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."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news...
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From: NMAWorldEdition | 07 December 2010
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
http://www.nma.tv/
Julian Assange through his Wikileaks website promises greater government transparency. But his document dumps have angered officials around the world.
US Senator Joseph Lieberman has pressured internet companies to withdraw their services from Wikileaks. Rather than protect internet freedom, Amazon and PayPal have willingly complied with US demands.
Assange is the subject of death threats. Some government officials say he should be assassinated. Sarah Palin said he should be hunted down like a terrorist.
Efforts to take down Wikileaks have proven futile, thanks to mirror sites.
Meanwhile, Assange has been arrested in the UK on rape charges. He has vowed to release more documents in a 'nuclear' option if arrested or killed.
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1.53pm:Evgeny Morozov, a Standford University academic who writes about politics and the internet, is troubled by the consequences of Anonymous' Operation Payment.
The that Anonymous chose to go after Visa and MasterCard has created all sorts of other challenging issues. While the attacks targeted only the public web-sites of these companies -- rather than the underlying infrastructure that allows card transactions to be processed -- such subtleties are likely to get lost in the public debate. As far as policymakers are concerned, these attacks would be viewed as striking at the very of the global economy (even if they obviously aren't in reality). It's still not clear to me whether any credit card data has been leaked or compromised as a result of such attacks, even though Anonymous posted some links to such data on their Twitter feed. This too won't matter, as most people would assume that data has, in fact, been stolen.
He urges WikiLeaks to distance itself from Anonymous:
All in all, if the public continues to associate WikiLeaks with hacking and cyber-attacks -- rather than, say, providing a safe platform for whistleblowers -- this will greatly erode the goodwill that WikiLeaks has built over the course of the last few months by increasing their cooperation with media organizations and NGOs.
1.37pm: The latest cables leaked describe Hugo Chávez's Venezuelan government as too shambolic and broke to exploit uranium or build nuclear reactors, writes Rory Carrol.
Rory Carroll byline
A confidential cable from John Caulfield, the deputy chief of mission, said Washington had little reason to fear Venezuelan plans to exploit uranium with Iranian help and build a reactor with Russian help.
"Although rumours that Venezuela is providing Iran with Venezuelan-produced uranium may help burnish the government's revolutionary credentials, there seems to be little basis in reality to the claims," said the 2009 cable.
Rory also reports that Chávez is desperate to attract foreign partners after nationalisation frightened many away:
Venezuela's tottering economy is forcing Hugo Chávez to make deals with foreign corporations to save his socialist revolution from going broke.
The Venezuelan president has courted European, American and Asian companies in behind-the-scenes negotiations that highlight a severe financial crunch in his government.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news...Originally collected by
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