[governance] FW: [IP] Fwd: Wikileaks Domain Revoked?

[Lee W McKnight]

Since we're talking Vittorio's holiday shopping...Amazon's denial re their cessation of service w Wikileaks was not politics but for violating terms of service, below.

Lee
________________________________________
From: Dave Farber [dave at farber.net]
Sent: Saturday, December 04, 2010 4:11 AM
To: ip
Subject: [IP] Fwd: Wikileaks Domain Revoked?

Begin forwarded message:

From: Sam™ <samwaltz.groups at gmail.com<mailto:samwaltz.groups at gmail.com>>
Date: December 3, 2010 9:18:23 PM EST
To: Dave Farber IP <dave at farber.net<mailto:dave at farber.net>>
Subject: Wikileaks Domain Revoked?

This may be of interest to the list.

Sam™
https://www.mensa.org/user/6020
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/blog/2010/dec/03/wikileaks-knocked-off-net-dns-everydns

WikiLeaks fights to stay online after US company withdraws domain name
Everydns.net<http://Everydns.net> says attack against leaks site endangered other
customers' service – effectively pushing site off the web
Charles Arthur and Josh Halliday
guardian.co.uk<http://guardian.co.uk>,     Friday 3 December 2010 07.54 GMT

WikiLeaks was removed from its wikileaks.org<http://wikileaks.org> address. Photograph: Joe
Raedle/Getty Images
The US was today accused of opening up a dramatic new front against
WikiLeaks, effectively "killing" its web address just days after
Amazon pulled the site from its servers following political pressure.

The whistleblowers' website went offline for the third time in a week
this morning, in the biggest threat to its online presence yet.

Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate's committee on homeland
security, earlier this week called for any organisation helping
sustain WikiLeaks to "immediately terminate" its relationship with
them.

On Friday morning, WikiLeaks and the cache of secret diplomatic
documents that have proved to be a scourge for governments around the
world were only accessible through a string of digits known as a DNS
address. The site later re-emerged with a Swiss domain, WikiLeaks.ch<http://WikiLeaks.ch>.

Julian Assange this morning said the development is an example of the
"privatisation of state censorship" in the US and is a "serious
problem."

"These attacks will not stop our mission, but should be setting off
alarm bells about the rule of law in the United States," he warned.

The California-based internet hosting provider that dropped WikiLeaks
at 3am GMT on Friday (10PM EST Thursday), Everydns, says it did so to
prevent its other 500,000 customers of being affected by the intense
cyber attacks targeted at WikiLeaks.

The site this morning said it had "move[d] to Switzerland", announcing
a new domain name – wikileaks.ch<http://wikileaks.ch>, with the Swiss suffix. However, the
new address still only points to an IP address, suggesting WikiLeaks
has been unable to quickly find a new hosting provider.

The Wikileaks.ch<http://Wikileaks.ch> domain name, which only surfaced on Friday morning,
is being served by the Swiss Pirate Party. And the routing to it is
still being done by everydns.

Late yesterday evening Tableau Software, a company which published
data visualisations, pulled one of its images picturing the WikiLeaks
diplomatic cables at the request of Senator Lieberman. Writing on the
company's blog, Elissa Fink said: "Our decision to remove the data
from our servers came in response to a public request by Senator Joe
Lieberman, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, when he
called for organisations hosting WikiLeaks to terminate their
relationship with the website."

Mark Stephens, the London-based lawyer acting on behalf of Assange,
wrote on Twitter after the shutdown: "Pressure appears to have been
applied to close the WikiLeaks domain name."

Andre Rickardsson, an expert on computer security at Sweden's Bitsec
Consulting, told Reuters: "I don't believe for a second that this has
been done by everydns themselves. I think they've been under
pressure," he said, apparently referring to US authorities.

A new Germany-based WikiLeaks domain – wikileaks.dd19.de<http://wikileaks.dd19.de> – also
appeared on Friday morning, with its data apparently hosted in
California. People have also taken to setting up alternative domain
names that point to the WikiLeaks address. Robin Fenwick, a UK-based
web services director, this morning launched Wikileeks.org.uk<http://Wikileeks.org.uk> – a
"joke domain" that points to the WikiLeaks DNS address.

In a statement on its website, the free everydns.net<http://everydns.net> service said that
the "distributed denial of service" (DDOS) attacks by unknown hackers
– who are trying to knock WikiLeaks off the net – meant that the leaks
site was interfering with the service being provided to other users.
That in turn meant that WikiLeaks had broken everydns.net<http://everydns.net>'s terms of
service, and it cut the site off at 3am GMT on Friday (10PM EST
Thursday).

DNS services translate a website name, such as guardian.co.uk<http://guardian.co.uk>, into
machine-readable "IP quads" – in that case 77.91.249.30, so that
http://77.91.249.30 will show the Guardian site. If the DNS fails, the
site is only reachable via IP address – but WikiLeaks has not yet
provided one via Twitter or other means.

Everydns.net<http://Everydns.net> said that the attacks – which have been going on all
week, and led the site to temporarily host its services on Amazon's
more resilient EC2 "cloud computing" service – "threaten the stability
of the EveryDNS.net<http://EveryDNS.net> infrastructure, which enables access to almost
500,000 other websites".

WikiLeaks was given 24 hours' notice of the termination, and everydns
said: "Any downtime of the wikileaks.org<http://wikileaks.org> website has resulted from its
failure to use another hosted DNS service provider."

The move comes after several days of WikiLeaks coming under a
determined DDOS attack, apparently from hackers friendly to the point
of view of the US government, which has disparaged the site's leaking
of thousands of US diplomatic cables.

US companies have also come under intense political pressure to remove
any connection to, or support for, WikiLeaks. Amazon ended its hosting
of the cables on its EC2 cloud computer service earlier this week, but
last night insisted in a blogpost that its decision was not due to
pressure from Senator Joe Lieberman, who has called for the removal of
the data – and who has influenced at least one other US company to
withdraw support for WikiLeaks data.

In a blogpost late on Thursday, Amazon said reports that government
inquiries prompted it to remove the data were "inaccurate".

Amazon said:

"[Amazon Web Services] does not pre-screen its customers, but it does
have terms of service that must be followed. WikiLeaks was not
following them. There were several parts they were violating. For
example, our terms of service state that "you represent and warrant
that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content…
that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and
will not cause injury to any person or entity". It's clear that
WikiLeaks doesn't own or otherwise control all the rights to this
classified content. Further, it is not credible that the extraordinary
volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing
could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that
they weren't putting innocent people in jeopardy."

It noted that:

"When companies or people go about securing and storing large
quantities of data that isn't rightfully theirs, and publishing this
data without ensuring it won't injure others, it's a violation of our
terms of service, and folks need to go operate elsewhere."

But as commentators have pointed out, that stance is contradicted by
the fact that Amazon has previously hosted the "war logs" from
WikiLeaks which contained data about the US wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq.

Connecting to WikiLeaks is presently not possible until it gets a new
DNS service. WikiLeaks itself said on Twitter that the ending of DNS
services was allegedly due to "claimed mass attacks" and called for
further donations to "keep us strong".

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