Who controls your eye balls?

“Five people from across the UK were arrested early today in connection with a spate of online attacks last month in support of the whistleblowers’ site WikiLeaks”, says the Guardian, going on >>>

Police said the five males, aged between 15 and 26, are being held after a series of arrests in the West Midlands, Northamptonshire, Hertfordshire, Surrey and London.

Three teenagers, aged 15, 16 and 19, were arrested in a series of coordinated raids at 7am along with two men aged 20 and 26. All five are being held in custody at local police stations.

The five were arrested on suspicion of being involved in the loose-knit group of “hacktivists” known as Anonymous, who temporarily crippled the websites of MasterCard, Visa and PayPal after those companies cut off financial services to WikiLeaks. The attacks followed WikiLeaks’ release of US diplomatic cables from late November.

The arrests were “coordinated by the Metropolitan police working in conjunction with other UK forces and international agencies”, says the story.

It didn’t work for Canute either.

Meanwhile, with Egypt as the focus, for the moment, Anons continue to make themselves felt as they progressively increase their efforts to force the corporate and government powers that used to be to listen to the people they’re supposed to represent.

Yesterday, DEAR CITIZENS OF THE WORLD was the header to a Reader’s Write from [an] Anon. It went on >>>

Anonymous can not, and will not stand idly while people are being denied their basic rights and human liberties. Yet, there are still a lot of governments worldwide who fail to even aspire to the standard of freedom that was set by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These governments believe they have the right and privilege to impose upon their own people an ‘official’ version of ‘reality’ which isn’t in any way tampered by the truths of everyday life under which its citizens are living. Anonymous believes this is an outright crime which can not go unpunished.

The Egyptian people are living under inhumane conditions; being denied their basic rights to freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association, and the free access to information. By imposing censorship upon its own people and condemning these freedoms, the Egyptian government has revealed itself to be criminal, and has made itself an enemy of Anonymous.

To the Egyptian Government: Anonymous challenges all those who are involved in censorship. Anonymous wants you to offer free access to uncensored media in your entire country. When you ignore this message, not only will we attack your government websites, Anonymous will also make sure that the international media sees the horrid reality you impose upon your people. Anonymous will not spare anybody who supports this suppression. It is in the hands of the Egyptian government to end this: continue your repression and you will be subject to civil protest – lend an ear to the claim of freedom from your people and the hostilities will cease.

To the Egyptian people: We stand together and united against this oppression. This struggle is not just for you alone, but for the whole of humankind. Citizens can no longer endure their governments abuse. When forced by the threat of oppression, we will be loud as hell – and when the people roar, it will send shivers down the spines of all those who stifle our freedom and take our precious liberties away.

Anonymous are your brothers and sisters, your sons and daughters, your parents and your friends, regardless of age, gender, race, religion, ethnicity, or place of birth. Anonymous is you. You will not be denied your right to free speech, free press, free association and your universal right to freely access information, both in real life and through the internet.

Join us on the IRC – irc.anonops.ru #opEgypt !

Join us in this battle for freedom of information worldwide!

For as Khalil Gibran once said: “Life without Freedom is like a body without a soul, and Freedom without Thought is like a confused spirit… Life, Freedom and Thought are three-in-one, and are everlasting and shall never pass away.”

We are Anonymous.
We are Legion.
We do not forgive.
We do not forget.
Expect us.

Stay tuned.

This kind of order is far more common than one may think, and in the case of terrorism and espionage investigations the government can issue them without a court order. The government says more than 50,000 of these requests, known as national security letters, are sent each year, but they come with gag orders that prevent those contacted from revealing what the agency has been seeking or even the existence of the gag orders.

Anonymous offers support to Tunisian protestors with governmental hit.

Leakspin

anonops.net appears to be down.

anon ops manifesto

“The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops.”
- John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Wikileaks have been down because of Distributed-Denial-of-Service attacks (DDoS). There are reasons to believe that The United States Of America are behind this since due to the nature of the leak on Sunday 28th November 2010, where over 251000 documents (US diplomatic cables) were published on WikiLeaks.

What is this all about? And what does it have to do with censorship and Operation Payback?

While we don’t have much of an affiliation with WikiLeaks, we fight for the same reasons. We want transparency and we counter censorship. The attempts to silence WikiLeaks are long strides closer to a world where we can not say what we think and are unable to express our opinions and ideas.

We can not let this happen. This is why our intention is to find out who is responsible for this failed attempt at censorship. This is why we intend to utilize our resources to raise awareness, attack those against and support those who are helping lead our world to freedom and democracy.

“In a free society, we are supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, we are in big trouble.”
- Ron Paul

Who tried to stop WikiLeaks?

• EveryDNS released a statement confirming that it took action against Wikileaks because of the numerous denial-of-service attacks that had been carried out against the original domain. ^{(guardian) (tweet)}
• “TheJester“ who had this to say: “www.wikileaks.org – TANGO DOWN – for attempting to endanger the lives of our troops, ‘other assets’ & foreign relations #wikileaks #fail”.
• The French government: “The French government has moved to ban WikiLeaks from French servers, part of a series of moves threatening the group’s presence on the internet. Industry minister Eric Besson said it is “unacceptable” for French servers to host the site, which “violates the secret of diplomatic relations and puts people protected by diplomatic secret in danger”^(article).
• Amazon pulled the plug on hosting the whistle-blowing website only 24 hours after being contacted by the staff of Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate’s committee on homeland security. Its refreshing to see that a company like amazon takes direct orders from a government employee (not even an official call from the government), disregarding their customers first amendment rights. Democracy is a fine thing ^(guardian).
• In a statement, PayPal said: “PayPal has permanently restricted the account used by WikiLeaks due to a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity. We’ve notified the account holder of this action” ^(allvoices).

Need we say more? If PayPal had the slightest moral, they would have donated to wikileaks themselves. We also regret to hear that EveryDNS rather tries to save its own instruments rather than doing whatever in their power to keep the website up (whatever happend to looking after your customers?). WikiLeaks is a pioneer of transparency. They are the whistleblowers that this society is crying out for. If we’re all going to bury our heads in the sand and ignore these contradictions of a so-called free society, then why do we still vote? Then why are we even interested in politics at all? Why don’t we hand them our (copy)rights on a silver plate, with the apology that we were counteracting them?

This is a global issue, but the United States of America’s first amendment is a good example:

“Amendment 1 – Freedom of Religion, Press, Expression”
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Current condition of this amendment:

• If you’re a Muslim, you’re a terrorist. Freedom of Religion
• If you publish something groundbreaking about the government, it’s treason. Freedom of Press
• If you express your feelings, it’s copyright infringement. Freedom of Expression

So why does that amendment even exist in the first place, if it is treated with blatent disregard? Are we the only ones who think this is slightly hypocritical? Everybody portrays Anonymous as a bunch of 13 year old nerds glued to their computers and gaming consoles. Are a “bunch of 13 year olds” the only ones capable of understanding how serious this situation is, how it could affect our very way of life? Just as the university students in the UK are fighting a seemingly losing a battle, so are we ^(spec). There is a limited number of avenues available taking the legal route, sometimes challenging and breaking laws are necessary to being heard and noticed.

“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.”
- George Orwell (My Few Wise Words of Wisdom’ (2000) by Charles Walker)

By doing everything to discredit WikiLeaks, Julian Assagne and all others involved, the world’s governments demonstrated that they are worse than terrorists. At least terrorists are honest in what they try to achieve. Whatever is said in the smear campaign against Julian Assagne, how could it ever be worse than a complete government having hidden agendas and trying to silence everybody who stands against it?

So, what are we, Operation Payback going to do about it?

• We offer WikiLeaks an additionalmirror and have it Googlebombed.
• We will create counter-propaganda, organizing attacks (DDoS) on various targets related to censorship (time, date and target will be published by that time).
• Contact media entities, inform them that Operation:Payback has come out in support of Wikileaks, and has declared war on the entities involved in censoring there information; we will seek public support in a campaign against censorship.
• We will find and will attack those who stand against Wikileaks and we will support WikiLeaks in everything they need.

Choose freedom. Help us.
Thanks in advance,
Anonymous
www.anonops.net