Technology Slice Blog

WTF Wikileaks Task Force - The CIA has launched a task force to assess the impact of the exposure of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables and military files by WikiLeaks. Officially, the panel is called the WikiLeaks Task Force. But at CIA headquarters, it's mainly known by its all-too-apt acronym: W.T.F. The irreverence is perhaps understandable for an agency that has been relatively unscathed by WikiLeaks. Only a handful of CIA files have surfaced on the WikiLeaks Web site, and records from other agencies posted online reveal remarkably little about CIA employees or operations. WTF Wikileaks Task Force Even so, CIA officials said the agency is conducting an extensive inventory of the classified information, which is routinely distributed on a dozen or more networks that connect agency employees around the world. And the task force is focused on the immediate impact of the most recently released files. One issue is whether the agency's ability to recruit informants c...

WikiLeaks Task Force - The CIA has launched a WikiLeaks Task Force, better known by the agency as the acronym: WTF. According to a report by the Washington Post, the agency has launched the task force to appraise the impact of thousands of sensitive diplomatic documents and military files hitting the web thanks to WikiLeaks. Among the task force’s responsibilities is “whether the agency's ability to recruit informants could be damaged by declining confidence in the U.S. government's ability to keep secrets,” the report said. WikiLeaks Task Force CIA spokesman George Little told the paper that the panel is being led by the CIA's Counterintelligence Center. It is made up of more than two dozen members from departments across the agency. "It's just a huge vulnerability," an unnamed former high-ranking CIA officer told the Post. "Nobody could carry out enough paper to do what WikiLeaks has done." WikiLeaks Task Force

Bank of America Stops Wikileaks Transactions - Bank of America stops processing WikiLeaks payments, which could pose a problem for the infamous website. It actually decided that it will no longer handle any WikiLeaks transactions, which they are quite within their rights to do. Of course, the controversial site has fired back at them on Twitter. Upon learning the news, WikiLeaks posted on Twitter “Does your business do business with Bank of America? Our advice [sic] is to place your funds somewhere safer.” This seems to be odd reasoning. How would this decision mean that money is not safe? It really makes no sense, and in fact it is not really logical at all. Their other tweet about this topic did make more sense though. They also tweeted “We ask that all people who love freedom close out their accounts at Bank of America.” Bank of America Stops Wikileaks Transactions The reason the bank made the decision is because it believes that WikiLeaks “may be engaged in activities that a...

Michael Moore Donates to Wikileaks - Filmmaker Michael Moore said Tuesday that he has given $20,000 towards bailing out Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Mr. Moore defended his decision, saying he support Mr. Assange’s organization. Wikileaks has released upwards of 100,000 classified documents, many of which have been widely disseminated to various news organizations. A court in London imposed the fine, saying Mr. Assange poised a flight risk. The court in London set bail for £240,000 ($378,840). Radio show host Rush Limbaugh took issue with Mr. Moore’s proposal. “It’s so heart warming to see a bunch of high-minded people out there on the left…coming out of the woodwork and paying the bail of the serial rapist Julian Assange,” Mr. Limbaugh said. Michael Moore Donates to Wikileaks Mr. Assange remains jailed in the U.K. after Swedish police issued an arrest warrant for the Wikileaks founder. Sweden has requested that Mr. Assange be extradited to Sweden on allegations of sex...

Wikileaks Cyberwar - A group of hackers vowed Thursday to intensify a "war of data" against Mastercard, Visa and other groups which have cut funding to the WikiLeaks website over its release of US secrets. The group "Anonymous" has claimed credit for bringing down the websites of the two firms after they suspended payments to WikiLeaks, and for attacking the site of a Swiss bank that closed an account of site founder Julian Assange, who is being held in the UK. "The campaign is not over. It's still going strong, more and more people are joining and helping in. Just last night Visa went down for a brief period," an unofficial spokesman for the group, calling himself "Coldblood", told BBC Radio. "I see this as becoming a war but not your conventional war. This is a war of data, we are trying to keep the Internet open and free for everyone, just the way the Internet has been and always was." Wikileaks Cyberwar Coldblood, who...

Mastercard And VISA Cut Off Wikileaks - Last week, WikiLeaks was evicted from Amazon cloud-based servers, reportedly under pressure from US politicians. A couple days later, PayPal followed suit – effectively depriving WikiLeaks of a flood of micro-donations from supporters around the globe. Now reps for MasterCard and Visa have said the companies will halt payments to WikiLeaks until a full investigation into the practices of the site has been completed. In an interview with the BBC, a Visa Europe spokesperson said the investigation would determine whether the nature of WikiLeaks business "contravenes Visa operating rules." Meanwhile, MasterCard said in a statement that it was "in the process of working to suspend the acceptance of MasterCard cards on Wikileaks until the situation is resolved." Mastercard And VISA Cut Off Wikileaks The snub from Visa and MasterCard could be incredibly costly for WikiLeaks, which relies on credit card donations to keep its si...

Israel Jumps On Wikileaks Documents - Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu expressed hope Monday that U.S. diplomatic cables revealing that several Arab states share his country's concern about Iran's nuclear weapons program could build momentum for tougher international action against the effort. "More and more states, governments and leaders in the Middle East and the wider region and the world believe this is the fundamental threat," Netanyahu said, referring to disclosures in cables released by the Web site WikiLeaks. According to the cables, some leaders, including Saudi King Abdullah, have advocated using military action to stop the Iranian nuclear program. "There's a gap between what they say privately and publicly," Netanyahu said at an annual gathering of the Tel Aviv Journalists' Association. Regional leaders read publicly from one "script" that says the "greatest threat is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," Ne...

Wikileaks Cyberattack - In the first test of WikiLeaks’ resiliency since a staff rebellion earlier this year, the organization recovered within hours from a distributed denial of service attack during its roll-out of leaked State Department cables on Sunday. But experts who monitored the disruptive traffic say the attack was relatively modest in size. WikiLeaks’ main web address and its “cable gate” site were unreachable as the organization’s media partners published their first analyses from a massive trove of a quarter-million U.S. diplomatic cables Sunday afternoon. Hours earlier, WikiLeaks wrote on Twitter: “We are currently under a mass distributed denial of service attack.” But Arbor Networks, which analyzes malicious network traffic crossing the internet’s backbones, reports that the DDoS generated between 2 and 4 Gbps of disruptive traffic, slightly above the average for all DDoS attacks, but well below the peak 60 to 100 Gps consumed by truly massive attacks against other...