Cyberwar against Wikileaks? Good luck with that
We read:
"Should the U.S. government declare a cyberwar against WikiLeaks? “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.
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.
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.
Source
5 comments:
First, i seriously doubt the US lacks the capability to stop/take down Wikileaks. What would stop them dead in their tracks is the political correctness mentality that has deeply infected the current US govt. Of course, had Wikileaks done this to say, Russia, Iran, N. Korea, or Isreal, the situation would have been solved within an hour and the world would still be trying to find Assange's remains.
I bet if someone leaks Obama's college transcripts to Wikilaks you'll see the full force of America's cyber power wipe the site off the face of the internet within minutes.
well said. This leak originated in the White House, so of course they're not going to stop it...
A single smart bomb on the hosting center for the site, and another one on Asange's home, would solve this problem cleanly and neatly.
If we were the country so many libs/progressives/demo-rats say we are we would do just that Annon 3:25.
Too bad that obama and his minions don’t use the seam "restraint" against those who disagree with them like the Tea Party.
We get attacked more often by this administration than Al-qaeda does!
There needs to be some sort of litmus test to see if people have the psychological capasity to vote before they're allowed to go into that booth. If that were case, the lines at polling places would be a whole lot shorter.
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