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Defend Manning and Assange! year-old US army intelligence analyst accused of leaking the Iraq, Afghanistan and diplomatic cables, and WikiLeaks' Australian founder Julian Assange.
Manning, being held in the US, faces up to 52 years in prison and Assange could suffer a similar fate if he falls into WashingAs Socialist Resistance went to press Assange was awaiting an extradition hearing in the UK court brought by the Swedish government whose prosecutors want to question him about sexual assault allegations. This move, say Assange's lawyers, is "politically motivated". Certainly it aids the international witch hunt against
The death threats and accusations of terrorism he has faced and the initial denial of bail ignited a wave of protest with figures including journalist John Pilger, film maker Ken Loach and human rights activist Jemima Kahn coming forward to put up sureties for him in the name of freedom of information. These protests look likely to develop into a full scale campaign when the
Assange continues to deny the Swedish allegations but given the US authorities' thirst for vengeance he can ill afford to lose the protection currently afforded him by being in Britain in the public eye and at the centre of a growing campaign. Extradition to Sweden now would leave him much more isolated and vulnerable to being sent on to the States where he could be put on trial for espionage.
If the culture of secrecy among global superpowers is to go on being challenged by organisations like WikiLeaks, Manning and Assange must not be allowed to suffer terrible retribution by the US authorities. That is why the campaign to defend them deserves full support.
www.indexoncensorship.org www.guardian.co.uk Seamus Milne: "Leakers hold global power
to account", Guardian 2 December 2010
Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom statement www.cpbf.org www.openrightsgroup.org
Bryan Appleyard, New Statesman 10 Jan
2011 www.newstatesman.com
theguardian Massive leak of secret files poses true Afghan war The biggest exposure of internal government files in history - the
WikiLeaks revelations - would not have
been possible without the existence of the
internet. Small wonder, then, that as soon as the whistle-blowing website started
publishing excerpts from an avalanche of secret US diplomatic cables the net became the battleground between freedom of information activists and those intent on Silencing them.
Attempts to censor the internet are not new. The Chinese, Saudi and Iranian governments have all gone to great lengths to try to silence critics: some US Senators are pushing plans for an internet "blacklist" and Facebook and Google routinely scrutinise users and control their data.
But when WikiLeaks, in careful coordination with the Guardian, Le Monde, New York Times and Der Spiegel, began opening some of Washington's international double dealings to public scrutiny, the US launched desperate attempts via the net to stem the flow of information. Making its mark WikiLeaks had already made its mark worldwide with sensational revelations about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These earlier leaks exposed US collusion with torture and death squads, and incidences of slaughter of Afghan civilians by NATO forces on the rampage.
Now "Cablegate" has given people unprecedented access to political, business and diplomatic dealings of the US. These have included its constant manoeuvrings against Iran; its covert military operations
in Pakistan; its domination of Middle East
resources through alliances with dictators
and shady autocracies; its spying on UN
officials and its deal with the British to
protect American interests in the Iraq war
enquiry. Hundreds of the 250,000 cables have been publicised so far and there are many more revelations to come.
The US political establishment has been hugely embarrassed and calls for the capture and prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange have been echoed at government level. Internet war But it was when leading figures in Washington began orchestrating cyber-sabotage that the internet war reached a new pitch. The main WikiLeaks site had to move its servers after Amazon was persuaded by Senator Joe Lieberman who heads the US Senate's homeland security committee to withdraw hosting. The site was also forced to change its web address when, under US pressure, EveryDNS cancelled its account, Mastercard, Visa and Paypal stopped facilitating donations to the site and Swiss Post's financial arm, PostFinance froze the WikiLeaks bank account.
At this point, however, freedom of information defenders began turning the tables. A loose group of hackers connected to the online imageboard 4chan, often referred to as Anonymous, acted in support of WikiLeaks by attacking and disabling the sites of the companies that had denied service to the organisation. Operation Payback In what the hackers called Operation
page 21 of the scan
Payback "denial of service" weapons were used. This involves online computers being harnessed to jam target sites with mountains of requests for data in order to
One Anonymous source told the UK press that the initial attacks against PostFinance required about 200 computers and within days the hackers were reportedly enlisting thousands more pro-WikiLeaks supporters. According to the Guardian, 'By the time the Visa and Mastercard websites were disrupted...close to 3,000 computers were involved."
Anonymous claims to have successfully distributed software tools to allow anyone with a computer to join Operation Payback. Its counter offensive looks set to be stepped up when the extradition hearing of Julian Assange comes before the UK court (see previous page).
The big social networking sites Twitter and Facebook may soon be in the hackers' sights. Twitter is thought to have removed the Anonymous account which had 22,000 followers out of concern that the account was being used to encourage defence of WikiLeaks. The Anonymous page on Facebook was removed, accused of "violating its conditions" by supporting attacks on websites.
Another possible target in the weeks to come, according to some commentators, is the US government itself. Mysteriously for a brief period one day last December senate. gov the website of every US senator went down. "Mirror" sites to the rescue The hackers are not the only ones rushing to WikiLeaks' defence. Following the attempts to push its website off the net, more than 1,300 volunteer "mirror" came forward to store the classified cables. Soon duplicate copies of WikiLeaks were loaded onto hundreds of different servers worldwide - beyond reach of attack by any single legal authority. Index on Censorship, the UK-based freedom of information campaign, called it a "triumph for the internet ideal".
Thanks to this unprecedented show of online solidarity the attacks on WikiLeaks have up to now made minimal impact and seem unlikely to affect the availability of the information that the organisation has already released or still intends to publish.
Who will win the internet war in the long run remains open to question but the hugely significant work of WikiLeaks and all those championing the public's right to