The list of targets is expanding daily as Washington, smarting over the damage caused by the release of secret diplomatic cables, mounts a revenge operation against WikiLeaks, its founder Julian Assange, and anyone associated with it.
The New York Times and Visa joined the hit-list yesterday, while anonymous cyber attacks continued against sites hosting the whistleblower site.
The United States, which champions Internet freedom, has been accused of hypocrisy in its reprisals, said to be co-ordinated by the Obama administration. Analysts said there were parallels with recent cyber attacks on Estonia and on Google in China — both condemned by the US — in the American response to WikiLeaks.
The public face of the reprisals is Joe Lieberman, the chairperson of the Senate homeland security committee, who has pressurised companies to end their association, called for Assange to be prosecuted in the US, and this week added The New York Times to the list of organisations that should face investigation.
Barack Obama has not yet said a word about WikiLeaks and the state department and the Pentagon have shrugged it off as damaging but containable. But Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst who also worked with special operations in the state department’s counter-terrorism section, believes the campaign against WikiLeaks, is being run from the top.
“It’s being directed by the White House,” he said. “This is not just each individual department doing its own thing.”
The campaign began quietly, with a call from staff at the Senate homeland security committee to Amazon, then hosting the WikiLeaks site.
The Espionage Act
Twenty-four hours later, Amazon booted WikiLeaks out. Another US software company also cut ties, the French government issued a warning to French web servers, and the bank accounts of WikiLeaks and Assange were frozen.
Lieberman, asked by Fox News about the legality of news organisations such as the New York Times distributing the leaked cables, said WikiLeaks had violated the Espionage Act.
“The New York Times has committed at least an act of bad citizenship. Whether they’ve committed a crime I think bears a very intensive inquiry by the justice department,” said Lieberman, an independent with close relations with the Republicans.
Leslie Phillips, Lieberman’s spokesperson, said the senator was “encouraged that businesses around the world — most recently Visa and PayPal — have followed the lead of Amazon and dropped WikiLeaks as a customer of their services”. She said he encouraged other firms with a business relationship with WikiLeaks to sever their ties.
Asked if he was working on his own or in cooperation with the state department and Pentagon, she said: “Senator Lieberman has made no demands on any business regarding WikiLeaks.
“His belief is that once it became known that Wikileaks was disseminating stolen classified information, these businesses would understand that in order to adhere to their own terms of use and to be good corporate citizens they would have to sever their relationships with WikiLeaks.” Visa got the message.
The target
It said it had suspended all payments to ÂWikiLeaks pending an investigation of the organisation’s business.
The state department, and especially the Treasury, have had enormous experience in recent years in putting the squeeze on financial institutions that deal with Iran.
The Pentagon has said publicly that it has the capacity to mount cyber attacks but has denied it intends targeting WikiLeaks.
Adam Segal, a national security specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations, said it was unlikely the Pentagon would do this, given the fact that there would be enormous collateral damage, with many organisations that had nothing to do with WikiLeaks potentially suffering as servers went down.
“Given the information that comes from the state department about internet freedom, it would be hard to justify,” Segal said.
A parallel could be drawn with the 2007 attack on Estonia, he said. In that case, attacks had not been conducted by the Russian government, but by “patriotic hackers”.
Crucially, the cyber attacks are being countered by a mass effort of technological support for the whistleblower’s site. About 800 websites are “mirroring” WikiLeaks by adding a sub-domain to their site, which points users to WikiLeaks even if its domain name is removed.
Counter attacks have been mounted against companies that have dropped WikiLeaks. Each of the six companies, including Amazon and eBay, that have severed ties with Assange and WikiLeaks have quickly become the subject of sustained online assault. It took just hours for the Swiss bank, Post Finance, to be brought offline after announcing it was closing Assange’s account.
The ephemeral Anonymous group has claimed responsibility for the attacks, as part of what it calls “Operation Payback”. Anonymous has gained notoriety for attacks on copyright-enforcement agencies and large record labels.
The US justice department has declined to specify what actions attorney general Eric Holder was referring to in relation to Assange.
He said: “I personally authorised a number of things last week and that’s an indication of the seriousness with which we take this matter and the highest level of involvement at the department of justice.” — Guardian News & Media 2010