It seems that the game begins with all parties around the world because of the Wikileaks.
On December 1st, Wikileaks has been shut down by Amazon and banned from using its servers.
“Wikileaks servers at Amazon ousted. Free speech the land of the free – fine our $ are now spent to employ people in Europe,” Wikileaks twitter posted.
Wikileaks had moved to Amazon after their site fell victim to a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack. The attack, peaking at 2 to 4 Gbps, was said to have originated from a single source. This source, Th3J35t3r, a self-titled ‘Hacktivist for good’, has been silent since word of his actions spread in the media.
Shortly after getting the boot from Amazon, Wikileaks moved to France’s OVH for hosting. Later on the French minister for industry, energy and digital economy, Eric Besson said “The situation is unacceptable. France cannot host websites that violate diplomatic relations secrecy and endanger persons protected by diplomatic confidentiality. We cannot host sites that have been called criminal and rejected by other countries on the basis of harm to national rights”
The above situation tells the truth that Amazon might be under political and government pressure to ban and kick off Wikileaks!
According to NY Times, US Government refused to support Wikileaks for identifying the cables which may cause harm for individuals.
Shortly after moving from Amazon to OVH, Wikileaks again faced connection issues. EveryDNS, the free DNS offering of DYN Inc., cut DNS services after ongoing DDOS attacks threatened the stability of the service. If you try to access www.wikileaks.org, you will get an error!
Today, the online payment service provider PayPal has cut off the account used by Wikileaks to collect donations. PayPal said in a blog posting that the move was prompted by a violation of its 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”. As we all know that PayPal is a subsidiary of EBay Inc. I think this is another pressure from US government!
While there are many critics on Wikileaks especially when it comes to releasing this large volume of cables and information, many analysts see more behind Wikileaks.
IMHO, Wikileaks website is not the case. It is the propaganda by the US government to spreading the information all over.
When it comes to technology, there is no impossible! Many people are asking what will happen if US government shut down the whole Wikileaks websites?
The answer will be simply “Nothing but increasing the importance of Wikileaks”
As stated above, the website is not the problem. Information can be found anywhere even in places that would be impossible to shut down such as Torrent Networks!
They started already to use this service. All Wikileaks data could be downloaded easily using BitTorrent format and from torrent networks! And in that case it will be virtually impossible to stop distributing these files. It doesn’t need all that hassle to host an illegal website or illegal contents on webs servers that could be controlled by governments.
Just tweet the torrent link and it is there! No one will be able to trace…
Wikileaks claimed that it released an encrypted Torrent file with over 1.4 GB of secret data and document! The file is encrypted with AES-256 which will be decrypted by a passphrase that will be published in case of any actions against Wikileaks founder. The file is called “Insurance File”
It looks like there will be a cyber war all over the internet but where are our countries?
As I stated in my previous post about Wikileaks, it might be few clicks to put the world in a new dilemma and changing game play! Whatever the motives and power behind Wikileaks, there is no doubt that it will change something around the world. My analysis and research will focus on activities related to the Middle East. I’m not intended to cover the political issues as it requires another scope. But things might be in some way or another connected together when it comes to technology and society!
Unfortunately, I see apathy and ignorance appearing in most media channels in the region. They are trying to express their own point of view even if it is not true to cover other things or hide the scandals or problems related to their countries!
In one of the largest online newspapers in Egypt, someone who claims that he is a security expert! Said that Wikileaks sources are only a computer hacker and a US army member who copied large files on RW-DVD!!! For sure they need to spread this idea and letting people believe. There is no evidence related to this claim but who cares in the Middle East! Even if they had access to the secret database from computers in Iraq, how they would have get all this large volume without triggering any security alert!
This issue couldn’t be happened in a small firm with a file server, so what about the US government?
Going back to the Arabic cyberspace and Wikileaks, there is no much discussion in an open manner. But there are few exceptions out there!
Whatever the case, I think that Middle East will be one of the biggest losers in this game!
Sources FYI:
Wikileaks working websites:
http://213.251.145.96/
http://wikileaks.nl/
http://www.wikileaks.ch/
Image source: Time Magazine
Updated December 5, 2010: Wikileaks Mirrors