The opening shot of the First Cyber War was fired when the Obama administration informed a number of Internet companies that had business relationships with WikiLeaks that the whistle blower website was to be boycotted. In short order Pay Pal, Visa and Mastercard ended their relationships with the group, EasyDNS turned hard and Amazon was singing "Hey, You, get off of my cloud!"
At the same time a mysterious series of Denial of Services attacks began to plague the various WikiLeaks websites. These attacks, in which a website is flooded with bogus traffic to block it up, is the kind of thing the government has called cyber terrorism, but given the circumstances and the target, it is hard not to conclude that the government is ultimately behind it. At the same time, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was hounded and ultimately arrested in an 'unrelated' rape change that, excuse my language, doesn't past the sniff test. And Senator Diane Feinstein called for this un-American to be prosecuted for espionage because he has done what the Washington Post did with the Pentagon Papers.
In the latest counter attack the hacker group Anonymous has organized Operation Payback as a hacker respond to those companies that figured the easiest thing to do under the circumstance was to throw WikiLeaks under the bus. Think again! In it's opening salvo, Operation Payback brought the Mastercard and Visa servers to their knees today. In response, Facebook and Twitter shut down Operation Payback's accounts. That'll stop them! As if those accounts were at all important to the groups operations.
Today a new WikiLeaks release went out on schedule and a representative said that the only way the gov't could stop further releases was to shut down the whole Internet, but they can't even do that!
So they thought shutting down WikiLeaks would be easy did they? I know my people. Visa and Mastercard are going to have a very interesting Christmas season. Pay Pal too. Especially Pay Pal. This begins the first serious Cyber War. The Internet will never be the same.
Welcome to the Matrix!
Here is a recap of my other DKos dairies on this subject:
The Internet Takeover: Why Google is Next
BREAKING: Goodbye Internet Freedom as Wikileaks is Taken Down
BREAKING NEWS: Obama Admin Takes Control of Internet Domains!
Things Even Keith Olbermann Won't Cover - UPDATE: VICTORY!!!
Stop Internet Blacklist Bill Now!
Sweet Victory on Internet Censorship: Senate Backs Off!
Internet Engineers tell the Senate to Back Off!
Why is Net Neutrality advocate Free Press MIA?
Obama's Internet Coup d'état
Julian Assange on Threat to Internet Freedom
FCC Net Neutrality's Trojan Horse
Free Press: Country Codes for the Internet?
The Mountain comes to Mohammad
Keith Olbermann's Deception
Court rules -> Google Must Be Evil & Maximize Profits
EFF on the Google\Verizon Net Neutrality Proposal
Google-Verizon: What is the Free Press Agenda?
End of the Internet As We Know It!
Free Press would make this Illegal!
Google Verizon Announce Terms of Deal
