2010-12-09 Cyber War Report: New Front Opens Against Internet Coup d'état

The Internet may already be starting to break apart. IT World writes two days ago:

Regardless of the supposed criminal intent of the affected systems, the seizure without notice of these domain names by US authorities sent shock-waves around the Internet world. It got people's attention in a much stronger way than version 1 of this enforcement operation had — the first iteration late last June seized the names of nine sites selling pirated first-run movies. Many people woke up to the reality of how vulnerable the DNS is to government meddling.

(More recently, the uproar caused by the WikiLeaks publication of US diplomatic cables — and subsequent attempts to censor the site and/or to hound it off the Internet — have resulted in what developer Dave Winer calls "a human DNS" implemented "in a weird sneaker-net sort of way," via Twitter and ad hoc bulletin-board sites.)

Within days of the ICE/DHS seizures, at least three separate initiatives to work around the DNS had been announced, and several existing alternatives were highlighted in the ensuing discussion.

The article then goes on to discuss the details of the various new substitutes for the single unified international, but U.S. based, domain name system that has served the Internet for 25 years.

Back in August, after Google & Verizon announced a joint legislative proposal on network neutrality, certain people predicted disaster for the Internet. One cause, Net Neutrality, was substituted for the many aspects of Internet freedom and one phrase seemed to be on everyone's lips:

Amy Goodman's Democracy Now "could spell the end of the Internet as we know it."
Craig Aaron at Huffington Post, "pact to end the Internet as we know it"
Countdown with Keith Olbermann "an end to the Internet as we know it"

In August I poopooed the so-called threat posed by the Google/Verizon initiative, roundly criticized all of the above for begging the U.S. government to step in and protect our rights on the Internet, and after attempting to explain the central importance of the DNS and the international organizations that run it, gave my view on what would end the Internet as we know it. "As it stands now, no government in the world can enforce a domain name decision because they don't run the domain name system that translates domain names like the DailyKos.com into IP addresses, and any attempt by a national government to seize control of the domain root server system would end the Internet as we know it."

In a September diary, Obama's Internet Coup d'état, I wrote:

This is a most important "technical" detail because ultimately for the U.S. government to be successful in enforcing these controls on the Internet it must either wrestle control of the root domain name servers [DNS] from the international ngo's that have been running them, ICANN and InterNIC, or corrupt those organizations to it's will. That is why I think it fair to call this a coup d'état and nothing less than an attempt by the U.S. government to takeover the Internet.

The now famous letter written by 87 of the engineers that have brought us the Internet warned of the same thing in September. Commenting on what they saw as the inevitable blow back from the Senate Internet Blacklist Bill, they said:

These problems will be enough to ensure that alternative name-lookup infrastructures will come into widespread use, outside the control of US service providers but easily used by American citizens. Errors and divergences will appear between these new services and the current global DNS, and contradictory addresses will confuse browsers and frustrate the people using them. These problems will be widespread and will affect sites other than those blacklisted by the American government.

Now this is exactly what is happening!

The cliché is coming true and we just may be witnessing the end of the single unified Internet we have known. Obama just may give Bush his Internets! Soon we may be saying: The Internet is Dead, Long Live the Internets!

I also wrote in that diary:

Speaking as one of the peons, let me say we have labored, in some cases more than a quarter century, to build the Internet as a tool for human liberation, and to do this we have build organizations that I believe represent the absolute best in international cooperation and a body of excellent software, freely available to all, that has made the dream of instant, multimedia, global, lowcost and secure communications a reality. We will not go quietly into that goodbye!

Let the Cyber War Be Joined!

Viva WikiLeaks!

Viva Anonymous!

Viva Operation Payback!

2010-12-08 Operation PayBack: 1st Cyber War Begins over WikiLeaks

The opening shot of the First Cyber War was fired when the Obama administration informed a number of Internet companies that had business relationships with WikiLeaks that the whistle blower website was to be boycotted. In short order Pay Pal, Visa and Mastercard ended their relationships with the group, EasyDNS turned hard and Amazon was singing "Hey, You, get off of my cloud!"

At the same time a mysterious series of Denial of Services attacks began to plague the various WikiLeaks websites. These attacks, in which a website is flooded with bogus traffic to block it up, is the kind of thing the government has called cyber terrorism, but given the circumstances and the target, it is hard not to conclude that the government is ultimately behind it. At the same time, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was hounded and ultimately arrested in an 'unrelated' rape change that, excuse my language, doesn't past the sniff test. And Senator Diane Feinstein called for this un-American to be prosecuted for espionage because he has done what the Washington Post did with the Pentagon Papers.

In the latest counter attack the hacker group Anonymous has organized Operation Payback as a hacker respond to those companies that figured the easiest thing to do under the circumstance was to throw WikiLeaks under the bus. Think again! In it's opening salvo, Operation Payback brought the Mastercard and Visa servers to their knees today. In response, Facebook and Twitter shut down Operation Payback's accounts. That'll stop them! As if those accounts were at all important to the groups operations.

Today a new WikiLeaks release went out on schedule and a representative said that the only way the gov't could stop further releases was to shut down the whole Internet, but they can't even do that!

So they thought shutting down WikiLeaks would be easy did they? I know my people. Visa and Mastercard are going to have a very interesting Christmas season. Pay Pal too. Especially Pay Pal. This begins the first serious Cyber War. The Internet will never be the same.

Welcome to the Matrix!

The Internet Takeover: Why Google is Next

Last week we saw an unprecedented attack on the freedom of the Internet by our government. It begin with the seizure of 82 domains by the DoJ and ended with a whole variety of moves, both legal and extra-legal to bring down WikiLeaks or block access to it. Clearly the U.S. government has launched a new campaign to control the Internet and what we can access with it.

Monday's Diary: BREAKING: Goodbye Internet Freedom as Wikileaks is Taken Down
Friday's Diary: BREAKING NEWS: Obama Admin Takes Control of Internet Domains!

They have been able to seize domains, as oppose to only block domains, China style, because they are taking unfair advantage of the fact that at present, the root domain servers, although run by an international NGO, are located in the United States and can be served by an American court order.

The Domain Name System [DNS] is that network of servers that converts a domain name, say DailyKos.com to it's IP address, in this case 208.122.51.48 which is how it is found on the Internet. In order to seize domains, the Federal government must 'seize' the top level domain servers or bend them to their will, that's why I have referred to this as an Internet coupe d'etat.

But as any Internet hacker can tell you, and the Feds found out last week, screwing with the DNS system and 'seizing domains' isn't everything it's cracked up to be. Many of the websites that Eric Holder claimed were selling counterfeit good were up and running under new domain names even before he had his Monday morning press conference. You can register a new domain name and point it at your website in less than an hour. The situation was much the same when they pulled the plug on wikileaks.org. Within hours it was available as wikileaks.de, wikileaks.nl, ljist.org and a host [no pun intended] of others. Before Friday was over some Kossacks had even included the wikileaks IP addess in their signatures.

Which brings me to the question of search engines. While the DNS system was designed as the first and most basic way we humans can find things on the web, it has largely been replaced or supplemented by the search engines. Hell, to tell you the truth these day, even when I know the domain name, I don't type it into the browser navigation bar, I type it into Google, let it correct my spelling, figure out if it's a dot com, dot net or dot whatever and find it for me. How do people find counterfeit goods or any goods on the Internet for that matter? They Google for them. How do you find documents like the Wikileaks if you don't know the website? You Google for them!

Which brings me to the point of this diary. As you can easily see, all of the Federal government's violation of international trust and our rights with its draconian seizure of domains and attacks on domains will come to naught if Google continues to do what it has always done, deliver us search results as it finds them, without fear or favor.

I don't for a moment consider the other major search engines. Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo all bent over for the Chinese government without even being kissed first, I don't think the Obama Administration will have any trouble out of them. Google on the other hand, just might pose somewhat of a problem. They are coming from a different place. They have their roots in the Free Software Movement and they have opposed this sort of thing before with China and the Bush Administration. And most importantly, of all the forces that may oppose the Obama Internet takeover, Google has the money and the technical clout to make it a real ball game.

Therefore you can bet that the pressure will be on Google big time to 'play ball.' I have seen all this coming for a long time. I know the government has been planning these moves for a long time. And I know that they know that Google could be a problem. That is why, apart from the fact that the Google/Verizon legislative proposal on network neutrality of August, really wasn't that bad, I considered this summer's attacks on Google to be preemptive strikes. It is also why I have been and continue to be so strong in my support for Google and have been and continue to be very suspicious of those, including Free Press, Huffington Post, Democracy Now, and the DailyKos, that were in panic mode in August, requesting that their followers sign petitions demanding "Google Don't Be Evil" and begging for the Federal government step in and protect the Internet. Again I ask of these organizations, the question I asked then.

Are you fools or tools?

Goodbye Internet Freedom as Wikileaks is Taken Down

The whistle blower website Wikileaks.org has been taken down by U.S. based host, Amazon.com, after it was pressured by the U.S. Senate Homeland Security Committee. According to the Christian Science Monitor:

The website WikiLeaks.org is no longer functioning, after its US-based domain host on Thursday terminated service for the controversial site. The expulsion forced WikiLeaks to relocate its domain name with a Switzerland-based domain name host, and the website is now found at WikiLeaks.ch.

Perhaps fittingly, WikiLeaks' new domain name host is the Swiss Pirate Party, which the Associated Press calls "a political group formed two years ago to campaign for freedom of information and sensible technology policy." The New York Times reported that the party is a branch of the Swedish Pirate Party, according to the website whois.com.

Former domain name host EveryDNS.net, a subsidiary of New Hampshire-based web host Dynamic Network Hosting, said in a statement on its website that it booted WikiLeaks at 10 p.m. EST on Thursday.

"The interference at issues [sic] arises from the fact that wikileaks.org has become the target of multiple distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks. These attacks have, and future attacks would, threaten the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure, which enables access to almost 500,000 other websites," the statement says.

Multiple distributed denial of service attacks [DDOS] are completely illegal, and completely disruptive to the world wide web and very costly because they operate by creating massive amounts of bogus Internet traffic in an effort to jam up one site. That traffic has to be handled and hundreds of Internet engineers must stay up all night trying to figure out just what the hell is going on. Just as hundreds of Internet engineers spent last weekend trying to figure out what was happening to these 82 domains. When our government fails to play by the rules [ and the rules of the Internet require openness about just how everyone is handling traffic ] there is no end to the disruption it can cause.

DDOS attacks are not trivial to pull off because they typically require the control thousands of computers on the Internet. I hope the organization behind this DDOS attack is found and prosecuted. But given the nature of the attack and it's target, I suspect that in this case our government is carrying out Internet crime rather than solving it. So don't wait for Eric Holder to announce arrest warrants of those who are behind these recent DDOS attacks on WikiLeak's U.S. host.

When the Obama Administration seized 82 domains over the weekend, the Daily Kos largely ignored the issue. I wrote a dairy about the website removals, but it got little attention. From the comments, it was clear that many here saw that as a simple question stopping counterfeiters by any means necessary and backed the government moves. They failed to see how this big take down of websites represents a serious threat our Internet freedom or the larger question of what will happen to the world wide web once individual governments start taking unilateral actions to dominate the Internet. Instead on Monday, they recommended an article about what the well known DHS contractor Level 3 said Comcast might do to Netflix, and failed to even mention the removal of 82 domains. I believe that the NYTimes website publication of that story just 6 hours after Eric Holder announced the seizure of domains of an unprecedented magnitude served to obscure the really important breaking news in the area network neutrality. How can we seriously talk about network neutrality if we allow the government to determine what information can even be distributed on the Internet?

Now they have pressured Amazon to taken down WikiLeaks. Will there be at outcry here now?

Also it should be noted somewhere that Assange is being taken down now, not to stop him from dropping dime on the Wars or America, which he has already done, or the State Dept. of America, which he has already done, it is being done just in time to stop him from dropping dime on the Bank of America.

Interesting.

UPDATE: An Open Letter to Amazon.com Customer Service from Daniel Ellsberg, rec'd 10:30pst

Dear friends:

I hope you will join me and others in boycotting Amazon--inconvenient as that may be--to provide some counter-pressure to efforts by Senator Lieberman and the Administration to demonize, hound, block and prosecute Wikileaks, and ultimately to control whistleblowing and dissent on the internet.

Note: After sending this letter to Amazon.com and to the websites below, I looked on Google News and found that antiwar.com had already launched a boycott effort, citing reasons that I share: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/antiwarcom-launches-boycott-of-amazoncom-after-retailer-drops-wikileaks-111205949.html Moreover, I hadn't yet read this terrific column by Glenn Greenwald, http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/01/lieberman/index.html (I read Greenwald every day, but I'm in the grip of a bad cold at the moment.) If you need more background, check out antiwar.com and Google News on Wikileaks, Assange, Amazon, etc.

I don't take it for granted that all my friends will agree with me about Wikileaks or Amazon. For those who do, this looks like a useful action."

[Note to editors: I hope that any sites that now encourage their readers to make purchases through amazon.com will consider ending this arrangement as antiwar.com has done--publicizing the reason for it to your readers-- even though I know that it means a loss of much-needed income for your operations. Let's not leave it to Joe Lieberman to call on a boycott! It's not only Wikileaks that is now under threat, and not only from Congress or Republicans.

Yours,
Dan Ellsberg

UPDATE 2: Government Sanctioned Private Seizure of Domains?

In checking the various WikiLeaks outlets as listed in wikileaks.info I noticed that wikileaks.com is replaced by a graphic that says "Sorry! This site is not currently available." This image is hosted at http://images-pw.secureserver.net/images/unavailable.jpg which is a GoDaddy.com server. This raises the troubling possibility that GoDaddy is holding a domain that doesn't belong to it.

Cosmos Engineering is the computer company I started in 1984. CosmosEng.com is the domain I purchased in 1996. At that time there was only one registrar, Network Solution. Fortunately, that monopoly got broken up and the annual fee dropped from $35/year at NS in 1996 to $10/yr. at GoDaddy today. Before I had GoDaddy as my registrar, I used Gandi.net out of France for $12.00 euros/yr. Now I'll be moving it offshore again because GoDaddy doesn't own that domain, I do, and if they are going to start taking advantage of the trust I have put in choosing them as my registrar, by seizing domains on anybody's orders, I will take my business to a land were liberty is still valued!

UPDATE 3: Reporters Sans Frontières [Reporters without Borders] issues statement, it read in part:

This is the first time we have seen an attempt at the international community level to censor a website dedicated to the principle of transparency. We are shocked to find countries such as France and the United States suddenly bringing their policies on freedom of expression into line with those of China. We point out that in France and the United States, it is up to the courts, not politicians, to decide whether or not a website should be closed.

Julian Assange on Threat to Internet Freedom

In my dairy, I have already given extensive coverage to attempts by the U.S. government to control the Internet. Now it would seem that other governments want a hand on the controls too, but only governments, thus taking control away from the non-government international organizations that have run the Internet so far.

A United Nations initiative is developing that attempts to put multiple governments in charge of the Internet but only governments. On Friday, Vint Cerf, who is generally considered the father of the Internet, and is currently Google's Chief Internet Evangelist, wrote in the official company blog:

The beauty of the Internet is that it’s not controlled by any one group. Its governance is bottoms-up—with academics, non-profits, companies and governments all working to improve this technological wonder of the modern world. This model has not only made the Internet very open—a testbed for innovation by anyone, anywhere—it's also prevented vested interests from taking control.

But last week the UN Committee on Science and Technology announced that only governments would be able to sit on a working group set up to examine improvements to the IGF—one of the Internet’s most important discussion forums. This move has been condemned by the Internet Governance Caucus, the Internet Society (ISOC), the International Chamber of Commerce and numerous other organizations—who have published a joint letter (PDF) and launched an online petition to mobilize opposition. Today, I have signed that petition on Google’s behalf because we don’t believe governments should be allowed to grant themselves a monopoly on Internet governance. The current bottoms-up, open approach works—protecting users from vested interests and enabling rapid innovation. Let’s fight to keep it that way.

These existing Internet governance groups such as ICANN and ISOC are also expressing concerns. Most recently the World Information Technology and Services Alliance weighed in, with John Higgins, Public Policy Chairman writing:

I was saddened and disappointed to learn that the Commission on Science and Technology for Development (CSTD) Bureau, at its extraordinary meeting on December 7, 2010, decided to limit participation in the new Working Group on Improvements to the Internet Governance Forum to governments only.

I therefore strongly urge you to set aside the December 7 decision to block participation from business and civil society in the new working group. In order for the working group to be effective in improving the Internet Governance Forum, it must provide for an open and inclusive process that ensures a mechanism for the full and active participation of governments, the private sector and civil society from both developing and developed countries.

IT News for Australian Business believes this new initiative has been spurred by WikiLeaks. Noting that a number of countries, including China, India and Saudi Arabia have already expressed support, under the subtitle WikiLeaks sparks push for tighter controls., they say:

At a meeting in New York on Wednesday, representatives from Brazil called for an international body made up of Government representatives that would attempt to create global standards for policing the internet - specifically in reaction to challenges such as WikiLeaks.

The Brazilian delegate stressed, however, that this should not be seen as a call for a "takeover" of the internet.

Of course not! Why would governments want to takeover the Internet?

Meanwhile back in the United States, the FCC is planning to seize more power on the Internet this week when it votes on it's so-called Net Neutrality rules. A Google/Verizon proposal for back in August. Reuter's describes the FCC rules this way:

The Federal Communications Commission will vote on Dec. 21 on whether to adopt regulations that ban the blocking of lawful traffic but allow Internet service providers to ration Web traffic on their networks.

So actually worst than the Google/Verizon proposal since if ISPs can ration web traffic on their networks, Net Neutrality pretty much goes out the window! But note that it will ban the blocking of lawful traffic.

Another way of saying that is to say that it will allow the blocking of unlawful traffic. And what is "unlawful" traffic? WikiLeaks is certainly at the top of the list. So would the 82 domains unilaterally seized by the U.S. gov't a few weeks ago, so would much of what has been done recently in support of WikiLeaks, and so would a growing list of blacklisted websites in an increasingly controlled Internet.

While Free Press has had nothing to say about the seizure of 82 domains by DHS for 'piracy' or attempts to block and censor WikiLeaks and it's supporters on the Internet, they are back on the beat for Net Neutrality and the FCC vote this Tuesday, asking supporters to send this letter:

Dear President Obama:

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski needs to hear from you right now. He came into office last year promising to fulfill your pledge to protect an open and neutral Internet from blocking and discrimination.

But he’s now pushing a rule that betrays your promise...

I think that on many fronts it should already be clear that Obama has broken his "pledge to protect an open and neutral Internet from blocking and discrimination." How can Free Press continue to ignore these broader issues of Internet freedom and press forward their very narrow campaign for what they define as Net Neutrality?

Again I ask, Are these people fools or tools?



Here is a recap of my other DKos diaries on this subject:
BREAKING - Digital Sit-Ins: The Internet Strikes Back!
Cyber War Report: New Front Opens Against Internet Coup d'état
Operation PayBack: 1st Cyber War Begins over WikiLeaks
The Internet Takeover: Why Google is Next
BREAKING: Goodbye Internet Freedom as Wikileaks is Taken Down
BREAKING NEWS: Obama Admin Takes Control of Internet Domains!
Things Even Keith Olbermann Won't Cover - UPDATE: VICTORY!!!
Stop Internet Blacklist Bill Now!
Sweet Victory on Internet Censorship: Senate Backs Off!
Internet Engineers tell the Senate to Back Off!
Why is Net Neutrality advocate Free Press MIA?
Obama's Internet Coup d'état
Julian Assange on Threat to Internet Freedom
FCC Net Neutrality's Trojan Horse
Free Press: Country Codes for the Internet?
The Mountain comes to Mohammad
Keith Olbermann's Deception
Court rules -> Google Must Be Evil & Maximize Profits
EFF on the Google\Verizon Net Neutrality Proposal
Google-Verizon: What is the Free Press Agenda?
End of the Internet As We Know It!
Free Press would make this Illegal!
Google Verizon Announce Terms of Deal