
Will someone finally do something to stop Julian Assange and his Wikileaks?
We know Obama, being as weak kneed as a 90 year old grandmother, won’t but it appears the Russians will. According to Philip Shenon the Russians are pissed and are about to do something about it:
American intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, outraged by their inability to stop WikiLeaks and its release this week of hundreds of thousands of sensitive U.S. diplomatic cables, are convinced that the whistleblowing website is about to come up against an adversary that will stop at nothing to shut it down: the Russian government.
As U.S. officials struggle to control damage from the secret cables exposed by Wikileaks, Russia is planning to block a similar dump about the Kremlin.National-security officials say that the National Security Agency, the U.S. government’s eavesdropping agency, has already picked up tell-tale electronic evidence that WikiLeaks is under close surveillance by the Russian FSB, that country’s domestic spy network, out of fear in Moscow that WikiLeaks is prepared to release damaging personal information about Kremlin leaders.
~~~Assange has courted attacks from the Russian government, telling a reporter from the pro-government daily newspaper Izvestia last month that WikiLeaks had obtained damaging information “about Russia, about your government and businessmen” and “we will publish these materials soon.” Another WikiLeaks spokesman was quoted as describing the Russian government as “despotic.”
~~~Russian intelligence agencies have suggested, none too subtly, that WikiLeaks could be destroyed through cyberwarfare methods if the whistleblowing site did begin to create trouble in Moscow. Last month, the Russian news agency Life News quoted an official from the FSB’s Center for Information Security as saying that the government would be capable of organizing “the right team” to target WikiLeaks and “shut it down forever.”
And within an hour of this report the Wikileak site was brought down:
The WikiLeaks website said it came under a forceful Internet-based attack on Tuesday morning, making some of the content, including the controversial “Cablegate” documents, inaccessible for hours to users in the U.S. and Europe.
The site appears to have responded by switching its main hosting base from Sweden to the U.S., making it available again.
~~~“We are currently under a DDOS attack,” according to one tweet early Tuesday. Shortly after 9 a.m., another tweet was sent, saying, “DDOS attack now exceeding 10 Gigabits a second.”
~~~…. According to a study by Internet security company Arbor Networks, the average denial of service attack over the past year was 349 megabits per second, 28 times slower than the stream Wikileaks reported.
The question is, will they stop at cyber attacks? Putin has friends in organized crime, wealthy and powerful friends, and I’m sure they can get it done. Or will the Russian FSB do it themselves?
I know…sounds like a movie, but don’t discount it. Assange has the arrogance, narcissism, and stupidity to follow through with his threats and the Russians won’t have any of it I’m thinking. Even now he is lecturing Hillary Clinton to resign:
Hillary Clinton, Julian Assange said, “should resign.” Speaking over Skype from an undisclosed location on Tuesday, the WikiLeaks founder was replying to a question by TIME managing editor Richard Stengel over the diplomatic-cable dump that Assange’s organization loosed on the world this past weekend. Stengel had said the U.S. Secretary of State was looking like “the fall guy” in the ensuing controversy, and had asked whether her firing or resignation was an outcome that Assange wanted. “I don’t think it would make much of a difference either way,” Assange said. “But she should resign if it can be shown that she was responsible for ordering U.S. diplomatic figures to engage in espionage in the United Nations, in violation of the international covenants to which the U.S. has signed up. Yes, she should resign over that.”
In his twisted mind he thinks he has the world on its knees, and while Obama is most certainly a man who can be pushed around, I find it highly unlikely Vladimir Putin is.

See author page
Regarding the theory that Assange is narcissistic enough to embarrass the Russian leadership: A popular alternative view is that he knows damned well what would happen to him and is too scared to try it. Instead, he’ll stick to proving his ‘courage’ by attacking governments that he knows perfectly well won’t really go after him, like our own.
I subscribe to the latter view. I think when he talks about embarrassing Putin et al, it is just gas and empty talk.
Until your post I hadn’t even thought of this, Curt.
But remember all of those dead Russian reporters?
Heck, how often to Russian reporters walk into an open elevator shaft anyway?
Assange might have been able to walk all over countries with a past reputation for free speech, but Russia has never had much love for the free flow of information.
Under Putin in just the one year (2000)
Assange messed with the wrong guys!
The Ruskies kill about that many journalists every year!
Assange is an anarchist. Pure and simple.
Interpol Issues Arrest Warrant for WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/11/30/interpol-issues-arrest-warrant-wikileaks-founder-julian-assange/
He had better hope that Interpol gets to him first.
Oh please publish your expose about the Kremlin. Please.
There are two powers in Russia, the KGB and the Mob. The KGB is the more powerful, but either way, if you want to do business in Russia, you must have the “protection” of one or the other.
The KGB is the government (Putin), and it has all of its influence (military,) ergo, this WikiLeaks meatball isn’t about to piss-off anyone anywhere near the Kremlin. They’d be able to find him anywhere, and are RW&A to make him disappear. Nan’s list above is a good example. The last decade of assassinations of heads of banks, etc. are ample example of what Putin and friends are capable of. . . . It shows how little Assange fears the U.S. & Great Britain, unfortunately.
Do NOT mess with the Rooskies! They WILL take you out!
The Rooskies straight up KILL people that cross them. I hope Ass-ange crosses them.
this WikiLeaks meatball isn’t about to piss-off anyone anywhere near the Kremlin.
Those dead Russian reporters knew what they were up against and tried their luck anyway. I expect Assange to do the same; he’s in a better situation than most of them, after all, what with being able to hide among a large network of friends. Also ‘arrogant’ is a far more accurate description than ‘coward’, based on his actions to date.
In any case, Assange is the current front man but wikileaks is a distributed organization. Killing him won’t stop anything. The DDOS is also more or less a failure.
Okay, so if one deals in pirated (stolen) DVDs and CDs in America, you WILL face the wrath of the Justice Department, but if you deal in stolen (pirated) military and intelligence documents, you get a pass.
Way to go Holder and Obama…
Not only that, but DHS went out and seized the websites (domain names) of various sites that illegally hosted copyrighted material, but haven’t made any attempt to do the same to wikileaks. There may be technical reasons- I don’t know how DNS resolution plays out for an internationally hosted site, and DHS may not have enough authority to demand that someone’s DNS entry be blackholed /redirected to them. But the reasons could also be legal.
Why is the US government not shutting these US based servers down for trafficing in stolen Federal Documents. that is a Federal Offense?
Putin to Assange: “One word: polonium!”
It may be disinformation but Assange’s own lawyer is saying that Assange is in the UK right now.
The Globe and Mail reports:
WikiLeaks website founder Julian Assange is in Britain and police know his whereabouts but have refrained so far from acting on an international warrant for his arrest, a British newspaper said on Thursday……
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/europe/wikileaks-assange-in-britain-and-police-know-where-report/article1821721/
@anticsrocks #9: I agree. Any fence who knowingly accepts stolen property can be prosecuted. Why not Assange? He knowingly accepted and published private government documents. He should be under a jail somewhere. Surely they have some space left at Guantanamo.
In Russia you can download any DVD from the state-wide networks in about 2 weeks after the official release of a film. You can do that without any risk of punishment.
As to the killed journalists list – shame on you! We – russians know about such crimes and in america they are all under “top secret” protection. 🙂
Also I don`t understand what all this fuss is about. All this Assange-published information is known and discussed for years all over the world, but not in America and Western Europe. So Assange said something new only to Americans, but not to anybody else. I think you should get rid of all patriotic shit in your brain and say “thank you” to the man who open your eyes to what all the other world knows for ages.
@Mikhail: Well what a nice thing to say, that we are shit for brains. I will refrain from slinging names back at you.
The material that Assange is making public is not his property and it is also more than just rumors that everyone in the world is talking about.
Try getting your facts straight before you sling mud next time.
Or as Abraham Lincoln put it, after borrowing from Solomon:
Better to remain silent and thought a fool, than to speak out and remove all doubt.
The law is different in the peace and the war time.
Your patriotized TV demonstrated fictive evidence about wars in the world. So they steal the truth – the property of american citizens and others. And the Assange steal it back to you!
Say him ”Thank you” – he steal back your own stolen property 🙂 Robin Hood did the same thing.
@Mikhail: Robin Hood – the original socialist?
Not exactly sure what you said, but I will say this, the only one with shit for brains is Assange.
In the countries other than US and Western Europe it has become a tradition – to watch funny stories about “Western patriotic TV”. For example in the time of the Georgia-Abhazia war CNN demonstrated video materials showing a city in Abhazia and said that they are in the Georgia. Your TV simply lies to your and shows fictive documents. 20 years ago – in the time of USSR – we had the same thing in our country. Our TV simply lied to us.
I mean TO LIE IS TO STEAL THE TRUTH – YOUR OWN PROPERTY. So liers must compensate you the stolen thing. And Assange simply does it for you. He compensate you what was stolen from you.
You are right – Robin Hood is a bad example – he is a criminal.
Policeman is a better example – he return stolen things.