A member of Anonymous at a protest against Scientology in Colorado in 2008 (Jacob Davis/flickr)
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.
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The show is a co-production of WNYC Radio and Public Radio International, in collaboration with New York Times Radio and WGBH Boston.
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Comments [2]
John,
I usually appreciate your acerbic sensibility, but your moralistic tone was a BIT much during this interview. We're big kids, we can make our own decisions about Operation Payback. Leave your political opinions in your pocket.
Thanks.
"Operation Payback" was in full flight before the whole Wikileaks saga and has to do with the DDoS which happened against thePirateBay. This however is a sub-operation of Operation Payback called "Operation Avenge Assange"
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