Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Millions at stake with WikiLeaks and Julian Assange





With major positive changes in my life in the search of 5 Million Euros and just recently moved into a new home, I feel confident with the white winter snow falling in Helsinki, important changes are taking place, Europe's top central banker Jean-Claude Trichet tried to calm the financial markets after another turbulent day when the borrowing costs of several major economies remained at unsustainably high levels.

Amid signs that the contagion from Ireland's debt crisis was spreading to some of the biggest economies in the 16 nation eurozone, the premium demanded by investors to hold Spanish, Italian and Belgian government bonds compared with German bonds touched record levels.

French, Portuguese and Irish bonds were also caught up in the rout. However, Europe's political leadership remains adamant that the currency can survive and Jean-Claude Trichet, the European Central Bank president, waded into the argument by calling for more, not less, harmonisation within the eurozone as the way out of trouble.

Then we see the political game between North and South Korea we have to remember that the main engine for any economy is war, and then the reason of my writing today
and to distract us a bit we have the interesting case of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange the leader of an organization devoted to divulging the world’s secrets using technology unimagined a generation ago.

Over the last year his information insurgency has dumped 76,000 secret Afghan war documents and another trove of 392,000 files from the Iraq war into the public domain–the largest classified military security breaches in history.

Sunday, WikiLeaks made the first of 250,000 classified U.S. State Department cables public,the cables, which date from 1966 up until the end of February this year, contain confidential communications between 274 embassies in countries throughout the world and the State Department in Washington DC. 15,652 of the cables are classified Secret.

Offering an unprecedented view of how America’s top diplomats view enemies and friends alike: And many of them make some pretty harsh–and blunt–comments on various world leaders. Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe? Deeply ignorant on economic issues. Libyan President Muammar al-Qaddafi? “Just strange.” Silvio Berlusconi? “Feckless, vain, and ineffective as a modern European leader, physically and politically weak" whose "frequent late nights and penchant for partying hard mean he does not get sufficient rest" The WikiLeaks dump reveals that Qaddafi apparently gets botox injections. But perhaps the meanest words were reserved for Kim Jong-Il, who was called a “flabby old chap,” by a diplomat’s source.The Pentagon and State Department leaks are just the start.


On November 11, Assange said that he’s still sitting on a trove of secret documents, about half of which relate to the private sector. And WikiLeaks’ next target will be a major American bank. “It will give a true and representative insight into how banks behave at the executive level in a way that will stimulate investigations and reforms, I presume,” he said, adding: “For this, there’s only one similar example. It’s like the Enron emails.”

Julian Assange, since enraging governments the world over and facing rape charges in Sweden, has been searching for a nation that will offer him asylum. Now his website is seeking refuge, too–from the largest cyberattack it’s ever faced. Some portion of Wikileaks’ servers are at the “Pionen” White Mountains data center owned by Swedish broadband provider Bahnhof, as first reported by Norwegian news site VG Nett. That data center store's Wikileaks’ data 30 meters below ground inside a Cold-War-era nuclear bunker carved out of a large rock hill in downtown Stockholm. The server farm has a single entrance and is outfitted by half-meter thick metal doors and backup generators pulled from German submarines have a look...




the company’s data center is “a kind of metaphor” for Bahnhof’s commitment to resist any sort of intrusion, physical or legal. “We’re proud to have clients like these,” he says. “The Internet should be an open source for freedom of speech, and the role of an ISP is to be a neutral technological tool of access, not an instrument for collecting information from customers.”

A WikiLeaks source who asked not to be named says that half of WikiLeaks servers have gone offline under a two-day flood of fraudulent traffic, what’s commonly known as a denial of service attack. WikiLeaks is actively searching for new hosts for its Web servers, ideally offered free-of-charge by volunteers, according to the source. The source also said that the attack was the largest in the whistleblower site’s history, and the first to “actually cause harm” to WikiLeaks, although none of the site’s private data has been compromised.

It seems that Julian Assange will have to be on the run for a while he has declared a verbal retaliation to many influential politicians, I agree on the freedom of speech but not in such a degree in which you will have to hide for a living.

This week keep it safe as the strong players in the stock market will stay the same or move down a point or two, send me an e mail and keep in touch...

Now I really have to say this is getting out of hands, Julian Assange appeared in court in London just hours after he emerged from a month in hiding and surrendered to police.

Filmmaker Ken Loach, Jemima Khan, and campaigning journalist John Pilger each offered to put up part of his bail but a judge in London refused, saying a court would review the situation at a hearing on December 14th.

Online supporters of whistleblowing website Wikileaks are fighting back after news of Julian Assange’s arrest hit the wires.

Immediately afterwards online activists known as “Anonymous” have initiated what they called Operation:Payback, a call to action to bring down the websites of companies that have publicly removed services once used by the Wikileaks website.

Anoymous has already targeted the Swiss bank PostFinance, a bank that froze all payments to the controversial website, after it promised to take down PayPal, the online payment company that cancelled Wikileaks’ account that it used to solicit donations.

Its current target? Mastercard. The website is currently down for a large number of users after a DDOS attack.

All of the groups actions have been publicly posted to the Anon_Operation Twitter account; the Paypal attack was posted to Twitter on December 6, the PostFinace attack was declared 17 hours ago and just hours ago it was confirmed by the group that Mastercard had been taken offline as a result of its online assault.

Anonymous is a collection of online activists formed from popular online message boards, attacks are not for profit but are in most cases to demonstrate a show of force to promote unfair practises or highlight sensitive political issues.



The three attacks here could just be the start of an uncomfortable battle about technology and Political issues, we all know the power of INTERNET my only concern at this moment is that since now the use and control of the WWW will be more regulated, I hope not. Anyway the leaks are still comming now with one that really raises concern:

An extensive blog post untangling an alarming story from the state department cables: "another horrific taxpayer-funded sex scandal for DynCorp,

I finally plea for the use of knowledege for a good cause that is really what matters, keep in touch...

Wikileaks given data on Swiss bank accounts: