On 11/23, Glenn Greenwald wrote a provocative piece for The Guardian on how the U.S. government effectively shut down WikiLeaks without charging anyone from WikiLeaks with a crime. Greenwald noted that after WikiLeaks leaked U.S. diplomatic cables, Sen. Lieberman began pressuring various hosting services (like Amazon) and fund collection services (like Paypal, Visa, & Master Card) to drop Wikileaks. Furthermore, and unbeknownst to me, apparently WikiLeaks suffered massive cyberattack forcing it to change servers twice.
All of this leads Greenwald to conclude that:
[T]he US government – through affirmative steps and/or approving acquiescence to criminal, sophisticated cyber-attacks – all but destroyed the ability of an adversarial group, convicted of no crime, to function on the internet.
There is obviously no proof that the U.S. was behind or deliberately acquiesced to the cyberattacks, but WikiLeaks certainly has been marginalized ever since the leak of those cables. Greenwald finishes by contrasting the attack on WikiLeaks to the prosecution of Anonymous members, concluding that no one should want the government to have the power to extra-legally “cripple an adverse journalistic outlet . . .”
Interesting argument, check out the rest of Glenn Greenwald’s article for The Guardian here.
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