Showing posts with label WikiLeaks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WikiLeaks. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

UAE considered keeping Hamas hit under wraps: WikiLeaks


DUBAI (Reuters) – The United Arab Emirates chose to release details of a Hamas leader's assassination in Dubai nearly a year ago, after deciding silence would be seen as siding with Israel, U.S. cables released by WikiLeaks showed.
The assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in an hotel room -- which UAE police said was very likely the work of Israel's Mossad spy agency -- was carried out in January by a team using forged passports and disguises.
"The two options discussed were to say nothing at all, or to reveal more or less the full extent of the UAE's investigations," U.S. Ambassador Richard Olson wrote in a diplomatic cable, citing a conversation with a UAE government media adviser.
Saying nothing "would have been perceived as protecting the Israelis," the ambassador wrote. The cables released on the WikiLeaks website show the hit was discussed for nine days at the highest levels before being released to the public.
"The statement was carefully drafted not to point any fingers, but the reference ... to a gang with Western passports will be read locally as referring to the Mossad," Olson wrote.
Israel has said there was no proof that its intelligence agency was behind the murder, which eliminated a Hamas leader suspected of smuggling arms into the Gaza Strip.
Dubai officials were not immediately available for comment on the cables.
As Dubai splashed details of the hit, complete with surveillance camera footage and passport scans, a diplomatic row erupted since many of the suspected assassins were traveling on forged European passports.
The cables, written soon after the assassination, do not reveal the identities of the agents. But Dubai's police chief Dahi Khalfan Tamim had said he expected they would show that Mossad was involved in the murder.
"The documents will surely prove to those who doubted us," Tamim said, Gulf News quoted him as saying in a report last Friday.
(Reporting by Martina Fuchs; editing by David Stamp)
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Monday, December 20, 2010

Assange Case Files Leaked: What Goes Around Comes Around?


The founder of WikiLeaks is (in)famous for blowing the whistle on governments by leaking documents and cables. Now the tables have turned on Julian Assange with the releasing of secret government documents about the rape charges filed against him -- and in an ironic twist, his lawyers are furious.
According to the Atlantic Wire, the loud decry of the leaked government documents containing details of the rape charges against Assange is, according to his lawyers, "among the most audacious and least self-aware complaint of all time."
(See Assange in Person of the Year 2010.)
To add insult to injury for Assange, the Swedish police files were leaked to the Guardian, the same British newspaper that WikiLeaks handed thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables. His lawyers believe that the leaked documents unfairly damage his defense case and they are angered at what they allege is a political agenda behind the leaks.
(See TIME's interview with Julian Assange.)
But whether they are being released by him or about him, it seems that leaks are synonymous with Julian Assange.
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Is Pakistan Losing Patience in the War on Terror?


On Saturday, in answer to a New York Times article, Pakistan's secretive spy agency denied that it had exposed the identity of a senior CIA official in Pakistan, causing him to abruptly leave Pakistan. In a briefing held on background, an official of the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) couldn't have made it more categorical: "We absolutely deny this accusation, which is totally unsubstantiated and based on conjecture."
Short of a smoking gun, we'll have to take the Pakistanis' word for it. CIA cover is never perfect, and this wouldn't be the first time that a CIA officer has been forced to leave his post in the middle of the night.
But what can't be dismissed is the suit filed by a Pakistani tribesman in which he accuses the CIA of murdering his brother and his son in a drone attack. According to press reports, none of which have been confirmed by the CIA, it was the appearance of the station chief's name in a filing in this suit, along with unspecified threats, that caused him to be pulled. Regardless, the suit itself could be an ominous sign that the Pakistanis may be coming to the end of their rope in the "war on terror."
Here's why: I have long known that the ISI oversees the judiciary, from the appointment of judges to interfering in cases that harm national security. There are no exceptions. If there were a Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, he'd be behind bars - for life. In other words, it's all but certain that the ISI greenlit the case brought by the tribesman for the death of his brother and son.
The ISI's power in the judiciary hit home for me two years ago. My wife and I were winding our way through the Pakistani court system as part of an adoption. I wondered right from the beginning how often ex-CIA agents had appeared before Pakistan's notoriously conservative judiciary - and what the government would think about us, or if it might even block the adoption. Every lawyer I talked to assured me that the government - the ISI - wouldn't care about a civil case. When I asked whether the ISI intervened in cases touching national security, they only smiled.
In trying to figure out what's happening in Pakistan these days let's not fool ourselves. The ISI is not a rogue agency that does exactly what it wants. It falls squarely under Pakistan's military. The commander and chief controls the budget as well as personnel appointments. At any time, he can remove the ISI's director. And since Pakistan's military is the ultimate executive authority in the country, it would be safe to conclude Pakistan itself permitted the suit against the CIA.
Conceding that I've climbed out on a long speculative limb - but who doesn't when it comes to Pakistan? - we should be wondering just how much purchase we've lost in Pakistan. They want our money, but not our drones. They don't want the United States to fall into the arms of India, but they also do not intend to kowtow to us. They want to be a part of any settlement in Afghanistan, but they won't or can't bring the Taliban under control. But now, with leading elements of the country possibly going after the CIA, whether it's by leaking a name or by fighting it in the courts, we should start wondering whether Pakistan is done with the bargaining on the war on terror.
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Sunday, December 19, 2010

WikiLeaks Reveals BP's 'Other' Offshore Drilling Disaster

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A BP offshore oil platform suddenly shows signs of a potentially devastating leak. Bubbles form in the seawater. Alarms sound. Panicked oil workers flee the rig. That may sound like the moments that preceded last April's Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, but it actually describes an event 19 months earlier, in the Caspian Sea waters of tiny Azerbaijan. There are uncanny echoes of the Azerbaijan incident in the Deepwater Horizon tragedy, including the likely cause - a faulty cement job. But there was one marked difference: While the Gulf explosion created an ongoing political firestorm, the Azerbaijan leak remained almost forgotten until last week, when another leak - this time of diplomatic cables, released by WikiLeaks - showed just how close BP had come to a major disaster in the Caspian.
A series of cables by then U.S. Ambassador in Baku, Anne E. Derse, chronicled a growing testiness between BP and the government of Azerbaijan, whose long borders with Russia and Iran and vast Caspian energy reserves give it strategic importance way beyond its small size. BP commands enormous clout in Azerbaijan, having invested $4 billion in gas and oil pipelines from Baku, which travel through Georgia to the Turkish port of Ceyhan, giving energy-hungry Western Europe a supply channel that bypasses Russia.
But the partnership with the Azeri state energy company SOCAR was strained to the limit one morning in Sept. 2008, when a blowout in a gas-injection well on BP's Central Azeri platform prompted the emergency evacuation of 212 workers, and shut down large parts of the offshore production in the Caspian's Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli (ACG) field. That accident deprived the Azerbaijan government of revenues of up to $50 million a day during the weeks when production plummeted, according to the leaked cables. "It is possible that BP Azerbaijan 'would never know' the cause of the gas leak," Ambassador Derse wrote to her bosses in Washington on Oct. 8, 2008, citing confidential talks with the American head of BP Azerbaijan, Bill Schrader. "BP is continuing to methodically investigate possible theories." A later cable says BP concluded that "a bad cement job" caused the leak. BP has not said which company was responsible for that cement work, and its 2008 annual report offered few details. The leak is mentioned on page 28 of the report, where it is stated only that production had resumed "following comprehensive investigation and recovery work."
The cables, first published in London's Guardian, demonstrate the sharp contrast between the saturation coverage of the Gulf blowout, and the Azerbaijan leak that was barely covered in the local press. "Unless you were on the inside you didn't know how serious it was," says Edward Chow, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "It hit the trade press, so if you were reading Platts [a specialist oil newsletter] you would have seen it." BP said in a statement published in the Guardian that the company "enjoys the continued support and goodwill of the government and the people of Azerbaijan," and that its discussions with the government are confidential.
The pipeline project has always had a strong geopolitical undertone. A former aide to President Heydar Aliyev told TIME in an interview in Baku in 2006 that President Bill Clinton had urged the Azeri leader in 1994 to construct the pipeline link with Europe as part of "a very strategic plan" to bypass Russia and Iran. But the primary concern following the Caspian platform leak was less on potential diplomatic consequences in a region at the epicenter of energy-driven strategic contest but on the financial losses Azerbaijan suffered after BP's leak. "Schrader said although the story hadn't caught the press's attention, it had the full focus of the GOAJ [Government of Azerbaijan]," Derse wrote, "which was losing '40 to 50 million dollars' each day."
That loss seems trifling by comparison to the $40 billion or more in cleanup costs and legal liabilities that BP faced over the Gulf disaster, even before last week's Obama Administration decision to sue BP and eight other companies involved in Deepwater Horizon. And the revelations about the Caspian incident may have government lawyers picking over the details in search of a pattern of lax safety on BP platforms. In the Caspian leak, the gas did not ignite, and all the workers made it safely off the rig - a far happier outcome than in the Gulf. In what could be seen in retrospect as another portent of things to come, Ambassador Derse described the Azerbaijan government's annoyance over what they said was BP's secretiveness about the incident - a charge which would be repeated by President Barack Obama less than two years later, when he lashed out at BP for obfuscating over the Gulf blowout.
Chow also suggests that the suspicion that both accidents were caused by cement work around the wells could suggest a "systemic" problem with regard to BP's wells. "If you look at the larger picture, BP has had safety problems for more than five years now," Chow says. "It has been well documented, even before the Azerbaijan news."
In one cable from the embassy in Baku in October 2008, a U.S. diplomat says "BP has closed off a 'few suspect wells' from which they think a bad cement job caused the leaking gas." That, the diplomat says, "is actually good news, since had it been a reservoir leak the damage would have been potentially non-reparable, whereas now all BP has to do is fix the cement job." The repair work is "hard and expensive ... but preferable to losing the platform." By April 2010, that assessment would read like a gross understatement.
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Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Sweden appeals UK granting bail for Julian Assange

LONDON, ENGLAND - DECEMBER 07: Julian Assange...

LONDON – A British judge granted Julian Assange bail on Tuesday but the WikiLeaks founder will remain in custody for at least another 48 hours after Swedish prosecutors said they would challenge the decision.
Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, has already spent a week in a U.K. jail following his surrender to police in a Swedish sex-crimes investigation. He denies any wrongdoing and his lawyers say he plans to fight Sweden's extradition request.
Britain's High Court will hear the Swedish appeal, although it wasn't immediately clear when.
Assange's lawyer Mark Stephens said his client's relief at the bail decision had already evaporated, calling it "unfortunate" that "the Swedes won't abide by the umpire's decision."
"They clearly will not spare any expense but to keep Mr. Assange in jail," Stephens told journalists outside the City of Westminster Magistrates' Court in London. "This is really turning into a show trial."
Celebrity supporters in the court and pro-WikiLeaks protesters outside the building had earlier cheered Judge Howard Riddle's decision to free Assange.
Assange's mother Christine, who was flown to Britain by Australian media outlets, watched the hearing nervously from the public gallery but gave a huge smile as the judge announced his decision.
"I just want to thank everyone who's turned up to show their support and who's taken an interest," Christine Assange said.
Under the ruling Tuesday, Assange would be subject to strict bail conditions. Stephens said the court was demanding 200,000 pounds ($316,000) in bail up front before Assange could be freed. He would also have to wear an electronic tag, live at a registered address, report to police every evening and observe two four-hour curfews each day.
Several wealthy supporters have put up a total of 240,000 pounds ($380,000) as a guarantee for Assange, his lawyers said.
Assange's next court appearance was set for Jan. 11, ahead of a full hearing on Feb. 7 and 8.
Lawyer Gemma Lindfield, acting for Sweden, had asked the court to deny Assange bail because the allegations in Sweden were serious, Assange had only weak ties to Britain and he had enough money "to abscond."
At a court hearing last week, Lindfield said Assange is accused of rape, molestation and unlawful coercion. She told the court one woman had accused Assange of pinning her down and refusing to use a condom on Aug. 14 in Stockholm. That woman also accused of Assange of molesting her.
A second woman has accused Assange of having sex with her without a condom while he was a guest at her Stockholm home and she was asleep.
In Sweden, a person who has sex with an unconscious, drunk or sleeping person can be convicted of rape and sentenced to up to six years in prison.
Assange denies the allegations and has not been charged in Sweden. His lawyers say the allegations stem from a dispute over "consensual but unprotected sex."
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Friday, December 10, 2010

Guantanamo files may star in next WikiLeaks release

Logo used by WikileaksImage via Wikipedia
(Reuters) - WikiLeaks' next assault on Washington may highlight U.S. government reports on suspected militants held at Guantanamo Bay, which some U.S. officials worry could show certain detainees were freed despite intelligence assessments they were still dangerous.
The leaks could be an embarrassment to President Barack Obama's administration, already angered over WikiLeaks document dumps of U.S. State Department cables, as it seeks to fulfill a 2-year-old pledge to close the prison and either release the foreign terrorism suspects or move them elsewhere.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, jailed in Britain this week, has told media contacts he has a large cache of U.S. government reports about inmates at the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, known as GITMO, the last of four major tranches of U.S. government documents which WikiLeaks had acquired and at some point would make public.
"He's got the personal files of every prisoner in GITMO," said one person who was in contact with Assange earlier this year.
Officials at the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies had no immediate comment.
People familiar with Assange's dealings with the media said they had no indication he had already given journalists access to the Guantanamo material. In the past, large document dumps by WikiLeaks were made available initially to a small group of media.
Several U.S. government sources said there was concern Assange's material could include highly sensitive "threat assessments" by U.S. intelligence agencies gauging the likelihood that specific inmates would return to militant activities if set free.
These assessments, if published, could prove damaging in a number of ways, including revelations that could theoretically put in jeopardy U.S. intelligence sources and methods.
They could further embarrass the U.S. government if they show that detainees deemed likely to return to terrorism were released and subsequently involved in anti-U.S. violence.
It is unclear what time period may be covered by the Guantanamo documents believed to be in WikiLeaks' possession.
The prison at a U.S. naval base in Cuba was opened to house prisoners taken in the U.S.-led Afghan war launched by President George W. Bush soon after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. It has been controversial as a legal limbo, and Obama said on taking office in January 2009 that he wanted to close it in a year.
BACK TO THE BATTLEFIELD
This week the office of the Director of National Intelligence, the government's top intelligence official, released statistics showing that one in four of the 598 detainees released from Guantanamo are either suspected or confirmed to have become re-engaged in "terrorist or insurgent activities" after their release.
U.S. agencies believe that 83 remain at large.
WikiLeaks has already released three batches of classified U.S. documents, including Pentagon reports on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and 250,000 State Department cables, whose recent release is currently roiling the diplomatic world.
WikiLeaks began posting material on numerous mirror websites around the world after one of their main U.S.- based hosts, Amazon, cut them off for violating terms of service.
Assange, in British custody after sexual misconduct allegations involving two Swedish women, has threatened to release a deeply encrypted "insurance file," believed to be yet another massive collection of government data, if WikiLeaks' existence is threatened. It is not known whether this file contains Guantanamo material.
On Wednesday, Assange's lawyer, Mark Stephens, told Reuters that because WikiLeaks websites were still operating, there was no plan to release "insurance file" at the moment.
(Editing by Andrew Quinn and Doina Chiacu)
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Activists target Dutch website after boy arrested


(Reuters) - Cyber activists attacking organizations seen as foes of WikiLeaks briefly blocked a Dutch prosecution website on Friday after a 16-year-old boy suspected of involvement in the campaign was arrested in the country.
The campaigners also tried to block the website of online payment firm Moneybookers, but denied their attacks were intended to create business turmoil or badly disrupt online Christmas shopping.
Several companies have ended services to WikiLeaks after it published thousands of secret U.S. diplomatic reports that have caused tension between Washington and several of its allies.
The website continued its release of U.S. cables on Friday, with the latest reports including a prediction by the U.S. ambassador to Cairo that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak would "inevitably" win 2011 polls and stay in office for life.
The Dutch prosecution service said activists targeted its website with "denial of service" attacks that slowed it down for several hours in the morning and briefly made it unavailable, adding the incident was probably related to the boy's arrest.
"We have been investigating this with international authorities and we are working together with the FBI," Dutch prosecution service spokesman Wim de Bruin said, referring to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.
On Friday a Rotterdam judge ordered the boy, who was arrested in The Hague on Thursday in connection with the cyber attacks, to spend the next 13 days in custody while the investigation continues, the prosecution service said.
The suspect had told investigators he participated in the attacks on the websites of MasterCard and Visa. He is being held at a juvenile prison, De Bruin said, without offering more details about the boy's identity or background.
The attack on Moneybookers appeared to have frozen the site for about two minutes at about 1235 GMT but it subsequently came back online. The activists promised to continue their assault and spoke of MasterCard and Interpol as fresh targets.
Activists said Moneybookers had become a target because it had informed WikiLeaks in August it had closed its account.
Some participants in a chat room used by the so-called Operation Payback campaign voiced despair at what they saw at its lack of organization and discipline.
"The whole thing is getting out of control, people are attacking local police websites and giving us a bad reputation. This was supposed to be to help WikiLeaks and not an excuse for kids to crash random websites," one wrote.
Others were defiant. "If we don't panic, and we get bigger, no one can stop us," wrote a chat room participant.
In a statement, Moneybookers confirmed its website had been unavailable for a few minutes but the service was back up.
"We have been tightening security and applying additional vigilance which means that despite the attacks we continue to provide our service to users and merchants 24/7," it said.
The activists, who collectively call themselves Anonymous, said in a statement they were not hackers but rather "average Internet Citizens" whose actions were merely symbolic.
"We do not want to steal your personal information or credit card numbers. We also do not seek to attack critical infrastructure of companies such as MasterCard, Visa, PayPal or Amazon," the statement said.
"SYMBOLIC ACTION"
Online retail and web-hosting powerhouse Amazon stopped hosting WikiLeaks' website last week, and on Thursday it briefly became the main target of the pro-WikiLeaks campaigners -- before they admitted it was too big for them, for the moment.
The Anonymous statement added that a lack of firepower was not the only reason the attack on Amazon had not succeeded. It felt "attacking a major online retailer when people are buying presents for their loved ones, would be in bad taste."
The Anonymous statement followed one by WikiLeaks which said the website had no links to the cyber attacks, and neither supported nor condemned them. The statement quoted WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson as saying the attacks were "a reflection of public opinion on the actions of the targets."
"Organize FOR SUCCESS"
Some freedom of information campaigners sympathetic to WikiLeaks look askance at the attacks, saying its cause cannot be furthered by denying freedom of information to others.
On an online chat service used by the campaign, participants debated whether to end the attacks and focus instead on discovering more embarrassing material in the leaked documents.
Another statement purportedly from Anonymous organizers called on activists to stop attacking for the moment and await instructions. "We have to organize for success," it said.
(Additional reporting by Georgina Prodhan in London, Marius Bosch in Johannesburg and Greg Roumeliotis in Amsterdam)
(Writing by William Maclean; editing by David Stamp)
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Thursday, December 9, 2010

Operation Payback: Who Are The WikiLeaks "Hactivists"?


A hacking group simply identifying itself as "Anonymous" has taken credit for a recent string of high-profile cyber attacks against the websites of businesses, banks and politicians that have either spoken out against or stopped doing business with whistleblowing site, WikiLeaks.
Since Monday of this week, targets have included Swiss financial institution PostFinance, Joe Lieberman, Sarah Palin, MasterCard, Visa, Paypal and, most recently, Amazon.com.
While the group's members are, like their namesake, anonymous, this recent bout of attacks isn't the first of its kind by those involved.
Anonymous
Anonymous has claimed responsibility for cyber attacks against various targets since 2006, including a well-documented series of attacks against the Church of Scientology in 2008.
You'll recall that early in 2008, a video featuring Tom Cruise that was produced by the Church of Scientology found its way onto YouTube somehow and was removed after the organization accused YouTube of copyright infringement. In retaliation for what it deemed as censorship, Anonymous launched a series of attacks against the Scientology website and organized several in-person protests at Scientology centers.
The group's name, Anonymous, is believed to be a nod to the 4chan internet forums. Members are permitted to post forum topics under the name "Anonymous," which may be part of the reason our own Lev Grossman half-jokingly described the site as "a wretched hive of scum and villainy."
Though the content contained on 4chan can definitely get a bit rough around the edges, the site has spawned some of the more memorable internet memes in recent history—Rickrolling being one of the most popular—and has an uncanny ability to mobilize its users for or against certain causes.
While some members of Anonymous may also be 4chan members, a person believed to be involved with the @Op_Payback Twitter account told Mashable, "Make sure everyone knows that we are not 4CHAN. 4CHAN has nothing to do with this."
Operation Payback
Anonymous launched what it calls Operation Payback in September of this year, with the goal of disrupting targets that it sees as overly aggressive when attempting to enforce copyright law.
The group has taken down the websites of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in recent months, accompanied by attacks on a pair of KISS front man Gene Simmons' websites after he advised attendees at a media industry convention to "Be litigious. Sue everybody. Take their homes, their cars. Don't let anybody cross that line," in response to piracy.
In the past week, Anonymous has shifted its Operation Payback efforts towards banks that have blocked payments to WikiLeaks or frozen WikiLeaks' assets, and has gone after several companies that have recently stopped doing business with WikiLeaks.
Operation Avenge Assange
It appears that Operation Payback has spawned a new initiative known as Operation Avenge Assange. A recently-created flyer from the group says that WikiLeaks founder "Julian Assange deifies everything we hold dear" and urges people to "spread the current leaked cables" and even to "upvote" Assange on TIME's 2010 Person of the Year list.
The flyer also indicates that distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks will be planned and, indeed, several have already been carried out against companies such as Paypal, Visa and MasterCard—with Amazon next.
A spokesperson for the group told The Guardian the following:
"We're against corporations and government interfering on the internet. We believe it should be open and free for everyone. Governments shouldn't try to censor because they don't agree with it.
"Anonymous is supporting WikiLeaks not because we agree or disagree with the data that is being sent out, but we disagree with any from of censorship on the internet. If we let WikiLeaks fall without a fight then governments will think they can just take down any sites they wish or disagree with."
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks
The methods used by groups like Anonymous to take down its target websites vary in scope, but many fall under the umbrella of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. DDoS attacks are generally automated, highly-repetitive requests by a large number of individual computers for access to certain files or pages on a target website to the point that the servers running the website get overloaded and either slow to a crawl or shut down.
Supporters of Anonymous' initiatives use software known as the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) that's generally used by network administrators to stress test their networks. However, Anonymous uses a modified version of the software that lets users target a specific website en masse and basically stress test it repeatedly until it stops functioning.
Recent Attacks
Recent attacks against websites under the guise of Operation Avenge Assange have been as follows:
Monday 12/6
PostFinance: Swiss bank accused of freezing WikiLeaks assets
Tuesday 12/7
Swedish Prosecution Authority: Issued warrant for Assange's arrest in London
EveryDNS: Handled the routing of traffic to WikiLeaks.org website but stopped providing service after being overloaded with traffic and DDoS attacks against WikiLeaks
Wednesday 12/8
Joe Lieberman: Attempted to stop WikiLeaks from releasing recent diplomatic cables
MasterCard: Stopped WikiLeaks payment processing services
Borgstrom and Borstrom: Swedish law firm representing the two women who have accused Assange of inappropriate sexual contact
Visa: Stopped WikiLeaks payment processing services
Sarah Palin: Referred to Assange as "an anti-American operative with blood on his hands."
Thursday 12/9
Paypal: Stopped WikiLeaks payment processing services and froze WikiLeaks assets (assets have since been released)
Amazon.com: Removed WikiLeaks documents from its servers, and is selling WikiLeaks documents as a Kindle e-book
UPDATE: It looks like the group's attack on Amazon.com has been called off. A representative apparently told Mashable, "With the Amazon attack, they are simply toooo big for us right now. Maybe at a later time we can try again with them."
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Anna Ardin, Julian Assange Rape Accuser, May Have Ceased Pursuing Claims


The rape accusations against Julian Assange may be falling apart as one of his accusers leaves Sweden. Anna Ardin, one of two women behind the rape charges against the WIkiLeaks founder, may no longer be cooperating with prosecutors, the Australian website Crikey reports.
Julian Assange has been fighting sex charges from Sweden and is now in British custody. According to Crikey:
Ardin, who also goes by the name Bernardin, has moved to the West Bank in the Palestinian Territories, as part of a Christian outreach group, aimed at bringing reconciliation between Palestinians and Israelis. She has moved to the small town of Yanoun, which sits close to Israel's security/sequestration wall. Yanoun is constantly besieged by fundamentalist Jewish settlers, and international groups have frequently stationed themselves there. 
Attempts by Crikey to contact Ardin by phone, fax, email and twitter were unsuccessful today.
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Facebook deletes pro-WikiLeaks hackers' account

LONDON (Reuters) – Facebook and Twitter deleted the accounts of cyber activists who targeted Visa and other Internet payment sites that sought to block the WikiLeaks website after its release of U.S. diplomatic cables.
Facebook confirmed it had removed the activists' Operation Payback site on Thursday because it was promoting a distributed denial of service attack -- an illegal form of freezing websites. Twitter declined to comment.
The swoop against Operation Payback's self-described campaigners for Internet freedom followed their online attacks on credit card giants like Visa and MasterCard.
The campaign reappeared on Twitter later in the European afternoon using another account. Experts said the outages were unlikely to have much effect on the pro-WikiLeaks cyber campaign as activists were using separate chatrooms to organize.
A representative of one of the groups involved in the online campaign said on Thursday that more cyber attacks in reprisal for attempts to block the WikiLeaks website were likely.
On Thursday, supporters of WikiLeaks were plotting attacks on online payment service PayPal and other perceived enemies of the publisher, which has angered U.S. authorities by starting to release details of 250,000 confidential cables.
Amazon was also cited as a target.
"The campaign is not over from what I've seen, it's still going strong. More people are joining," a spokesman calling himself "Coldblood" told BBC Radio 4. The speaker, who had an English accent, said he was aged 22 and was a software engineer.
NEITHER "VIGILANTES" NOR "TERRORISTS"
"Anonymous has targeted mainly companies which have decided for whatever reason not to deal with WikiLeaks. Some of the main targets involve Amazon, MasterCard, Visa and PayPal."
The websites of credit-card giants MasterCard and Visa have already been brought down through distributed denial-of-service attacks that temporarily disable computer servers by bombarding them with requests.
In a statement on Thursday, MasterCard said although there was a limited interruption of some online services, cardholders could continue using cards for transactions worldwide. Its main processing systems were not compromised, the statement said.
AnonOps also claimed responsibility for bringing down Visa Inc's site, which was temporarily unavailable in the United States, but later restored.
In an online letter, Anonymous said its activists were neither vigilantes nor terrorists. It added: "The goal is simple: Win the right to keep the Internet free of any control from any entity, corporation, or government."
Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet said the Swedish government's website was down for a short time overnight in the latest apparent attack.
Sweden has issued an arrest warrant for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange over sex crimes and he is in jail in London, awaiting an extradition hearing.
Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, has been hailed as an advocate of free speech by supporters, but now finds himself fighting serious sexual allegations made by two women in Sweden.
Assange will have another court appearance next Tuesday and his supporters assert he is being victimized for his work.
MORE SECRET CABLES RELEASED
In the Internet Relay chat channel where activists coordinated the attacks, conversations were short and to the point. Participants asked what the target should be and reported progress. Some bemoaned the fact that paypal.com remained up despite efforts to bring down its transactions server.
"The only thing most of these CEOs understand is the bottom line. You have to hit them in the bank account, or not at all," said one participant called Cancer.
WikiLeaks is continuing to drip-feed cables into the public domain despite the legal woes of its founder.
Those released on Thursday showed U.S. diplomats reporting that the illicit diamond trade in Zimbabwe had led to the murder of thousands, enriched those close to President Robert Mugabe and been financed in part by the central bank.
Assange's online supporters hit the corporate website of MasterCard on Wednesday in reprisal for its blocking of donations to the WikiLeaks website.
"We are glad to tell you that http://www.mastercard.com/ is down and it's confirmed!" said an entry on the Twitter feed of a group calling itself AnonOps.
"Coldblood" said a battle was under way to protect the Internet. "I see this as becoming a war, but not your conventional war. This is a war of data. We are trying to keep the Internet free and open for everyone, just the way the Internet always has been," "Coldblood" added.
Assange's main London lawyer has denied that the WikiLeaks founder ordered the attacks.
"It's very hard to get hold of anyone from WikiLeaks. The only (person) you could really get hold of was Julian, but unfortunately he's not available at the moment," said "Coldblood."
(Additional reporting by Patrick Lannin in Stockholm, Ben Deighton in Brussels, Georgina Prodhan in London and Marius Bosch in Johannesburg)
(Writing by Keith Weir and William Maclean; editing by Mark Heinrich)
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Tuesday, December 7, 2010

WikiLeaks founder Assange refused bail by UK court


(Reuters) - WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has angered U.S. authorities by publishing secret diplomatic cables, was remanded in custody by a British court on Tuesday over allegations of sex crimes in Sweden.
Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, had earlier handed himself in to British police after Sweden had issued a European Arrest Warrant for him. Assange, who denies the allegations, will remain behind bars until a fresh hearing on December 14.
He has spent some time in Sweden and was accused this year of sexual misconduct by two female Swedish WikiLeaks volunteers. A Swedish prosecutor wants to question him about the accusation.
WikiLeaks, which has provoked fury in Washington with its publications, vowed it would continue making public details of the 250,000 secret U.S. documents it had obtained.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates welcomed news of the arrest. "I hadn't heard that but it sounds like good news to me," Gates told reporters during a trip to Afghanistan.
At a court hearing in London, Senior District Judge Howard Riddle said: "There are substantial grounds to believe he could abscond if granted bail."
He said the allegations were serious, and that Assange had comparatively weak community ties in Britain.
His British lawyer Mark Stephens told reporters a renewed bail application would be made, and that his client was "fine."
"We are entitled to appeal to a higher court, to the High Court, and we are also entitled to go again in the magistrates court at another date," he told reporters.
He said many people believed the prosecution was politically motivated, and that he would be "released and vindicated."
But a Swedish prosecutor was cited in newspaper Aftonbladet as saying the case was not a personal matter and was not connected with his WikiLeaks work.
CELEBRITIES OFFER TO STAND SURETY
Assange, dressed in a navy suit and wearing an open-neck white shirt, initially gave his address in court as a PO Box in Australia. Pressed for a more precise address, he gave a street in Victoria, Australia.
Australian journalist John Pilger, British film director Ken Loach and Jemima Khan, former wife ofPakistani cricketer and politician Imran Khan, all offered to put up sureties to persuade the court Assange would not abscond.
Pilger, who offered 20,000 pounds ($31,600), told the court: "These charges against him in Sweden are absurd and were judged absurd by a senior Swedish prosecutor.
"It would be a travesty for Mr Assange to go within that kind of Swedish system."
Vaughan Smith, founder of the Frontline journalists' club in London, said Assange had worked out of the club for the past several months. Smith said he had offered him use of the club address for his bail request.
"I am suspicious of the personal charges that have been made against Mr Assange and hope that this will be properly resolved by the courts. Certainly no credible charges have been brought regarding the leaking of the information itself," Smith said in a statement.
The U.S. government and others across the world have argued the publication of cables is irresponsible and could put their national security at risk.
The WikiLeaks website was shut down after apparent political pressure on service providers, but WikiLeaks said there were now 750 global mirror sites meaning the data so far released remained publicly available. More cables would be released later on Tuesday, it said.
Lawyer Gemma Lindfield, representing the Swedish judicial authorities, said the extradition case contained allegations of four sexual assaults by Assange against two women in Stockholm in August 2010. One charge over Miss A is that Assange "sexually molested her" by ignoring her request for him to use a condom when having sex with her.
Another charge relates to "Miss W," who alleged Assange had sex with her without a condom while she was sleeping on August 7.
Swedish prosecutors opened, then dropped, then re-opened an investigation into the allegations. The crime he is suspected of is the least severe of three categories of rape, carrying a maximum of four years in jail.
Assange's Swedish lawyer has said his client would fight any extradition and believed foreign powers were influencing Sweden.
Swiss PostFinance, the banking arm of state-owned Swiss Post, has closed an account used for WikiLeaks donations and online payment service PayPal has also suspended WikiLeaks' account. Visa Europe said on Tuesday it had suspended payments to the WikiLeaks website.
(Additional reporting by Mia Shanley in Stockholm and Sudip Kar-Guptaand Angus MacSwan in London; Editing by Maria Golovnina)

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