Washington – The FBI said Thursday that it had served more than 40 search warrants throughout the United States as part of an investigation into computer attacks on websites of businesses that stopped providing services in December to WikiLeaks.
The FBI statement announcing the search warrants was the first indication that the U.S. intends to prosecute the so-called “hacktivists” for their actions in support of WikiLeaks.
The search warrants were executed on the same day authorities in Great Britain announced that they had arrested five people in connection with the attacks, which temporarily crippled the websites of Amazon.com, PaylPal, MasterCard, Visa, the Swiss bank PostFinance and others.
FBI officials were unavailable for comment, and the statement did not say who was served or where the searches were conducted. The statement noted that attacks, known as distributed denial of service attacks and which use easily available software to shutdown a computer network by flooding it with millions of requests for information, violate federal law and are punishable by a prison sentence of 10 years.
The statement noted that a group known as “Anonymous” had claimed credit for the attacks. Anonymous is also believed responsible in recent days for attacks on government websites in Tunisia and Egypt.
British news reports said three of the five arrested were teenagers, aged 15, 16 and 19, and that the others were 20 and 26 years old. Dutch police last month arrested two teenagers suspected of involvement in the online campaign.
Click here to sign up for Truthout’s FREE daily email updates.
The attacks were organized through social networking sites such as Twitter in the days after WikiLeaks began publishing U.S. State Department cables that apparently had been downloaded by an American Army private serving in Iraq. Their first target was Amazon.com, which, at the behest of U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., had stopped hosting the WikiLeaks website.
They spread to PayPal, MasterCard and Visa after those businesses declined to process credit card payments destined to WikiLeaks.
PostFinance, a bank operated by Switzerland’s postal service, also closed an account that was registered to Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’ founder. The account number had been published on the WikiLeaks website with a solicitation for donations. PostFinance said it closed the account because Assange was not a resident of Switzerland, as Swiss law required.
The attacks did no long-term damage and in most cases only lasted a few hours. But legitimate would-be users were unable to contact the sites while the attacks were underway.
The FBI said it is working with several European governments and the National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance (NCFTA) to identify the source the attacks, which the FBI attributed to a type of software it identified as “Low Orbit Ion Canon” tools. It said major anti-virus programs had been updated to block such software.
Previously, the only known criminal investigation stemming from WikiLeaks’ publication of thousands of U.S. State Department cables was one that seeks to tie WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange to Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, who is suspected of providing the cables to the website. In December, a federal magistrate in Alexandria, Va., issued a search warrant to Twitter demanding the records of five of its users, including Assange and Manning.
It was not known late Thursday whether those records had been surrendered.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.