By Jason Von Kundra
The assault on Wikileaks and its founder, Julian Assanage, continued this week with the arrest of Assange in London. While Wikileaks has not been charged or convicted with a crime, the organization is being punished politically, technologically, and financially for Cablegate, a mass leak of government documents released in the vision of an open government with accountability and transparency.
An arrest warrant was issued Tuesday for Assange in Sweden on alleged sex charges. The UK justice system refused bail to Assange. While the charges are unrelated to Cablegate, the charges are trumped up as a political move by the US, France, and other governments, making Assange a political prisoner.
In an open letter to Austrian Prime Minister Gillard, 185 academics, lawyers, and journalists acknowledged the violent personal attacks on Assange by Sarah Palin, right-wing journalists, and William Kristol, former chief of staff to the vice president. The letter urges the prime minister to give Assange the rights and protections that he is entitled to under the law.
In addition to personal jabs at Assange, Wikileaks is experiencing an onslaught of aggression from financial and technological institutions. One such attack is a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that shut down the http://wikileaks.org/ website on December 3rd. Here are just some of the major assaults against Wikileaks, taken from a piece published in the Guardian:
Sunday 11/28
Wednesday 12/1
•Politics: Lieberman, chairman of the Senate's committee on homeland security, calls for Wikileaks to be taken offline.
Friday 12/3
•Politics: French industry minister Eric Besson writes to internet companies warning them there will be "consequences" for any companies or organisations helping to keep WikiLeaks online in the country.
Saturday 12/4
•Money: PayPal, owned by US auction site eBay, permanently restricts account used by WikiLeaks
Monday 12/6
•Money: Credit card company Mastercard withdraws ability to make donations to Wikileaks.
In a response to these attacks, a group of hackers called Anonymous have defended Wikileaks by going after their attackers through coordinated actions called Operation Payback. On Monday, the group shut down the website for Swiss bank PostFinance after the bank froze Assange’s legal defense fund account of $41,000. On Wednesday, Operation Payback shut down Master Card and Visa’s websites and Paypal’s website for their block on donations to Wikileaks. Additionally, Sarah Palin’s personal credit card information and political action committee website were allegedly hacked.
Despite all the attacks against Wikileaks, the organization has continued to release government documents and receive financial support unabated. TIME argues that Wikileaks is winning the war. “The more Assange is set up by world powers, the more powerful his own movement [for an open government] becomes.”
