Operation Payback/ Avenge Assange

So, we are back on the Wikileaks thing again. Despite my best arguments to myself, I could not convince me not to write about this. Moving swiftly on from my mild DID, we need to jump back in time a little. So, do you remember when the original Wikileaks stuff happened? Well, shortly after that, Wikileaks took a huge blow to the coffers. Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and others stopped accepting payments to Wikileaks' financial wing, shall we say?

Now, the reasons for stopping the payments varied, both on and off the record, but the gist of it was "violation of terms of service." Every time you sign up to another site, or install some software there is always a ToS or EULA that you have to agree to. Violating either basically constitutes breach of contract and you can be charged accordingly. So all these companies claimed breach of contract and shut down payments pending further investigations.

Now, this didn't sit well with some people on the Internet, namely Anonymous (pause for ironic effect.) Anonymous is basically a collection of individuals who post on forums, mostly 4chan, under known aliases. They are highly vocal about pretty much anything and participate in "hacktivism" and real activism, such as this. In truth it is slightly more complex than that and could fill a whole book, which I will probably never right, so somebody go ahead and do it, provided I am consulted and credited for the idea.

So, Anonymous are ticked off and decide to exact some payback (note the choice of words, specifically the usage of the word pay) on the payment proccessors. They look into their bag of tricks and whip out a classic: the DDoS attack (I will explain DDoS attacks in a future post). This was codenamed Operation Avenge Assange and came under the general umbrella of Operation Payback. I could explain the nuances, but I really don't want to get into, so sorry folks. Basically, they attacked various financial institutions and others and even took down Visa's and MasterCard's websites.

How it was actually done is kind of hazy, but as far as I know, people installed clients that would respond to an IRC trigger and act like a bot in a botnet (again, an explanation on botnets in a future post) to attack whatever target was named in the trigger. This would then allow a single person to have 100's and 1000's of computers attacking the desired target and thus lending more weight to the attack.

Now here's the thing, executing or participating in a DDoS is ILLEGAL. There is no room for discussion on this one. The legality of Wikileaks can be debated, but on this topic, the law is explicit. What they did was illegal, end of discussion.

Recently a few people have been arrested in connection to this, which they should be. Anonymous has retaliated saying that this should be considered a form of protest and freedom of speech and all manner of other things. Well, it's not protest, it's a crime. End of. They even went so far as to threaten the Government of the United Kingdom.

And throughout all of this, nobody realises the irony of the association between Wikileaks and Anonymous. Where Anonymous is rooted in the concealing of certain information, Wikileaks' founding principle is the full disclosure of information. I say nobody realised this, but Randall Munroe did and he showed it here. (PS xkcd = highly recommended by me)

I've said my piece and I'm done with this. I will post about the newer developments but in no real detail. As I've said before, this whole episode just pushed my buttons, so I'm going have as little to do with it as possible.