LONDON — A small army of activist hackers orchestrated a broad campaign of cyberattacks on Wednesday in support of the beleaguered antisecrecy organization WikiLeaks, which has drawn governmental criticism from around the globe for its release of classified American documents and whose founder, Julian Assange, is being held in Britain on accusations of rape.
Targets included Mastercard.com, which stopped processing donations for WikiLeaks; Amazon.com, which had briefly provided WikiLeaks server space; the online payment service PayPal, which cut off its commercial cooperation with WikiLeaks; the lawyer representing the two Swedish women who have accused Mr. Assange of sexual improprieties; and PostFinance, the Swiss postal system’s financial arm, which closed Mr. Assange’s account after saying he provided false information by saying that he resided in Switzerland.
Anonymous, a leaderless group of activist hackers that had vowed to wreak revenge on any organization that lined up against WikiLeaks, claimed responsibility for the Mastercard attack, and, according one activist associated with the group, was conducting multiple other attacks.
That activist, Gregg Housh, said in a telephone interview that 1,500 activists were on online forums and chatrooms including Anonops.net, mounting mass and repeated “denial of service” attacks on sites that have moved against Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks in recent days.
The hacker army has rallied around the theory that all the actions against the organization and against Mr. Assange, including the rape accusations, are politically motivated efforts to silence those challenging authority.
“To all of us,” he said, “there is no distinction. He is a political prisoner and the two things are completely entwined.”
Mr. Housh, who has worked on previous campaigns with Anonymous but disavows any illegal activity himself, said it was the first time the group had enough firepower to bring down well-secured blue chip companies like Mastercard. “No tactics have changed this time,” he said, “but there is so much support and there are so many people doing it that sites like that are going down.”
The group, which gained notoriety for their cyberattacks on targets as diverse as the Church of Scientology and the rock musician Gene Simmons, released two manifestos over the weekend vowing revenge those who moved against WikiLeaks after the organization’s recent release of classified diplomatic documents from a cache of 250,000 it had obtained.
“We fight for the same reasons,” said one. “We want transparency and we counter censorship.”
Mr. Assange was jailed in Britain on Tuesday after being denied bail in a London court hearing on a warrant for his extradition to Sweden to face accusations of sexual offenses. On the courthouse steps, his lawyer, Mark Stephens, told reporters that support shown for Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks so far was “the tip of the iceberg.”
In words that now seem prophetic, he added that the battle for WikiLeaks and its founder’s future was “going to go viral.”
By: Ravi Somaiya (ny times)
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