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

Ian Peter ian.peter at ianpeter.com
Sat Dec 4 15:24:18 EST 2010 

Sure, sure - and paypal just denied wikileaks donations on policy grounds,
and everydns shut the site because of usage issues after a call from Joe
Liebermann....




> From: Lee W McKnight <lmcknigh at syr.edu>
> Reply-To: <governance at lists.cpsr.org>, Lee W McKnight <lmcknigh at syr.edu>
> Date: Sat, 4 Dec 2010 14:54:57 -0500
> To: "governance at lists.cpsr.org" <governance at lists.cpsr.org>
> Subject: [governance] FW: [IP] Fwd: Wikileaks Domain Revoked?
> 
> 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 contentŠ
> 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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