LONDON, U.K - A loose grouping of cyber activists supporting WikiLeaks has abandoned its strategy of online attacks on organisations seen as hostile to the site in favour of spreading the leaked documents far and wide online.
The United States, enraged and embarrassed by WikiLeaks' publication of thousands of confidential US diplomatic cables, has leant on organisations from Amazon to online payments service PayPal which have now withdrawn services to WikiLeaks.- The cyber activists briefly brought down PayPal's official blog by bombarding it with requests this week but failed to harm retail and web-hosting giant Amazon, which withdrew its services to WikiLeaks more than a week ago.
"We have, at best, given them a black eye. The game has changed. When the game changes, so too must our strategies," said the blog post announcing "Operation: Leakspin".- The activists are now encouraging supporters to search through leaked cables on the WikiLeaks site and publish summaries of ones that have been least exposed, labelling them so they are hard to find by any authority seeking to quash them.
"Use misleading tags, everything from "Tea Party" to "Bieber". Post snippets of the leaks everywhere," the blog said, referring to the US grassroots conservative movement and the 16-year-old Canadian pop phenomenon Justin Bieber.- Similar strategies have been used in the past on YouTube and the now defunct Napster by users seeking to share video and music while dodging copyright crackdowns.
- The activists had previously been using denial of service attacks, in which they bombarded the Web servers of the perceived enemies of WikiLeaks with requests that crashed the sites, in an operation named Operation Payback.
Protests will be held around the world against the detention of Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.Demonstrations are planned in the capitals of Spain, the Netherlands, Colombia, Argentina, Mexico and Peru to demand Assange's release, the re-establishment of WikiLeaks domain name and the restoration of Visa and Mastercard credit services to allow supporters to donate money to the whistleblowing site.
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