If the US government can pressure companies all over the world to cut off access to Wikileaks, the internet’s most chaotic, trollish forces can target these same companies too:
The forces of Anonymous have taken aim at several companies who are refusing to do business with WikiLeaks. 4chan’s hordes have launched distributed denial-of-service attacks against PayPal, Swiss bank PostFinance, and other sites that have hindered the whistleblowing site’s operations.
A self-styled spokesman for the group calling himself “Coldblood” has said that any website that’s “bowing down to government pressure” is a target. PayPal ceased processing donations to the site, and PostFinance froze WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s account. The attacks are being performed under the Operation: Payback banner; Operation: Payback is the name the group is using in its long-running attacks on the RIAA, MPAA, and other organizations involved with anti-piracy lawsuits.
The battle over Wikileaks might just be the most important event of this year, as it morphs into a battle for control of the internet. Wikileaks is the product of the internet’s idealist, libertarian (in the good sense of the word) origins, owning no allegiance to any meatspace government and acting according to internet, not offline morality. 4chan and its various shadowy subgroups and self appointed vigilantes are another product of this morality: far from perfect, often misguided and sometimes as eager to punish disrespect as much as real transgressions, but still a vital part of the internet’s immune system. Thanks to them the companies who were eager to curry favour with the US government have found out these actions have consequences.
Wikileaks meanwhile is defending itself against being taken offline and does so rather well:
Taking away WikiLeaks’ hosting, their DNS service, even their primary domain name, has had the net effect of increasing WikiLeaks’ effective use of Internet diversity to stay connected. And it just keeps going. As long as you can still reach any one copy of WikiLeaks, you can read their mirror page, which lists over 1,000 additional volunteer sites (including several dozen on the alternative IPv6 Internet). None of those is going to be as hardened as wikileaks.ch against DNS takedown or local court order — but they don’t need to be.
Within a couple days’ time, the WikiLeaks web content has been spread across enough independent parts of the Internet’s DNS and routing space that they are, for all intents and purposes, now immune to takedown by any single legal authority. If pressure were applied, one imagines that the geographic diversity would simply double, and double again.
Almost a textbook example of the old adage that the internet percieves censorship as damage and routes around it. For the moment there’s a stalemate in the Wikileaks cyberwar, a stalemate in Wikileaks’ favour.