Wednesday 8 December 2010

Research: Wikileaks, Julian Assange (Founder), his Arrest & Anonymous "Operation: Payback"

[Update: Check all Recent Wikileaks related material of the blog HERE]


1) Intro 

WikiLeaks is an international new media non-profit organization that publishes submissions of otherwise unavailable documents from anonymous news sources and leaks. In July 2010 Wikileaks released confidential documents that shed light on the war in Afghanistan. Now Wikileaks has posted online almost 400,000 similar documents detailing events in Iraq after the 2003 invasion. (Current Link: http://213.251.145.96/)
Julian Paul Assangeis is an Australian journalist, publisher and Internet activist. He is best known as the spokesperson and editor in chief for WikiLeaks, a whistleblower website. Before working with the website, he was a computer programmer. He has lived in several countries, and has made occasional public appearances to speak about freedom of the press, censorship, and investigative journalism.
Anonymous are online supporters of Wikileaks who are fighting back after news of Julian Assange’s arrest hit the wires. They have initiated what they called Operation: Payback, a call to action to bring down the websites of companies that have publicly removed services once used by the Wikileaks website. (Current Link: http://anonops.net/anonops/About)

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2) About Sweden issuing European arrest warrant for Mr Assange over sex crime allegations:




Information about his arrest & accusations:

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3) What is WikiLeaks?

Articles about WikiLeaks:



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4) Who is Julian Assange?






















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5) Who are the AnonOps and what is "Operation: Payback"?



[From their Main Page]:



"The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops."
- John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Wikileaks have been down because of Distributed-Denial-of-Service attacks (DDoS). There are reasons to believe that The United States Of America are behind this since due to the nature of the leak on Sunday 28th November 2010, where over 251000 documents (US diplomatic cables) were published on WikiLeaks.
What is this all about? And what does it have to do with censorship and Operation Payback?
While we don't have much of an affiliation with WikiLeaks, we fight for the same reasons. We want transparency and we counter censorship. The attempts to silence WikiLeaks are long strides closer to a world where we can not say what we think and are unable to express our opinions and ideas.
We can not let this happen. This is why our intention is to find out who is responsible for this failed attempt at censorship. This is why we intend to utilize our resources to raise awareness, attack those against and support those who are helping lead our world to freedom and democracy.
"In a free society, we are supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, we are in big trouble."
- Ron Paul


Who tried to stop WikiLeaks?
·         EveryDNS released a statement confirming that it took action against Wikileaks because of the numerous denial-of-service attacks that had been carried out against the original domain. (guardian) (tweet)
·         "TheJester" who had this to say: "www.wikileaks.org - TANGO DOWN - for attempting to endanger the lives of our troops, 'other assets' & foreign relations #wikileaks #fail".
·         The French government: "The French government has moved to ban WikiLeaks from French servers, part of a series of moves threatening the group's presence on the internet. Industry minister Eric Besson said it is "unacceptable" for French servers to host the site, which "violates the secret of diplomatic relations and puts people protected by diplomatic secret in danger"(article).
·         Amazon pulled the plug on hosting the whistle-blowing website only 24 hours after being contacted by the staff of Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate's committee on homeland security. Its refreshing to see that a company like amazon takes direct orders from a government employee (not even an official call from the government), disregarding their customers first amendment rights. Democracy is a fine thing (guardian).
·         In a statement, PayPal said: "PayPal has permanently restricted the account used by WikiLeaks due to a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity. We've notified the account holder of this action" (allvoices).

Need we say more? If PayPal had the slightest moral, they would have donated to wikileaks themselves. We also regret to hear that EveryDNS rather tries to save its own instruments rather than doing whatever in their power to keep the website up (whatever happend to looking after your customers?). WikiLeaks is a pioneer of transparency. They are the whistleblowers that this society is crying out for. If we're all going to bury our heads in the sand and ignore these contradictions of a so-called free society, then why do we still vote? Then why are we even interested in politics at all? Why don't we hand them our (copy)rights on a silver plate, with the apology that we were counteracting them?
This is a global issue, but the United States of America's first amendment is a good example:
"Amendment 1 - Freedom of Religion, Press, Expression"
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Current condition of this amendment:
·         If you're a Muslim, you're a terrorist. Freedom of Religion
·         If you publish something groundbreaking about the government, it's treason. Freedom of Press
·         If you express your feelings, it's copyright infringement. Freedom of Expression

So why does that amendment even exist in the first place, if it is treated with blatent disregard? Are we the only ones who think this is slightly hypocritical? Everybody portrays Anonymous as a bunch of 13 year old nerds glued to their computers and gaming consoles. Are a "bunch of 13 year olds" the only ones capable of understanding how serious this situation is, how it could affect our very way of life? Just as the university students in the UK are fighting a seemingly losing a battle, so are we (spec). There is a limited number of avenues available taking the legal route, sometimes challenging and breaking laws are necessary to being heard and noticed.
"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
- George Orwell (My Few Wise Words of Wisdom' (2000) by Charles Walker)
By doing everything to discredit WikiLeaks, Julian Assagne and all others involved, the world's governments demonstrated that they are worse than terrorists. At least terrorists are honest in what they try to achieve. Whatever is said in the smear campaign against Julian Assagne, how could it ever be worse than a complete government having hidden agendas and trying to silence everybody who stands against it?
So, what are we, Operation Payback going to do about it?
·         We offer WikiLeaks an additionalmirror and have it Googlebombed.
·         We will create counter-propaganda, organizing attacks (DDoS) on various targets related to censorship (time, date and target will be published by that time).
·         Contact media entities, inform them that Operation:Payback has come out in support of Wikileaks, and has declared war on the entities involved in censoring there information; we will seek public support in a campaign against censorship.
·         We will find and will attack those who stand against Wikileaks and we will support WikiLeaks in everything they need.
Choose freedom. Help us.
Thanks in advance,
Anonymous
www.anonops.net


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6) TAKE ACTION!! 
Wikileaks: Stop the crackdown

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7) Other interesting Articles & Links (to get updated) 


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"In a free society, we are supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, we are in big trouble."
- Ron Paul



/od
    Posted by Od at 18:02

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