You're not sure whether Aunonymous [sic] leaked credit card data? In a DOS attack? How would that work?

You also seem to have missed that SecureCode support was affected (in terms of server response), whether this was deliberate or not.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/blog/2010/dec/08/wikileaks-us-embassy-cables-live-updates

Sadly Ev i think your right, people will start to miss the details and just see 'Anonymous attacked X bank', symptom of humanity.

The BBC managed to make it fairly clear - the two groups are unconnected in any way, as Anonymous had repeatedly stated.

It's like asking you to distance yourself from Sarah Palin's comments.

It's not 'the internet' any more, it's the 'internets', and I'm not making a bad joke, ICANN and the USG won't control squat for much longer...the only thing they can do is isolate the United States of America, imagine the sight of 'The Great Firewall of America'!

America's high minded shining city on a hill, leader of the free world, exceptional blah blah blah brought down by a little bit of truth, and worst of all, self inflicted... hilarious...

Julian Assange shouldn't win the Nobel Peace Prize he should win a comedy award!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/blog/2010/dec/09/wikileaks-us-embassy-cables-live-updates

2.57pm: Wikileaks is trying to distance itself from Anonymous, sort of:

WikiLeaks is aware that several government agencies and corporations, including the Swedish prosecutor, Mastercard, PayPal and State.gov have come under cyber-attack in recent days, and have often been driven offline as a result.

The attacks are of a similar nature to those received – and endured – by the Wikileaks website over the past week, since the publication of the first of 250,000 US Embassy Cables.

These denial of service attacks are believed to have originated from an internet gathering known as Anonymous. This group is not affiliated with Wikileaks. There has been no contact between any Wikileaks staffer and anyone at Anonymous. Wikileaks has not received any prior notice of any of Anonymous' actions.

Wikileaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson said: "We neither condemn nor applaud these attacks. We believe they are a reflection of public opinion on the actions of the targets."

I'm surprised that this article does not mention 4chan even once. As far as I'm aware, they're the main ones behind the denial of service attacks. People on their /b/ board are all "anonymous", thus the name of the "group". I don't think it's so much them caring about foreign policy as it is them hating The Man.

I bet half of Anonymous will get bored by this in a week or two, a month maximum, like they always do. Let's remember, its members come mainly from 4chan's very own /b/ board, not exactly the most centralized and committed force on the Internet. They are good at handling targets on a short term basis, but their commitment to long term attacks should be put into question, specially as the mainstream media starts noticing that Denial of Service attacks aren't really that dangerous to global institutions.

But I do have a feeling NSA and several other intelligence agencies across the globe are gonna be paying more attention to everything that goes on in the "chan" image boards, if they haven't started already, mainly because said boards have been a clear gathering spot for individuals promoting a wide range of criminal activities, actual "hacking", identity theft, privacy concerns,child porn distribution, and others .

Sadly Ev i think your right, people will start to miss the details and just see 'Anonymous attacked X bank', symptom of humanity.
www.dokunbana.com

"Assange Calls For Obama's Resignation If Confirmed President Approved UN Spy Ring"

This is like a foot soldier calling for Ulysses S. Grant to resign during the Appomattox campaign of 1865. President Obama is keeping a steady hand on the tiller of world affairs. Julian Assange is acting like an anarchist gossip merchant.

I repeat...

Some things must remain private and confidential. In any organisation whether it be a corporation, government, defence force or charity there is a hierarchy of awareness and responsibility. Certain people are invested with executive decision making. Obviously these people should be employed on merit. Pure anarchic openness of all information sources leads to mass confusion, as people are unable to prioritise and process the data. A happy child trusts his parents to make good decisions on his/her behalf. That is why we need command and control structures in place around the world. When people feel that their confidences can be betrayed at the click of a mouse they are loathe risking authentic connections with others. We actually need more respect for intellectual property and healthy boundaries everywhere right now, not less.

P.S. What does it say about Mr.Assange's respect for healthy boundaries and the concept of sovereignty that he so recently had casual, unprotected sex ?

As you can see by the reaction of the left to the Wikileaks take down, the youth of today are very adept at using the Internet and their considerable computer skills to disrupt and even shut down a major company via cyberspace.

Not only should major companies be very concerned about this trend, governments around the world should be aware of the ability and determination these radiclas have to disrupt commerce and even daily life.

"A cyber attack on America's financial and economic nervous system will be the next Pearl Harbor." - K.T. McFarlane, former Bush National Security Advisor

“There is now a statement on Anonymous/DDoS posted on WikiLeaks' site. They distance themselves from the attack -- which is good -- but don't really say what they feel about it (which is not so good...)”.

The idea of Wikileaks expressing feelings is bizarrely anthropomorphic.

I find it amusing that the hacker group attacking on behalf of transparency is called "Anonymous".

Also,
"I don't think that their attacks are necessarily illegal or immoral. As long as they don't break into other people's computers, launching DDoS should not be treated as a crime by default"

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't DDOS attacks usually harness botnets (hundreds or thousands of unwitting, usually home computers) to do the attacking? The implication being that they have already broken into other people's computers

Let's remember, its members come mainly from 4chan's very own /b/ board, not katalog firmexactly the most centralized and committed force on the Internet. They are good at handling targets on a short term basis, but their commitment to long term attacks should be put into question, specially as the mainstream media starts noticing that Denial of Service attacks aren't really that dangerous to global institutions.

Morozov joins the other major media whitewashing Anon.

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2010/12/major-media-white-washing-4chan-anonglobalpr-agitprop.html

This article is morally disgraceful in every regard. The sly and even sinister diminishing of the actual immorality and criminality of both WikiLeaks and the Anonymous b/tards are outrageous. The attacks these technocommunists made -- and that is precisely the term to use about them, their ideology, and their methods -- are indeed meant to assault capitalism and the institutions of free society. These people even attacked the "progressive" Electronic Frontier Foundation which champions freedom of expression (albeit usually in the forum of attacking copyright) merely because the EFF expressed its unhappiness with Anon's vigilante methods. Morozov left that bit out.

Parsing their attacks as "not really" attacking infrastructure is facetious. In fact they do damages, and we don't always know the extent of them, and the attacks aren't over.

The leftist Guardian reported that trading was down for the days of these attacks and indeed attributed to them -- that's not good enough for evidence of harm for Morozov? And Paypal's payment mechanism *was* attacked.

Minimizing this coercion and violence as merely a "civil disobedience" as if these people were Gandhi does a disservice to the noble traditions of civil disobedience for reasons of *conscience*. These people don't have a conscience; they are morally void and legally nihilist.

The real question is why someone who blogs on the establishment Foreign Policy and enjoys a visiting scholarship position at Stanford and other institutions of the establishment feels the need to join the underminers of these institutions and make common cause with them -- continously. Have a look at Morozov's Twitter feed to see the unseemly enthusiasm he's showing for these vandals.

The utopianist way in which Morozov keeps giving these people directives -- they need to get better PR, they need to switch tactics -- on Twitter and his NYT piece advocating a giant monopolist platform for leaking -- a Ministry of Truth -- let's us know his vision: it's an awful one.

To pretend that WikiLeaks has no relationship with Anonymous -- when one Anon member has already been sentenced to jail for Sarah Palin's e-mail hack -- is to imagine we are all as clueless as the mainstream media just hearing about these Leninist groups for the first time. Just look at the overlap between all the people who downloaded insurance.aes256 and who launched the LOIC attack. It's the MO of both these mendacious covert anarchist cooperatives to lie about the nature of what they do, and pretend they are unrelated. And old story in the annals of conspiracies. Keep looking.

Unfortunately for Morozov, he cannot move fast enough to sanitize the already black reputation of WikiLeaks and Anon-- their Bolshevik methods do that for them thoroughly. The Pentagon Papers involved high-placed government officials who gave their files willingly and knowingly and worked with professional journalists and lawyers on a matter of conscience where they already had a record of concern. The sullen uneducated goons of WikiLeaks and Anon don't even know what they are dumping on to the Internet, and they have obtained it by force and without authorization, not with consent.

The cyberattacks are likely to continue because the establishment will not yield to bullying by thugs. The public will never be convinced that people who steal files without CONSENT are to be trusted. The U.S. will likely find some means of prosecuting, or more likely sanctioning Assange and WikiLeaks which is their right, and there will be more circling of the wagons and closure of information portals. And that's what Assange sought all along, "the worse, the better" as he openly explained, to destroy the U.S.

Washington's Internet Freedom Agenda isn't so much duplicitious as it is superficial. But Morozov's agenda is no better - it's a frank, beligerent call to arms by thugs in the name of undermining civil society, and it is only thinly cloaked in scholarly rhetoric.