WikiLeaks Under Fire 282
kan0r writes "The transparency group WikiLeaks.org currently seems to be under heavy fire. The main WikiLeaks.org DNS entry is unavailable, reportedly due to a restraining order relating to a series of articles and documents released by WikiLeaks about off-shore trust structures in the Cayman Islands. The WikiLeaks whistle blower, allegedly former vice president of the Cayman Islands branch of swiss bank Julius Baer, states in the WikiLeaks documents that the bank supported tax evasion and money laundering by its clients from around the world. WikiLeaks alternate names remained available until Saturday, when there seems to have been a heavy DDoS attack and a fire at the ISP. The documents in question are still available on other WikiLeaks sites, such as wikileaks.be, and are also mirrored on Cryptome. Details of the court documents have also been made available."
But why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wikileaks is an interesting website, and I can see no reason why anyone would want to take a site hosting confidential leaked documents from governments and big business offline...
Speaking seriously here, I wouldn't doubt it being a corporate or political DDoS attack, considering the confidentiality of the documents, and how damaging they could be to said companies/governments' reputations. Not a bad thing in my opinion, but they would think otherwise.
Re:But why? (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGmA1Cpmldg [youtube.com]
Re:But why? (Score:5, Interesting)
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What's so hard to believe about this?
Europeans want to vote in US elections: http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/2825 [brusselsjournal.com]
People in the US want to extend US rights to non-US citizens, variously in Guantanamo Bay and for those present on US soil in less than legal circumstances.
Treaties like the UN Law of the Sea Convention want to set up international bodies that can fine countries.
Are we not oozing towards a single world gov
Re:But why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you really sure about the document's scope?
I suppose if you mean the physical territory of these United States, then anyone standing within the borders could be seen as "People of the United States".
Too, WRT Guantanamo Bay, the fact that the detainees are not in CONUS may be seen as keeping them out of legal theory range.
Not here to shill for anybody: it's a debate that reasonable people can chew on for a while.
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I dunno. Am I beavering away on plots to spread mayhem north of the Rio Grande?
This is certainly a fine extreme case, and it's a good thing that we do consider things like waterboarding. The will of the people seems to be strongly opposed. Excellent. Wouldn't want that carried out on me. Like a minefield in the enemy harbor, though, waterboarding isn't so much about the actual yes/no should it be used on
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The selected document evidence exhibits "A" through "O", comprised of selected portions of Plaintiffs' confidential and protected bank files, records, data and consumer account information
Even if they are committing a crime, banking privacy laws still apply.
Now, having said that, I hope the IRS go after these folks.
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Re:But why? (Score:5, Insightful)
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The latter seems unlikely, because if the information was available for any length of time
then it has likely escaped.
Re:But why? (Score:4, Insightful)
"The internet is a bunch of TUBES!!!"
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Re:But why? (Score:5, Interesting)
Besides, what about the mysterious UPS fire? I find that interesting because UPSes, especially commercial grade ones installed in server rooms, typically have safety mechanisms (read: big breaker switches) in them that prevent them from overloading and catching fire. In 15 years of working in server rooms, I've never actually seen one catch fire, though I've heard of a few freak accidents.
Re:But why? (Score:4, Informative)
Wasn't a UPS, but a 3-phase power conditioner for a machine room. Yes, it was a freak accident.
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Maybe they're doing it for publicity purposes
This is What Freenet Was Made For (Score:5, Interesting)
This is why WikiLeaks, although good in theory, won't be able to survive in practice. It is centralized, and being as such it can be subject to attack, threat and intimidation.
Those running WikiLeaks should also post their material to Freenet. This is advantageous for two main reasons: First, insurance against the site going down due to attack, lack of funds, etc. Second, it will prevent attacks in the first place since the attackers know nothing can be gained, there material is already out there and won't be able to be taken down. So even if Freenet isn't to be the main site, it is still useful to have the content on Freenet too.
Re:This is What Freenet Was Made For (Score:5, Insightful)
1/ It's slow
2/ No one uses it
3/ No one uses it because it's so slow
4/ It's so slow because no one uses it
5/ It's not preinstalled on all computers
6/ Its installation is as much jumping through hoops as a first use of Windows Vista
So yeah, backups on FreeNet is a good idea, but hosting the main site? Not if they want to be acessed sometimes.
I'd rather d/l the full archive off The Pirate Bay or Mininova, though. A lifetime of reading about "why all the systems should all be completely transparent to any one in the general public".
Re:This is What Freenet Was Made For (Score:5, Interesting)
I would like to see an update to the bittorrent protocol which allows 'dynamic' torrents. The hashes and files of a directory could be changed as a file is added or changed. Build in some mechanisms so that only the original seeder can make changes and set it up and point it to
First download might take a little long, but everytime someone added/changed a file it would be almost instantly replicated across the torrent network. I know that I'd donate some HD space and an open 'dynamic torrent' in rtorrent for something like this.
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Freenet has improved remarkably. It's certainly not what you'd call fast, but for popular content or anything small (text documents, for example) it isn't bad at all. You'd probably end up waiting several minutes for a 1MiB chunk of text that wasn't overly popular, but that's hardly problematic for something like this.
My usual browsing experience is that Freesites load their text in somewhere between 10s and 60s, with the pictures loading over the course of the next 2-3 minutes. Some load instantly if
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1. It's slower than the regular internet, sure, but that is to be expected. Anonymity and encryption isn't totally free. But it is perfectly usable for things like this.
2. An rapidly increasing number of people are using it. About a year ago, numbers were estimated at about 500. Today it is more like 5000. Due to the anonymity, numbers aren't definite, by design, but there are mechanisms to guess the network size.
3. I don't think Freenet's slowness is the main reason for peop
Re:This is What Freenet Was Made For (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:But why? (Score:5, Funny)
Meanwhile Wikileaks gets to have it's operating premises reinforced, play victim, garner more support, funds, etc.
So you see, it's a win-win strategy all around. What, me cynical?
Restraining order? (Score:5, Funny)
Insult + Injury (Score:5, Funny)
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To those behind the attacks... (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember: What's once on the internet stays on the internet...one way or another.
Just deal with it.
Re:To those behind the attacks... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:To those behind the attacks... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:To those behind the attacks... (Score:4, Insightful)
Still, Slashdot has been designed to handle this much load. Those poor webservers that feel "The Effect" have probably been running perfectly fine at a lower use for years until someone uses them to announce a breakthrough of some sort with images and video and, shortly afterwards they burn out.
Though you missed the 4th possibility: The webserver is a Commodore 64. We only linked to that one once
Re:To those behind the attacks... (Score:5, Interesting)
The page about the C-64 web server, hosted elsewhere and full of pictures, only lasted a few minutes, as I recall.
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And that's not counting other devices running the same TCP/IP stack or OS getting slashdotted.
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You've just become the main suspect.
Must be doing someting right... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Must be doing someting right... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Must be doing someting right... (Score:5, Funny)
Storing data on a UPS? That would be security through obscurity.
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You know you're doing something right (Score:4, Interesting)
Yawn (Score:5, Funny)
Wake me up when the anchor of a ship accidentally cuts every cable around the WikiLeaks server buildings..
Winner: Counter-productive move of the year (Score:5, Insightful)
Could the people leaked about on WikiLeaks really be this dumb? Is there anything that will guarantee that this information will be more broadly distributed and read and more likely to come to the attention of the main stream media?
Why don't they just go the whole hog and DDoS the BBC and CNN at the same time to close the loop.
Re:Winner: Counter-productive move of the year (Score:5, Insightful)
Fortunately, yes, they can, and it seems they are. Not 'dumb' per se, mind you, but operating without any idea of how things work in this day and age, when any information that finds its way onto the Internet is effectively immortal, and any attempts to suppress that information only succeed in calling even more attention to it.
There's no way to silence the truth directly anymore in this new medium. Indirect methods, however, like repeating a lie loudly and often enough, can still be effective.
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Re:Winner: Counter-productive move of the year (Score:5, Funny)
"You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool."
-
Re:Winner: Counter-productive move of the year (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the simplest way to "silence: the truth is to drown it in misinformation (one of the applications of the indirect methods you referred to). Once nobody can tell what the truth is, and what the lies are, then someone trying to hide the truth can breath a little easier.
Modern-day PR hacks are really good at this kind of thing, Third World repressive regimes are still learning how to do it effectively.
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There were quite a few entries linking my nick to my real name in the past - accidential leaks. Nowadays Google provides only false positives. All the old data has expired, died forgotten. If it still exists, it's not being indexed.
Streisand effect (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect [wikipedia.org]
Doesn't necessarily have to be big business/ gov't (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't necessarily have to be big business/ go (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Doesn't necessarily have to be big business/ go (Score:4, Insightful)
Those "citizen groups" are right (Score:2, Insightful)
Some specific points I'd like to discuss:
- What is the point of publishing Coalition "soft spots" to the public? Aren't you just begging for terrorists to attack them? It makes p
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I'm certainly not claiming that our current system is even remotely close to "unbreakable", but you are making the classic argument of "security through obscurity", which is almost as much a logical fallacy when applied to physical security as it is
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That would explain the guano.
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Oh my. The disappointing part of that collection of videos is that Balmer didn't give himself a heart attack. --In any case, it was nice to note that even though the apocalypse arrived and nobody thought to wake me up, I was still able to catch it on Youtube.
-FL
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Questions (Score:2)
Secondly, Does wikileaks hold a record of the DDoS? As in the technical parameters, IPs etc.?
Thirdly, is their a translation to English of the bank records in question yet?
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Is it possible to overload a power supply to the point of fire from a remote location? I've heard of black hats getting into the climate control systems of certain areas and loading up the heat and frying certain parts of computers, but a power supply?
There are UPSes with intelligent controllers [upsforless.ca], of course. I don't really know how easy or difficult it would be to make these cause a UPS to overload, maybe someone else here has knowledge I don't. I would hope anyone using such a controller would take proper safety precautions, such as making them inaccessible from outside the internal network, but you know how smart some people are ... :)
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Re: Question? Answer. (Score:3, Interesting)
Question:
"Is it possible to overload a power supply to the point of fire from a remote location? I've heard of black hats getting into the climate control systems of certain areas and loading up the heat and frying certain parts of computers, but a power supply?"
Answer:
"The trojan has controllers on the universal power supply."
http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/articles/11372/33500/threaded#33500 [securityfocus.com]
http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/articles/11372/34207/threaded#34207 [securityfocus.com]
If it can help... (Score:5, Informative)
Personally I can resolve the wikileaks.org hostname from time to time only. Their website is still accessible from my network location (SoCal): http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks [88.80.13.160]
$ dig wikileaks.orgwikileaks.org. 864 IN A 88.80.13.160
wikileaks.org. 864 IN A 87.106.162.82
wikileaks.org. 198841 IN NS ns3.everydns.net.
wikileaks.org. 198841 IN NS ns2.everydns.net.
wikileaks.org. 198841 IN NS ns4.everydns.net.
ns2.everydns.net. 101251 IN A 204.152.184.150
ns3.everydns.net. 12596 IN A 208.96.6.134
ns4.everydns.net. 601 IN A 64.158.219.3
(special message dedicated to whoever wrote the slashdot lameness filter: foobar foobar foobar foobar foobar foobar foobar foobar foobar foobar foobar foobar foobar foobar foobar foobar foobar foobar foobar foobar foobar foobar foobar foobar foobar foobar foobar foobar foobar foobar)
The Text: "Clouds on the Cayman tax heaven (Score:3, Informative)
Clouds on the Cayman tax heaven
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Is David helvetic and Goliath a bear?
DANIEL SCHMITT
2008-02-15
This is the story of Rudolf Elmer of Switzerland, former Chief Operating Officer of Bank Julius Baer on the Cayman Islands. The story of a man suspected of leaking to the press information about the activities of a Swiss bank specialized in hiding and laundering the money of the ultra rich through anonymizing offshore tru
This is why.... (Score:2, Interesting)
..WikiLeaks is a flawed idea.
What they should have is a very simple page at WikiLeaks.com instructing people on how to easily download, install and use FreeNet [freenetproject.org], with FreeNet links to a FreeNet-hosted WikiLeaks website.
Then the site would not easily be able to be brought off line, because no one would know where it was hosted (since it is not actually hosted *anywhere*)
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I still say that their biggest mistake was to use Java to write it.
It uses really incredible amounts of resources. Back when it appeared, a computer with 128-256MB RAM was decent. Problem is that Freenet brought this hardware to its knees. My server had load averages of 20, it was unbearable. Even if I could have dedicated this box to Freenet exclusively, a loadavg of 20 means it's not getting nearly all the time it wants, which adds to
Clouds on the Cayman tax heaven REPOSTED HERE (Score:5, Informative)
Is David helvetic and Goliath a bear?
DANIEL SCHMITT
2008-02-15
This is the story of Rudolf Elmer of Switzerland, former Chief Operating Officer of Bank Julius Baer on the Cayman Islands. The story of a man suspected of leaking to the press information about the activities of a Swiss bank specialized in hiding and laundering the money of the ultra rich through anonymizing offshore trust structures. It also is the story of a man and his family living with the consequences of being suspected of fouling the nest of a traditional Swiss bank engaging in dubious activities. This story might differ from previous ones related to this issue, mainly because while researching the story, Rudolf Elmer has also been asked for his account of things.
Over the last few months Wikileaks has obtained and published various documents related to allegedly illegal activities in the Cayman Islands performed by Bank Julius Baer and started initial research into these. Regarding the same bank Wikileaks had obtained legal documentation on the case of a Rudolf Elmer, former debuty head of BJB cayman, in a Dec 2007 Zurich court case against Bank Julius Baer. The law suit relates to various irregularities of health-care/social-security payments by the bank, as well as the matter of stalking (including at least one acknowledged car chase) Elmer and his family by BJB-hired Private Investigators Zurich-based Ryffel AG,
Initial research easily turned up that 2002/2003 some sensitive documents had slipped out of the Swiss banks office in the Cayman Islands, apparently reaching US tax investigation units and eventually sent to the Swiss financial magazine CASH, which reported on the disclosure, but possibly due to an injunction or Swiss banking law, not the details. This event also triggered an article in the Wall Street Journal an article in Swiss Weltwoche [weltwoche.ch], titled "The leak in paradise", giving background information on what happened back in 2003 on the Caymans.
When the leak of trust structures was discovered in 2003, Bank Julius Baer initiated legal investigations on the Caymans, involving the search of the home of each employee and when not gaining any insights from that, undertaking a polygraph test on the employees. It still remained unclear where the data went.
The group of people having legitimate access to these documents was small, Rudolf Elmer, who was BJB Caymans deputy head and Chief Operating Officer at that point in time also fulfilled the position of Hurricane Officer, whos duties included keeping backups. Elmer, facing a spinal surgery coming up in a few days time, was on sick leave and had some trouble scheduling the test. He thus became a suspect.
The Polygraph Test
The transcript of the polygraph test conducted by a Lou Criscella and passed on to Wikileaks is very abstract to read with names of clients being substituted with single letters. While not all the context thus is properly understandable, the transcript does not show any wrongdoing.
Reading the transcript one gets the impression that data has slipped out of the Cayman Islands as early as 1997, and timelining the transcript with a couple of later documents will also reveal that Elmer is accused of having leaked data that was produced after the date that he left from the Caymans.
Elmer complained to the American Polygraph Association, the institution his interrogator works for, the Cayman Prime Minister and other entities about the conduct of the test.
Normally sick people would not be interviewed, but the APAs Ethics Commission, stated in a letter that the ethical rules for polygraphing do not apply to the Cayman Islands, and as the test had not been fully carried out, most of the APA rules would not apply anyway. He was informed there are no regulations on the Caymans for polygraph tests as in the United States.
Good way to help WikiLeaks (Score:2)
This is a real way of hitting back - respond to this attempt at burying WikiLeaks by giving them extra publicity!
The people vs the banks (Score:2)
Privacy for all or nothing (Score:5, Interesting)
For this reason, if you want truth, and are that interested in the truth, then you should advocate the full public disclosure of all corporate, charitable and government documents. Since this covers just about everyone, it follows that there should be no privacy at all and we ought to live in a world where everything is online. The alternative is to accept that there is a right to privacy, and if so, then institutions such as wikileaks ought to be viewed with a well deserved deep distrust, as the outcome can only be ultimately political.
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Just killing the privacy of "the rich" (like e.g. the riaa currently is) will unfortunately cause the elimination of everyone's privacy (and this is not "Bush's fault", not even China's, and not anyone's, it's a somewhat-less-obvious truth of the world we live in, like gravity is). Enforcing everyone's privacy rights, including the right of "the rich" to keep their ideas limited to
Re:Privacy for all or nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
I think this is a false choice. Why should we be forced to choose between a complete lack of transparency within government-chartered and/or publicly-traded organizations and no privacy--for anyone--at all?
There can be a reasonable balance between transparency and privacy. Trade secrets, proprietary processes, and national secrets, I agree, should be undisclosed, but should things like financial records, safety/environmental studies, and so on should be publicly available. If businesses don't like that, then they could easily remain private, un-incorporated entities.
Well, of course wikileaks can be used as a political tool. But if that leads to the exposure of corruption and fraud--who cares?!? I would expect that, over time, organizations like wikileaks, even if they are biased, would come to compete in exposing dirt from opposing sides. In fact, I see no reason why anyone should be against such a situation, because all true capitalists love competition (right?) and everyone wants to end corruption and fraud (right?). So what's the problem?
-Grym
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The thing is, all of the deliberations behind what you suggest have dark sides as well. There's always going to be someone who writes a few emai
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Explicitly enumerating the specifics of such a policy would undoubtedly be left up to the courts to decide and was not the point of my post. I was merely observing that both privacy and transparency are not mutually exclusive and how maximizing utility of a situation such as this is likely to be achieved by focusing on what benefits the public the most.
-Grym
Privacy for no one, then. (Score:2)
Let me explain.
Privacy is a stopgap measure. It existed to ensure that those who had better access to information and more power to act on that information could not use that to dominate the rest of us. If everyone has equal access to information, then we can know when someone is trying to use their power
Re:Privacy for all or nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
All of the power of shame is based in the belief that somehow, you are the only one. And most of the power of secrets is based in the idea that you have more power derived from them the fewer in the loop.
However, you present a false dichotomy. You make a fair representation for legal entities to have no right to privacy, but then make the spurious leap that it would then follow that no one should have privacy. Regardless of my agreement of that view, there are numerous shades of grey between a corporation/government group and an individual.
Missing something (Score:4, Insightful)
Stupid is as Stupid does. (Score:4, Interesting)
Psychopaths live in utterly false realities where their idea of how things work totally overshadows how things actually work. --But it does make them dangerous and tiresome, because they just keep trying to kill and destroy things and they never stop. It's like having somebody constantly trying to break down your Leggo structure while you're trying to build it. --And they'll also go running to the teacher to try to get you in trouble for the shit they're pulling.
--And information does vanish if you don't work to keep tabs on it. --The prime minister of Canada was caught trying to hide his millions worth of personal wealth from taxation in such an off-shore scheme, but it's very hard to find that info now.
One of the most effective ways for information to get lost is when the key word for the issue happens to be the same as for some other totally unrelated item which happens to be many times more current and popular. That one is frustrating.
-FL
WIKILEAKS under fire... (Score:2)
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http://gaddbiwdftapglkq.onion (Score:5, Informative)
Guess I should have posted this as an anonymous coward
What's Its IP#? (Score:2)
The court has targeted WikiLeaks' DNS registrar, not WikiLeaks itself with this order. So WikiLeaks shouldn't have to depend on DNS while it defends itself.
What's the
WikiLeaks.org at IP#: 88.80.13.160 (Score:5, Insightful)
Spread the word. DNS can be replaced, with some inconvenience, with manual labor.
WikiLeaks.be Address (Score:5, Informative)
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hosts file entry. (Score:2)
In this way, you will bypass the absurd DNS injunction, and undermine the courts. (But wait, SCO has already done that.)
"The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around."
Depending on your OS you may need to log on to root to edit this file. If wikileaks.org ever changes its IP address y
BBC - result of the Julius Baer case (Score:5, Informative)
Libel or tortious interference? (Score:2)
It's not DoS, it's by Court Order that shut it (Score:3, Informative)
The case was brought by lawyers working for a Swiss bank
A controversial website that allows whistle-blowers to anonymously post government and corporate documents has been taken offline in the US.
Wikileaks.org, as it is known, was cut off from the internet following a California court ruling, the site says.
The case was brought by a Swiss bank after "several hundred" documents were posted about its offshore activities.
Is Dynadot to blame? (Score:3, Interesting)
A stipulation is an agreement between two parties in a lawsuit that a certain fact or issue is not contested. What exactly did Dynadot stipulate to? Was it just that they were indeed the registrar for wikileaks.org, or was there more?