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.
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