The Wikileaks Scandal Is More Than Just a Diplomatic Scuffle;...

...It's a War For The Future Of The Internet

Tom Mendelsohn writes for The Independent:

You'll have been following the Wikileaks saga, of course, because it is novel and interesting. Maybe you like it because it looks like a live action retelling of Enemy Of The State, or because history seems to be in the making. It feels big, doesn't it? It is, but it's bigger than that, too: what we're witnessing right now is the opening of hostilities in the first big infowar. The war for the Internet is very big indeed.

If you're not a digital native, or if you're some kind of hearty outdoors type, this may not seem important, but you're dead wrong. We could be spectators for the start of the cyber Great War – and they've just knocked over Franz Ferdinand.

We've seen cyber skirmishes before: Russian hackers targeted and sank Georgia's internet infrastructure during their brief conflict in 2008, while there've been hints of Chinese muscle flexing for some time – especially last month, when traffic through US government sites was rerouted through Chinese servers for 18 minutes in November.

The difference now is that this battle is extra-national; it isn't one country against another, so much as an establishment of nations fighting a global insurgency – with the soul of the Internet as the spoils.

[ ... ]

Operation Payback is in full swing, lashing out with Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks – which flood a website with fake hits in order to overwhelm its servers. Armed with a simple hack tool called the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC), hackers have been attacking the websites of those companies who slighted Wikileaks and Assange with surprising success, knocking them offline for hours at a time.

The Swiss bank that deserted Assange was down for the whole day yesterday, while MasterCard – which, lest ye forget, still allows you to donate to subsidiaries of the KKK – has now lost control of its own homepage. If people can't see www.mastercard.com, it'll certainly cost them money; infowar is waged on the bottom line.

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