its action, EveryDNS claimed that the WikiLeaks web site posed a
danger to all the domain names served by the company as a result of persistent
distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on the site. Since a few days
before the recent release of US State Department cables, WikiLeaks has been
subject to an escalating Internet-based attack involving massive and continual
requests for data aimed at overloading the organization’s servers.

The stated reasons given by EveryDNS for its actions, however, cannot be taken
at face value, and it is very possible that commercial or political pressure was
brought to bear. EveryDNS was purchased earlier this year by Dyn Inc., which
also owns DynDNS. The buyout is part of the consolidation of the free DNS
market, which poses significant dangers for the freedom of the Internet.

The move by EveryDNS followed by one day the decision by Amazon to kick
WikiLeaks off of its hosted servers, after coming under pressure from US
government officials. Shortly before the action, Amazon had been contacted by
the office of US Senator Joseph Lieberman, the chairman of the Senate Committee
on Homeland Security.

Responding to Amazon’s decision, Assange stated in an online question and answer
session hosted by the British Guardian newspaper, “Since 2007 we have been
deliberately placing some of our servers in jurisdictions that we suspected
suffered a free speech deficit in order to separate rhetoric from reality.
Amazon was one of these cases.”

Amazon subsequently denied that its action was a response to pressure from the
US government; however, its statement merely parrots the government line against
WikiLeaks. “It’s clear that WikiLeaks does not own or otherwise control all the
rights” to the classified documents it has posted, Amazon claimed. That is,
Amazon accepts without argument the position of the Obama administration that
WikiLeaks does not have the legal right to publish the leaked documents.

The company also declared, without a shred of evidence, that it is “not
credible” that WikiLeaks had taken sufficient measures to ensure that innocent
people would not be harmed by information in the 250,000 documents. This claim
ignores the fact that WikiLeaks has released only a small fraction of these
documents, since it has very limited resources available to process them.

Amazon’s anti-democratic decision will be used to pressure other companies to
break off all connections with WikiLeaks, which could have even more serious
consequences.

This intention was made clear by Lieberman, who declared in a statement that
Amazon’s decision “is the right decision and should set the standard for other
companies WikiLeaks is using to distribute its illegally seized material. I call
on any other company or organization that is hosting WikiLeaks to immediately
terminate its relationship with them.” Among the companies Lieberman no doubt
has in mind are Twitter and Facebook, which WikiLeaks has employed to spread
information—including information about its new domain names.

On Friday, Tableau Software, a company that provided data visualizations created
from the leaked documents, reported that it was removing all content related to
WikiLeaks. In a blatant acknowledgement of self-censorship, a statement from the
company declared: “Our decision to remove the data from our servers came in
response to a public request by Senator Joe Lieberman, who chairs the Senate
Homeland Security Committee, when he called for organizations hosting WikiLeaks
to terminate their relationship with the website.”

The US government is doing whatever it can to block access to the content of
WikiLeaks. The Department of Commerce released a memo on Friday demanding that
all employees and contractors not access any content from the WikiLeaks web
site. The Library of Congress has also blocked access to the web site on its
networks.

WikiLeaks has access to several other servers in different countries, though
these may also be threatened, particularly its servers in France. One of its
servers has been hosted by the French company, OVH, since Amazon’s decision to
cancel its hosting service.

On Friday, the French government took initial steps aimed at banning WikiLeaks
from all French servers. Industry Minister Eric Besson declared, “France cannot
host websites that violate diplomatic relations secrecy and endanger persons
protected by diplomatic confidentiality.” Reflecting what is certainly intense
pressure from the US, Besson added, “We cannot host sites that have been called
criminal and rejected by other countries on the basis of harm to national rights.”

In a threat to all French server providers, Besson warned that any company with
relations with WikiLeaks must understand the “consequences of their acts and
secondly be made to take responsibility for them.”

In addition to these direct state or corporate actions against WikiLeaks, the
DDoS attack is also highly suspicious, with possible links to the US government.
A right-wing hacker, who specializes in targeting Muslim organizations, has
claimed responsibility, though this has not been confirmed. The size of the
attack has been large, with WikiLeaks reporting on November 30 that it exceeded
10 gigabites a second.

Meanwhile, the campaign against Assange continues, with political figures in the
US leading the way. Responding to calls for WikiLeaks organizers to be killed
(most recently, a Washington Times column headlined, “Assassinate Assange”), the
WikiLeaks founder reported in the Guardian Q&A, “The threats against our lives
are a matter of public record. However, we are taking the appropriate
precautions to the degree that we are able when dealing with a superpower.”

In an attempt to safeguard the documents and ensure that they are released even
if something happens to Assange, WikiLeaks has distributed more than 100,000
“insurance files” to supporters, in encrypted form. “If something happens to us,
the key parts will be released automatically,” Assange said.

The most immediate threat to Assange is a warrant for his arrest issued by
Sweden on the basis of trumped-up charges. However, there is also speculation
that Assange may already be the target of a US indictment, but that this
indictment is being kept secret until he is arrested.

The Christian Science Monitor reported on Thursday, “US officials publicly will
only say that they are investigating the matter and that no legal options have
been ruled out. But an indictment in such an important federal matter would be
handed down by a grand jury, and grand jury proceedings are secret, notes
Stephen Vladeck, an expert in national security law at American University…

“A judge could order an indictment of Assange sealed until such time as the US
is able to apprehend him, or until he is in custody in a nation from which he is
likely to be extradited,” the Monitor noted. “The purpose of such secrecy would
be to keep the WikiLeaks chief from going even further underground.”

In addition to the immediate threat to WikiLeaks and its members, the campaign
against the organization poses a grave threat to democratic rights, and in
particular to the freedom of the Internet. The campaign to bring down the
organization’s web site highlights the danger posed by the ownership and control
of critical sections of the Internet by private corporations.

In recent weeks, the US government has taken a number of steps aimed at
strengthening its ability to shut down web sites. On Monday, the Obama
administration seized the domain names of 82 organizations alleged to be
involved in piracy.

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/dec2010/wiki-d04.shtml

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