WikiLeaks (28 page)

Franco Frattini, Italy’s foreign minister, was one of the earliest politicians to grasp that the leak could not be undone, and was game-changing. “It will be the 9/11 of world diplomacy,” he exclaimed. For once the comparison didn’t look like hyperbole. “It was being discussed in the White House, the Kremlin, the Élysée, by Berlusconi and the UN, by Chávez, in Canberra, in every capital city of the world,” Rusbridger said. “The ones where it wasn’t being discussed, you knew they were bracing themselves. You just had this sense of mayhem being let loose. All these
incredibly powerful people, the most powerful people in the world, were scrambling into emergency board meetings.”

At Kings Place, the following day’s editorial conference was more crowded than usual. Morning conferences are a
Guardian
ritual: the heads of department – home, foreign, city, sport, as well as features, comment and arts – give a quick run-down of the day’s offerings. All staff can attend and anybody can speak. The seating arrangement mirrors the
Guardian
’s unspoken hierarchy: Rusbridger sits in the middle of an elongated yellow sofa; junior staff perch uncomfortably on stools around the glass walls. After the news roundup the editor typically says: “What else?” The words are often hard to hear. It is a brave, or foolish, person who opens the debate; sometimes the silence extends awkwardly for 10 seconds. This morning, however, there was no hesitation. The room was packed; the atmosphere one of excitement, and astonishment that the
Guardian
had managed, with a few glitches, to pull the story off.

One of the unfamiliar faces there was Luke Harding, the
Guardian
’s Moscow correspondent, who had mined the cables for a series of hard-hitting stories about Russia and who, having just returned again from Moscow, stood unshaven and jet-lagged next to the door. Ian Katz recalled Sunday’s dramatic events and explained the decision to bring forward publication when it became clear that Cablegate itself had sprung a leak. Katz described the
Guardian
’s sitcom-style wranglings with its many Euro-partners: “It was a cross between running a Brussels committee and an episode of ’
Allo ’Allo!
” He came up with a characteristically rococo analogy – “like being a kind of air traffic controller, with several small aircraft crashing at Stansted but managing to land a couple of big jets at Heathrow”.

The
Guardian
’s website had gone “absolutely tonto”, Janine Gibson reported. The story produced remarkable traffic – the
4.1 million unique users clicking on it that day was the highest ever. Record numbers would continue, with 9.4 million browsers viewing WikiLeaks stories between 28 November and 14 December. Some 43% of them came from the US. The
Guardian
team had designed an interactive graphic allowing readers to carry out their own searches of the cable database. This feature became the most popular aspect of the
Guardian
’s coverage. People from around the world looked to see what US officials had privately written about their rulers. “This was really pleasing,” says Gibson. “People were looking for themselves and engaging with the cables and not just the Assange-ness.”

As the cables rolled out day by day, an ugly, and in many ways deranged, backlash took place in the US. A vengeful chorus came mostly from Republicans. New York congressman Peter King, incoming chair of the homeland security committee, talked of “treason” and proposed WikiLeaks should be designated as “a foreign terrorist organisation”. Eschewing any risk of understatement, he said: “WikiLeaks presents a clear and present danger to the national security of the US.”

Congressman Pete Hoekstra of Michigan was reported calling for executions. “Clearly the person that leaked the information or hacked into our systems we can go after and we can probably go after them for espionage and maybe treason. If we go after them, and are able to convict them on treason, then the death penalty comes into play.”

His Michigan colleague, Mike Rogers, was not to be outdone. He told a local radio station: “I argue the death penalty clearly should be considered here. He clearly aided the enemy to what may result in the death of US soldiers, or those co-operating. If that is not a capital offence, I don’t know what is.”

Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, darling of the unhinged right, denounced Assange’s “sick, un-American espionage” and came close to inciting his assassination: “Why was he not pursued
with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaida and Taliban leaders? … He is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands.”

But it was Senator Joe Lieberman, Senate homeland security committee chairman, a foreign policy hawk and maverick Democrat, who was the most practical attack dog. Lieberman described the leak in apocalyptic terms as “an outrageous, reckless and despicable action that will undermine the ability of our government and our partners to keep our people safe and to work together to defend our vital interests”. He stopped short of denouncing Assange as a “terrorist” but said: “It’s a terrible thing that WikiLeaks did. I hope we are doing everything we can to shut down their website.”

On the first day of publication of the cables, Sunday, WikiLeaks came under massive hacker attack. The net traffic heading to WikiLeaks leapt from 13 gigabits (thousand million bits) per second to around 17Gbps. It peaked at 18Gbps. WikiLeaks was no stranger to DDOS or “distributed denial of service” attacks. Someone controlling a “botnet” of tens of thousands of compromised Windows PCs was apparently orchestrating them in an attempt to bring wikileaks.org crashing down.

In a usual DDOS attack, the PCs try to communicate with the targeted site. A typical method is to send a “ping” request with a few packets of data. It’s a bit like ringing the site’s front doorbell. The site generally responds by acknowledging that the data reached it. On its own, a ping request is easy for a site to deal with. But when a blizzard of them arrives from all over the world and continues and continues, it becomes impossible for the site to do anything useful: it’s too busy answering the ping requests to deliver any useful data.

The DDOS attack that hit WikiLeaks that afternoon was eight times as large as any previous ones. The hacker behind it appeared to be a curious right-wing patriot called “The Jester” – or, in the
argot he used, “th3j35t3r”. The Jester described himself as a “hacktivist for good”. His goal, as stated on his Twitter account, was to obstruct “the lines of communication for terrorists, sympathisers, fixers, facilitators, oppressive regimes and general bad guys”. As the attacks continued to pummel WikiLeaks, he tweeted excitedly: “
www.wikileaks.org
– TANGO DOWN – for attempting to endanger the lives of our troops, ‘other assets’ & foreign relations.” Normally, The Jester preferred to disrupt sites he viewed as being used by jihadist groups and other Islamist revolutionaries; every time he succeeded he sent the same delighted message: “TANGO DOWN”. Believed to be a former US military recruit, The Jester appeared to have decided on this occasion to target Assange.

The Jester’s attack was the first intriguing skirmish in what turned into a serious cyber-fight. Big US corporations tried to push Assange off the internet. But he was defended by a committed online group of underage libertarians and cyber-freaks. In this warfare, some would discern the beginnings of a decentralised global protest movement. Others would dismiss it as the antics of a handful of sexually frustrated young men. But there was no doubt WikiLeaks was under siege.

To dodge the DDOS attacks, Assange diverted the site’s main WikiLeaks page – though not the one with the diplomatic cables on it – to run on Amazon’s EC2 or “Elastic Cloud Computing” service. The cablegate.wikileaks.org directory and its contents remained outside Amazon, on a server located in France. Amazon’s commercial service was big enough to absorb DDOS attacks. On Tuesday 30 November there were more attacks against Amazon’s main site and WikiLeaks’ France-hosted cables site. Using machines in Russia, eastern Europe and Thailand, the assaults were larger and more sophisticated. Nonetheless, WikiLeaks managed to weather the storm, aided by Amazon’s powerful EC2 servers. Assange publicised that he was hiring them.

Senator Lieberman upped his campaign. He called Amazon and urged them to stop hosting WikiLeaks. Lieberman’s browbeating worked. Amazon removed WikiLeaks from its servers. Instead of admitting it had come under political pressure, the firm claimed in weasel tones that WikiLeaks had breached its “terms of service”. “It’s clear that WikiLeaks doesn’t own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content,” Amazon said. “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 to ensure they weren’t putting innocent people in jeopardy.”

This was a statement Amazon had no factual basis to make. Only a tiny proportion of the 250,000 cables had been published, and each one was, in fact, being carefully redacted. It seemed plain that Amazon executives were regurgitating lines fed to them by politicians.

The senator hailed Amazon’s “right decision” and urged “any other company or organisation that is hosting WikiLeaks to immediately terminate its relationship with them”. He went on: “WikiLeaks’ illegal, outrageous, and reckless acts have compromised our national security and put lives at risk around the world. No responsible company – whether American or foreign – should assist WikiLeaks in its efforts to disseminate these stolen materials.”

The WikiLeaks team had used free software to generate a graphic display showing an overview of the cables’ classification, number and other general data. The small company that licensed it, Tableau Software, removed the graphic from its public site – also feeling the pressure (though there was no direct contact) from Lieberman’s office. The dominoes then started to fall. The company EveryDNS, which provides free routing services (translating human-readable addresses such as wikileaks.org into machine readable internet addresses such as 64.64.12.170) terminated the wikileaks.org domain name. It also deleted all email
addresses associated with it. Justifying the move, EveryDNS said the constant hacker attacks on WikiLeaks were inconveniencing other customers.

In effect, WikiLeaks had now vanished from the web for anyone who couldn’t work out how to discover a numeric address for the site. WikiLeaks shifted to an alternative address,
www.wikileaks.ch
, registered in Switzerland but hosted in a Swedish bunker built to withstand a nuclear war.

Fresh problems surfaced: PostFinance, the Swiss postal system, closed Assange’s bank account, on the basis that he was not living in Geneva, as required by the rules. PayPal, owned by the US auction site eBay, said it would suspend WikiLeaks’ account there, due to “violation of the PayPal acceptable use policy”. A spokesman said the account “cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity”. It later emerged that the US state department had written to the company on 27 November – the eve of the cables’ launch – declaring that WikiLeaks was deemed illegal in the US. On Monday 6 December, the credit card giant MasterCard followed suit, saying that WikiLeaks “contravened rules”. On Tuesday, Visa Europe did the same. These were popular and easy methods of donating online; seeing both closed down shut off much of WikiLeaks’ funding. (Critics pointed out that, while WikiLeaks was judged off-limits, the Ku Klux Klan’s website still directed would-be donors to a site that takes both MasterCard and Visa.) It was a wounding blow and left Assange struggling to pay his and WikiLeaks’ growing legal bills.

These salvoes against WikiLeaks did not go unanswered: they triggered a backlash against the backlash. Fury raged online at such a demonstration of political pressure and US corporate self-interest. While polls suggested many Americans backed a shutdown of WikiLeaks, others were angered by the suppression of free speech; and far more outside the US thought the company cave-ins were a bad portent for free expression on the internet.

Into the arena stepped “Anonymous”, a grouping of around 3,000 people. Some were expert hackers in control of small-scale botnets: others were net newbies seeking a cause to rally around. It was a loose collective, mainly of teenagers with time on their hands, and older people (almost all men) with more nous and technical skills. The Anonymous crowd was only a group in the loosest sense, the
Guardian
’s technology editor Charles Arthur wrote: “It’s more like a stampeding herd, not sure quite what it wants but certain that it’s not going to put up with any obstacles, until it reaches an obstacle which it can’t hurdle, in which case it moves on to something else.”

Anonymous – which grew out of the equally chaotic “/b/” messageboard on the discussion site 4chan.org – had in the past tormented the Scientologists, reposting videos and leaking secret documents that the cult hoped to suppress. Anonymous’s broad manifesto is to fight against the suppression of information – but its members were not above childish actions simply to annoy and frustrate web users for their own amusement (known as “doing it for the lulz”). Anonymous supporters turned up at demonstrations from time to time – some of them wearing the same spooky Guy Fawkes mask that adorned the group’s Anony_Ops Twitter page. “It’s complex, puerile, bizarre and chaotic,” one of them told Arthur.

Operation Payback had previously been directed against the websites of law firms that pursued online music pirates, as well as against the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Now it was the online payment firms’ turn for “payback”. Despite having no hierarchy or recognisable leader, on Wednesday 8 December Anonymous hackers forced the main website of MasterCard offline for several hours. They temporarily disrupted Sarah Palin’s credit card account. Anonymous also claimed to have knocked out PostFinance’s site and that of the Swedish prosecutor’s office. Some Anonymous supporters posted a “manifesto”. “We support the free
flow of information. Anonymous is actively campaigning for this goal everywhere in all forms. This necessitates the freedom of expression for the internet, for journalism and journalists, and citizens of the world. Though we recognise you may disagree, we believe that Anonymous is campaigning for you so that your voice may never be silenced.”