Friday, December 17, 2010

Assange arrives at court for bail fight

Updated 2 hours 35 minutes ago
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has arrived at the High Court in London to fight for bail.
Photographers have swarmed around a white prison van to try to get a picture of the whistleblower.
Dozens of reporters gathered outside the building from 6:00am local time to secure a seat in the courtroom.
Mr Assange was granted a conditional release on $315,000 surety on Tuesday, but Swedish prosecutors are trying to keep him behind bars and will appeal the decision later tonight in the High Court.
He has spent more than a week in prison following his surrender to British police over a Swedish sex-crimes warrant.
He denies any wrongdoing and supporters of the 39-year-old Australian say the charges are trumped up and possibly politically motivated.
The hearing is scheduled for 10.30pm (AEDT).
If released on bail, Mr Assange will have to live at the country estate of Vaughan Smith, a former British army officer who founded the Frontline Club, a media club in London where WikiLeaks has based part of its operations.
The subsequent extradition proceedings could take months.
But before he is freed, his supporters - including maverick US film director Michael Moore, British director Ken Loach and campaigning socialite Bianca Jagger - must come up with the bail money in cash.
One of Mr Assange's lawyers, Mark Stephens, told reporters outside court: "We believe we will have the money today. It appears to be in the banking system.
"We are hopeful, but of course it is a matter entirely for the judge."
The decision to challenge Mr Assange's bail was taken by British prosecutors acting on behalf of the Swedish authorities, but they were forced to defend this decision after the Swedes said they had not been consulted.
"The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) acts here as agents of the government seeking extradition, in this case the Swedish government," Britain's chief state prosecutor Keir Starmer told the BBC.
A spokesman for the CPS said it was common in extradition cases for British lawyers to take decisions on the course of action to be followed without consulting the country which issued the arrest warrant.
- AAP/AFP
Tags: world-politics, information-and-communication, internet, law-crime-and-justice, courts-and-trials, united-kingdom
First posted 3 hours 17 minutes ago
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Thursday, December 9, 2010

WikiLeaks cyber war heats up

By Simon Lauder and staff

There are warnings today that a cyber war over the WikiLeaks cable dump could intensify, after hackers targeted the websites of credit giants Visa and Mastercard.
The visa.com website went down this morning as members of a hackers' group, called Anonymous, launched a coordinated cyber attack announced on their Twitter feed @Anon_Operation.
The attack, and a similar denial-of-service attack targeting Mastercard, came after the firms began blocking payments to WikiLeaks.
And the battle moved into the commercial sphere overnight with allegations the US government is pressuring companies to stop dealing with WikiLeaks.
Online payment service Paypal is the first to admit it froze the WikiLeaks account based on the US government's stance against WikiLeaks.
The Paypal move, as well as Visa and Mastercard's withdrawal of services, are a problem for WikiLeaks because it relies on many small donations to keep going.
WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson called the block on payments "despicable" and accused the three companies of bowing to US government pressure.
"We are looking at new measures to open up a gateway so people can continue supporting us," he said.
"It is an attack on a media organisation and should be of concern to the general public. And indeed it is, as we can feel by the reaction of the general public condemning the decision of these companies."
Hackers have also targeted the website of the Swedish authority which is prosecuting the sexual assault case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and are reportedly considering attacks on Paypal and/or Twitter.
A man who calls himself 'Cold Blood' says he is a spokesman for the activists behind the attacks.
"There's roughly about 1,000 people taking part in the attacks," he said.
"It involves people downloading a tool and becoming part of what's called a voluntary botnet. So they download the software and run it to allow people to control them and attack the same target at the same time."
Experts say it is extremely difficult to track down the authors of denial-of-service attacks, which are illegal in some countries.

More attacks likely

Deakin University's School of Information Systems head Matthew Warren says it is likely the attacks will escalate.
"A number of organisations around the world are refusing payments," he said.
"And I would expect that those organisations themselves would become victims of these type of cyber attacks during the next couple of days. It actually only needs a few people to coordinate those zombie nets."
Professor Warren says large companies are vulnerable to such attacks because of the "sheer volume of information that floods the server [and] slows down the operation".
"What we've seen with these attacks [is] that some have been successful for only a small amount of time, actually sort of impacting operations, slowing it down rather than bringing the site down," he said.
He says today's attacks can be judged a success because they have attracted more attention to the WikiLeaks cause.
"From that point it's been very successful because questions will now be asked. Why is it that they're stopping payments to WikiLeaks but they'll accept payments for pornography sites or for other services that people may question?"
Institute of International and European Affairs senior researcher Johnny Ryan has just finished a study for the European Commission on how to regulate illegal internet content.
He says the WikiLeaks scandal shows governments may not be able to control what is on the internet.
"We are seeing states and governments trying to get to grips with an entirely new digital order, a new system of communications," he said.
"The state is going to have to adapt. And the same goes for business and culture. There are seismic disruptions happening to all of these actors who are used to the old industrial order, and they're going to have to change in the digital era."
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