Infowar

2010-12-07T13:03:00+00:00

Unless you have been living under a rock the last week you cannot have missed the latest wikileaks data dump. This iteration of leaks had lead to what could possibly be described as the Internets first Infowar. Aside from the predictable Denial of Service attacks there has also been political pressure on hosting providers and sources of funding for the organisation. The most effective act so far was EasyDNS dropping support so wikileaks.org no longer resolves to IP address. This makes it a lot harder for non-technical people to find the raw data even though the servers are still up.

The response has been predictable, the Wikileaks site has now been massively mirrored making suppression of the data a game of whack-a-mole. It's also trivially simple to setup a redirect to Wikileaks' real IP address.

Perhaps realising that technical measures aren't going to stop the spread of information there has also been an intense focus on Wikileaks founder and front-man Julian Assange. By far the most public face of the organisation he has faced calls for extra-judicial assassination as well as rather nonsensical treason charges. This includes the rather unprecedented Interpol involvement resulting in his arrest for questioning on rape allegations. It's certainly the story that keeps on giving.

There are some problems with the current raging war. The mirroring system used by wikileaks is akin to giving some random unidentified stranger the keys to your front door. Without a domain name they can't effectively use SSL so you can be positive the site your talking to is Wikileaks and not some false flag operation. Without digital signatures for the mirrored data you can't be sure that what your reading hasn't been tampered with by that host. It will be interesting if they ever mirror the site on Freenet and we can find out exactly how censorship resistant it is. However these are all peripheral to the main story. We are watching Internet history unfold.

Alex's Adventures on the Infobahn - infowar

Infowar