Arrest of Julian Assange sparks online ‘operation payback’
The arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has sparked an online furor. By utilizing “distributed denial of service” attacks to attempt to overwhelm companies’ web servers, the activist group “Anonymous” has targeted organizations that they feel worked against WikiLeaks’ efforts in the days leading up to Assange’s arrest on Monday. Anonymous has vowed to continue its online efforts, which have so far been directed at Amazon, PayPal, Visa…and even took the MasterCard website offline for much of yesterday morning. How serious are these attacks, and what are the methods of the people behind them?
For the details on this distributed online campaign, we speak with New York Times Magazine and Wired contributing writer Mattathias Schwartz, and James Lewis, Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The story you just read is available to read for free because thousands of listeners and readers like you generously support our nonprofit newsroom. Every day, the reporters and producers at The World are hard at work bringing you human-centered news from across the globe. But we can’t do it without you: We need your support to ensure we can continue this work for another year.
When you make a gift of $10 or more a month, we’ll invite you to a virtual behind-the-scenes tour of our newsroom to thank you for being with The World.