WikiLeaks

14 members of Anonymous hacker group were arrested Tuesday by the US authorities on charges they participated in several major cyber attacks on PayPal as vengeance for declining to process donations for WikiLeaks.

Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested 14 people in 9 states and Washington D.C. for attacking PayPal last December. The attack is widely believed to have been orchestrated by Anonymous.

WikiLeals filed an official complaint with the European Commission against Visa and MasterCard on allegations the credit card networks reject processing donations to the whistleblower website. The complaint was filed in association with Icelandic IT company DataCell.

Visa and MasterCard blocked WikiLeaks from collecting funds from donors in December 2010.

According to the filing submitted with the Directorate-General for Competition of the European Commission, Visa and MasterCard breached antitrust provisions set out by Articles 101 and 102 of the EU Treaty.

Again WikiLeaks was denied to have its donations being processed. Last week the whistleblowing website hoped that DataCell would be able to start processing donations, for it had made an agreement with the Icelandic bank Valitor to have Visa and Mastercard payments processed by the bank.

DataCell stated it had always said that the payments were processed for WikiLeaks when entering a deal with Valitor. But the latter denies the allegation with spokeswoman Jonina Ingvadottir saying:

WikiLeaks will sue Visa and MasterCard for their refusal to process donations to the website. The whistle-blower service is now working with the lawyers in Denmark and Iceland along with its credit card processing partner DataCell to launch a lawsuit against the card schemes for "engaging in an unlawful, US influenced, financial blockade".

Eric Corley, who publishes the hacker quarterly, 2600, said that about 25% of American hackers are informers for the US Federal Bureau of Investigation.

"Owing to the harsh penalties involved and the relative inexperience with the law that many hackers have, they are rather susceptible to intimidation," Corley told the Guardian.

Facebook complacently provides US government with a way to spy on American people said WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who called the social networking website "the most appalling spying machine ever invented."

Social networking media like Facebook has all built-in methods for U.S. intelligence personnel to snoop on users of the site, Assange claims. Users' information, including names, locations, relationships, friends, and communications are all there for the government to see.

US prosecutors should be required to get a court warrant to get the IP addresses of Twitter users linked to WikiLeaks according to a court brief filed this week by a group of reputed security experts.

A hacker group called Anonymous which is in sympathy with WikiLeaks announced it will publish emails obtained from Bank of America Corp.

Anonymous, which has no relation to the whistleblowing website founded by Julian Assange, stated that it will release documents exposing "corruption and fraud" at the largest U.S. bank by assets.

22 additional charges were filed by the US Army against Pfc. Bradley Manning, accused WikiLeaks whistleblower including one with a potential death sentence.

Manning, the Army intelligence analyst, is charged with the aiding the enemy which is the military equivalent of treason, but prosecutors said on Wednesday that they planned to seek only a sentence of life in prison if he is convicted on the charge.

It is up to the presiding military judge to take the decision and he would be free to sentence Manning to death if he is found guilty, according to NBC News.

Over 40 search warrants in the United States were executed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as part of their investigation into cyber attacks made allegedly by a group called “Anonymous” who supported WikiLeaks whistleblower website.

The Distributed Denial of Service attacks targeted major US companies and entities. The search warrants in the United States coincided with the arrest of five people by British police in connection with the alleged attacks.

Scammers have hammered out a new scheme that may defraud unwitting people of big amounts of money. Now the scam is related to WikiLeaks. Victims who are supposed to be rich enough are called by an automated system that states their computer and IP address "had been noted as having visited the Wikileaks site, and that there were grave consequences for this, including a $250,000 or $25,000 fine, perhaps imprisonment".

Panicked marks are given a dedicated phone number to discuss payment terms if, certainly, these people are stupid enough to be deceived by the trick.

A congressional official told media sources under the terms of anonymity that in fact the US government considers the damages brought by the release of the US cables by WikiLeaks websites as limited which is contrary to the formal statements made by the Obama administration in public.

Bank of America is preparing to defense itself against the promised publication of discreditable materials about it on the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. The company has appointed chief risk officer Bruce Thompson to manage a 20-strong team that will address the damaging insider info from Julian Assange’s resource.

2010, the year of tiger was a multiple-valued year for every human being on the planet. It featured both dark and bright sides in political, economic and social aspects of the world development. With this year the humanity has shifted yet to another level of its success while it suffered not less losses and failures if compared to the past times. Let us make a review and recollect the top 10 noteworthy events and developments that impacted the world in the most critical areas. 

In order to effectively charge Julian Assange with the crime committed against the American nation the Justice Department just needs to cogently prove that WikiLeaks differs from traditional media and as such is subject to the Espionage Act, a former federal prosecutor told lawmakers Thursday.