WikiLeaks founder Released from UK jail on Bail

image source: www.pakmela.com

London's High Court ruled Thursday that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange can be freed if he posts £240,000 (US$384,000) in bail, rejecting prosecutors' appeal that he be imprisoned pending a January extradition hearing, according to the BBC.

Assange was granted bail on Tuesday in Westminster Magistrates Court on the conditions that he surrender his passport, wear an electronic tracking tag, regularly check in with police and adhere to a curfew. The Crown Prosecution Service, however, appealed the ruling, maintaining that Assange should remain in custody. In a statement, the Swedish Prosecution Authority affirmed that it was the U.K., not Sweden, that appealed.

Prosecutors argued that Assange has few ties to the U.K, travels frequently and represents a flight risk. He has remained in jail since Dec. 7.

Assange is wanted in Sweden for questioning related to sexual assault allegations from two women stemming from two incidents in the country in August. According to the Metropolitan Police, Assange is accused of one count of unlawful coercion, two counts of sexual molestation and one count of rape.

Assange has denied the allegations, maintaining that his contact with the women was consensual. He and his lawyers have said they believe the pursuit for Assange is related to WikiLeaks' ongoing release of U.S. diplomatic cables, which has angered the U.S. government.

Journalists and spectators convened en masse for Assange. Although Westminster Magistrates Court allowed reporters to use Twitter from the courtroom -- a deviation from the norm since courts regularly tell spectators to turn off their mobile phones -- Justice Duncan Ouseley did not allow reporters to use Twitter during Assange's latest hearing, according to The Guardian newspaper, which ran a live blog of the proceedings.

The U.S. Attorney General's office is investigating Assange but has yet to charge him. It has raised questions over whether Assange could eventually be extradited to the U.S. from Sweden. Sweden's prosecutor's office addressed that scenario in its statement, saying that an extradition request from the U.S. would require the consent of the U.K.

image source: www.pakmela.com

Assange is scheduled for an extradition hearing in the U.K. on Jan. 11. His attorney, Mark Stephens, said Thursday the bail money for his release appears to have been raised.

While Assange remains under intense pressure, the U.S. Army has charged a soldier believed to have leaked the cables to WikiLeaks.

Private First Class Bradley E. Manning is charged with mishandling and transferring classified information in connection with the cables. He is also believed to be the source of video of an Apache helicopter shooting civilians in Iraq, which was also released on the whistle-blower website.

As of Thursday, WikiLeaks has published about 1,600 of more than 250,000 cables in its archive.

source: ComputerWorld

The Winds of WikiLeaks' War

WikiLeaks' Cablegate release has instigated a Web battle. On one side, high-profile organizations like credit card companies have refused to do business with the site; on the other, WikiLeaks supporters have carried out a series of reprisal DDoS attacks. Meanwhile, Apple makes new rules for the Mac App Store, a new study makes AT&T look bad, and Google makes plans for its various OSes.
The fallout from WikiLeaks' late-November release of hundreds of thousands of private U.S. State Department messages continues to spread, and it's grown well beyond the spewing of outraged rhetoric. Feeling pressure from the public and possibly the U.S. government itself, businesses are attempting to lay siege to WikiLeaks, cutting it off financially and technologically. Those who support what WikiLeaks has done have begun to fight back in their own way.

Meanwhile, Julian Assange, the site's founder, has been arrested on a Swedish sex crime allegation. But before turning himself in to authorities, he issued something of a threat: If any harm comes to him personally, or if WikiLeaks is somehow wiped off the Web, there will be consequences. He's sent a heavily encrypted file with a surprise inside to supporters around the world. It's locked up so tight that even sophisticated military computers can't crack it open. Assange has said that if he or WikiLeaks croaks, the key gets sent out as well, and the whole world gets to see the great big secret inside. Unless that happens, though, what's in that file is anybody's guess -- and the mystery is what makes it such a powerful life insurance policy.

Despite that threat, WikiLeaks has seen some outfits turn their backs on it. For instance, it came to light recently that Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) was hosting WikiLeaks for a period of time, and its cloud services were actually giving the site a good amount of protection from DDoS attacks. Soon after that news spread, though, Amazon kicked WikiLeaks off its cloud and washed its hands of the whole thing. That didn't seem to leave WikiLeaks vulnerable, though -- as much as its adversaries have tried, wiping the site off the Web completely may be damn near impossible at this point. It's been mirrored and spread so far and wide throughout the Internet that if anyone manages to shut down one instance, there are many more places still providing access.

It seems WikiLeaks has an army of supporters willing to fight back on its behalf. When companies like Visa (NYSE: V) and MasterCard (NYSE: MA) refused to process donations people were trying to make to WikiLeaks, a group called "Operation Payback" targeted them for DDoS attacks, temporarily knocking out their websites. This did not crash the credit card operators' ability to conduct transactions; it was more an act of protest that gummed up their front-facing websites, not the vital foundations underneath.

The group reportedly also tried to knock out Amazon's home page, which would have had much more severe implications for that company, since that's really where most of its business is actually done. But that blow apparently failed to connect.

For now, the war continues. High-profile companies are doing everything they can to distance themselves from WikiLeaks -- refusing support, declining to do business, pulling the plug on pro-WikiLeaks groups, so on. The site's supporters just keep pushing back, flooding those companies' servers to the point of collapse. That kind of attack likely won't kill off an entire business, but it can be costly, and the more famous the target, the more publicity the reprisal campaign receives. So who's next?

Article By Paul Hartsock adopted from http://www.technewsworld.com 

Wikileaks' Previous 10 Greatest Stories

Adopted Article by By Tom Chivers at telegraph.co.uk

Wikileaks, the whistle-blowing website, Most of people know this site after they released the documents about Iraq and Afghanistan war. This site have been working for a while now and it provided many great stories in the recent past. Following are its top ten stories, which will give you a view how it have been contributing and providing alternative view of the world.

1. Iraq Apache helicopter attack

Horrifying video footage showing 15 people including two Reuters journalists being shot dead by a US Army Apache helicopter gunman, taken from the helicopter's gun camera, appalled the world when it was released on Wikileaks.

The crew were heard laughing at the "dead bas***ds" and saying "light 'em up!" and "keep shooting, keep shooting".

The US military has refused to discipline the helicopter's crew, saying that there were "insurgents and reporters in an area where US forces were about to be ambushed.

"At the time we weren't able to discern whether (Reuters employees) were carrying cameras or weapons."

The brother of one of the dead Reuters journalists was sceptical: "My question is how could those highly skilled American pilots with all their hi-tech information not distinguish between a camera and a rocket launcher."

2. Guantanamo Bay operating procedures

The "Standard Operating Procedures for Camp Delta", the US Army manual for soldiers dealing with prisoners at Camp Delta, was released on Wikileaks in 2007. Human rights groups were concerned to discover that according to official guidelines, prisoners could be denied access to the Red Cross for up to four weeks. It also showed that inmates could earn "special rewards" for good behaviour and cooperation - and that one such "reward" was a roll of toilet paper.

3. Scientology

In 2008, Wikileaks published "the collected secret 'bibles' of Scientology", including some of internal workings and strange practices of the controversial Church. It showed that there were eight "levels" of "Operating Thetans", with Level Eight being the highest, that Scientologists can aspire to. It also instructed adherents to carry out difficult-to-understand "drills" including: "Find a tight packed crowd of people. Write it as a crowd and then as individuals until you have a cognition. Note it down." The drills were written by the Church founder L Ron Hubbard himself. Lawyers for the Church of Scientology attempted to force Wikileaks to take the information down, calling it the "Advanced Technology of the Scientology religion", but the site refused.

4. Climate Research Unit emails

More than 1,000 emails sent over 10 years by staff at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit were posted on Wikileaks after being accessed by a hacker. They appeared to show that scientists engaged in "tricks" to help bolster arguments that global warming is real and man-made. One said: "I've just completed Mike's Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline." The report was described by sceptical commenters as "the worst scientific scandal of our generation". The head of the CRU, Professor Phil Jones, stepped down from his role in the wake of the leak, although following a House of Commons inquiry which found that he had no case to answer he was reinstated.

5. Australian internet blacklist

Last year, as the Australian government plotted a "great firewall of Australia" intended to prevent internet users in that country from seeing websites which the government deemed unsuitable, Wikileaks got hold of the proposed blacklist. It published them despite warnings from Bjorn Landfeldt, a University of Sydney professor involved in creating the list, that the list "constitute[d] a condensed encyclopedia of depravity and potentially very dangerous material" and "the concerned parent's worst nightmare" as children would inevitably seek it out. About half of the listed items were not child pornography or anything similar, but included Wikipedia entries, YouTube videos, fringe religious sites, fetish, straight and gay pornography, and even a travel agent's website and one of a dentist in Queensland.

6. Trafigura's Minton Report

In 2009 the internet went crazy over oil trading company Trafigura's attempts to block publication of an internal study about the health effects of waste dumping in Africa. The draft report, written by scientific consultant John Minton, said that the chemical processes Trafigura used to clean the dumped gasoline was amateurish and would probably have left dangerous sulphur compounds untreated. It was said that these compounds could cause severe burns to the skin and to the lungs, permanent ulceration, corneal damage, vomiting, diarrhoea, loss of consciousness and death to people who came into contact with it. The Guardian gained possession of the report, but Trafigura took the newspaper to court to gain an injunction. However, Wikileaks also had received the report, and within hours the information that The Guardian was legally prevented from publishing was all over Twitter.

7. BNP membership

The names, addresses and occupations of 13,500 members of the far-Right British National Party were released on to Wikileaks in 2008. The list included the names of several police officers, senior members of the military, doctors and professors. It came as senior military figures warned that the BNP's politics were "fundamentally at odds" with the values of the British military, and BNP figures said that the "establishment" was trying to "derail" the party. At least one person on the list was fired from their job after it was revealed that they were a member of the BNP.

8. Sarah Palin's email account

Ahead of the 2008 US Presidential Election, Republican candidate John McCain's running mate Sarah Palin had her private Yahoo email account hacked by Anonymous, an online group best known for an ongoing battle with the Church of Scientology. Two emails, her contact list and various family photos were posted to Wikileaks. The McCain campaign described it as a "shocking invasion of the governor's privacy and a violation of law". It was found that Mrs Palin had been using the private account for official business, and it was alleged that this was to avoid American public record laws.

9. 9/11 pager data

More than 500,000 pager messages sent in the United States on the day of the September 11 attacks were published to Wikileaks in November last year. Some were from federal and local officials, but most were from ordinary people. There was a debate over whether the release was legitimately in the public interest, revealing personal messages such as "I'm ok & love you..xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox". A Wikileaks spokesman defended the leak, saying that it represented "one more building block to getting a full picture of what happened on that day."

10. How to stop leaks' document

In a delightful twist, a British military manual - the Defence Manual of Security, or Joint Services Protocol 440 (JSP440) - specifically dealing with how best to avoid leaks was leaked onto the site in October last year. It warned that the Chinese "[have] a voracious appetite for all kinds of information; political, military, commercial, scientific and technical" and that spying is no longer like "the novels of John Le Carre". Journalists are listed in the document as one of the "threats" to security, alongside foreign intelligence services, criminals, terrorist groups and disaffected staff. In an even more self-referential moment, a Pentagon document naming Wikileaks itself as a threat to national security was leaked - to Wikileaks.

Wikileaks' Previous 10 Greatest Stories

Adopted Article by By Tom Chivers at telegraph.co.uk

Wikileaks, the whistle-blowing website, Most of people know this site after they released the documents about Iraq and Afghanistan war. This site have been working for a while now and it provided many great stories in the recent past. Following are its top ten stories, which will give you a view how it have been contributing and providing alternative view of the world.

1. Iraq Apache helicopter attack


Horrifying video footage showing 15 people including two Reuters journalists being shot dead by a US Army Apache helicopter gunman, taken from the helicopter's gun camera, appalled the world when it was released on Wikileaks.
The crew were heard laughing at the "dead bas***ds" and saying "light 'em up!" and "keep shooting, keep shooting".
The US military has refused to discipline the helicopter's crew, saying that there were "insurgents and reporters in an area where US forces were about to be ambushed.
"At the time we weren't able to discern whether (Reuters employees) were carrying cameras or weapons."
The brother of one of the dead Reuters journalists was sceptical: "My question is how could those highly skilled American pilots with all their hi-tech information not distinguish between a camera and a rocket launcher."

2. Guantanamo Bay operating procedures

The "Standard Operating Procedures for Camp Delta", the US Army manual for soldiers dealing with prisoners at Camp Delta, was released on Wikileaks in 2007. Human rights groups were concerned to discover that according to official guidelines, prisoners could be denied access to the Red Cross for up to four weeks. It also showed that inmates could earn "special rewards" for good behaviour and cooperation - and that one such "reward" was a roll of toilet paper.

3. Scientology

In 2008, Wikileaks published "the collected secret 'bibles' of Scientology", including some of internal workings and strange practices of the controversial Church. It showed that there were eight "levels" of "Operating Thetans", with Level Eight being the highest, that Scientologists can aspire to. It also instructed adherents to carry out difficult-to-understand "drills" including: "Find a tight packed crowd of people. Write it as a crowd and then as individuals until you have a cognition. Note it down." The drills were written by the Church founder L Ron Hubbard himself. Lawyers for the Church of Scientology attempted to force Wikileaks to take the information down, calling it the "Advanced Technology of the Scientology religion", but the site refused.

4. Climate Research Unit emails

More than 1,000 emails sent over 10 years by staff at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit were posted on Wikileaks after being accessed by a hacker. They appeared to show that scientists engaged in "tricks" to help bolster arguments that global warming is real and man-made. One said: "I've just completed Mike's Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline." The report was described by sceptical commenters as "the worst scientific scandal of our generation". The head of the CRU, Professor Phil Jones, stepped down from his role in the wake of the leak, although following a House of Commons inquiry which found that he had no case to answer he was reinstated.

5. Australian internet blacklist

Last year, as the Australian government plotted a "great firewall of Australia" intended to prevent internet users in that country from seeing websites which the government deemed unsuitable, Wikileaks got hold of the proposed blacklist. It published them despite warnings from Bjorn Landfeldt, a University of Sydney professor involved in creating the list, that the list "constitute[d] a condensed encyclopedia of depravity and potentially very dangerous material" and "the concerned parent's worst nightmare" as children would inevitably seek it out. About half of the listed items were not child pornography or anything similar, but included Wikipedia entries, YouTube videos, fringe religious sites, fetish, straight and gay pornography, and even a travel agent's website and one of a dentist in Queensland.

6. Trafigura's Minton Report

In 2009 the internet went crazy over oil trading company Trafigura's attempts to block publication of an internal study about the health effects of waste dumping in Africa. The draft report, written by scientific consultant John Minton, said that the chemical processes Trafigura used to clean the dumped gasoline was amateurish and would probably have left dangerous sulphur compounds untreated. It was said that these compounds could cause severe burns to the skin and to the lungs, permanent ulceration, corneal damage, vomiting, diarrhoea, loss of consciousness and death to people who came into contact with it. The Guardian gained possession of the report, but Trafigura took the newspaper to court to gain an injunction. However, Wikileaks also had received the report, and within hours the information that The Guardian was legally prevented from publishing was all over Twitter.

7. BNP membership

The names, addresses and occupations of 13,500 members of the far-Right British National Party were released on to Wikileaks in 2008. The list included the names of several police officers, senior members of the military, doctors and professors. It came as senior military figures warned that the BNP's politics were "fundamentally at odds" with the values of the British military, and BNP figures said that the "establishment" was trying to "derail" the party. At least one person on the list was fired from their job after it was revealed that they were a member of the BNP.

8. Sarah Palin's email account

Ahead of the 2008 US Presidential Election, Republican candidate John McCain's running mate Sarah Palin had her private Yahoo email account hacked by Anonymous, an online group best known for an ongoing battle with the Church of Scientology. Two emails, her contact list and various family photos were posted to Wikileaks. The McCain campaign described it as a "shocking invasion of the governor's privacy and a violation of law". It was found that Mrs Palin had been using the private account for official business, and it was alleged that this was to avoid American public record laws.

9. 9/11 pager data

More than 500,000 pager messages sent in the United States on the day of the September 11 attacks were published to Wikileaks in November last year. Some were from federal and local officials, but most were from ordinary people. There was a debate over whether the release was legitimately in the public interest, revealing personal messages such as "I'm ok & love you..xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox". A Wikileaks spokesman defended the leak, saying that it represented "one more building block to getting a full picture of what happened on that day."

10. How to stop leaks' document

In a delightful twist, a British military manual - the Defence Manual of Security, or Joint Services Protocol 440 (JSP440) - specifically dealing with how best to avoid leaks was leaked onto the site in October last year. It warned that the Chinese "[have] a voracious appetite for all kinds of information; political, military, commercial, scientific and technical" and that spying is no longer like "the novels of John Le Carre". Journalists are listed in the document as one of the "threats" to security, alongside foreign intelligence services, criminals, terrorist groups and disaffected staff. In an even more self-referential moment, a Pentagon document naming Wikileaks itself as a threat to national security was leaked - to Wikileaks.

Preparing to Secure Bail for Assange

Assange's legal team will attempt to secure bail for him from Westminster magistrates next Tuesday.

His solicitor, Mark Stephens, said Assange was "quite chipper – he seemed to be bearing up". Assange was wearing a grey prison tracksuit because he did not have any of his own clothes. The decision by the judge to remand him in custody had taken the WikiLeaks founder and his lawyers by surprise, and he went to prison in the clothes he was wearing.

Assange complained about the daytime TV, Stephens said, adding that "he doesn't have access to a computer, even without an internet connection, or to writing material. He's got some files but doesn't have any paper to write on and put them in."

In the wake of online attacks on corporations by pro-WikiLeaks hackers, Stephens said Assange was concerned that "people have unjustly accused WikiLeaks of inspiring cyber attacks".

Assange, 39, was seen by a doctor when he arrived at Wandsworth – all prisoners are assessed to see if they pose a suicide risk. He was kept for a night in the prison's Onslow centre, which contains sex offenders and others assessed to be vulnerable.

As part of a scheme called "access to justice", prison authorities are arranging for Assange to be given a computer so he can work on his case. The computer will have limited internet access.

Assange asked for one of his legal team to be allowed to bring him a laptop, but was refused – prisoners are not commonly allowed their own computers.

Assange, who was born in Australia, also saw officials from the Australian high commission. He has his own cell and because of the consular and legal visits did not exercise, but will normally get one hour a day. Because he is in the segregation unit, his association with other prisoners will be limited.

Swedish prosecutors want to interview Assange about allegations of sexual assault against two women. His lawyers say they fear the US will attempt to extradite him to face charges over the release of hundreds of thousands of secret cables, although Washington has not so far launched any legal action against him.

In a letter to the Guardian appearing tomorrow, prominent supporters including John Pilger, Terry Jones, Miriam Margolyes and AL Kennedy call for Assange's immediate release. "We protest at the attacks on WikiLeaks and, in particular, on Julian Assange," they write, adding that the leaks have "assisted democracy in revealing the real views of our governments over a range of issues".

Julian Assange put in segregation unit

Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, has been transferred to the segregation unit of Wandsworth prison where the authorities are planning to give him limited access to the internet, it emerged tonight.

Assange, the most famous inmate in the Victorian jail, met his legal team after being sent there on remand when he was refused bail on Tuesday. Sweden is seeking his extradition over allegations of sexual assault.

Assange is thought to have asked to be housed away from other prisoners, who had shown a high degree of interest in him after he arrived. A source said other inmates had been supportive of Assange, whom the US has accused of jeopardising its national security by releasing a flood of confidential diplomatic documents.

The two Ladies Who accused Julian Assange of Rape

The names and photos of the two women accusing Julian Assange of rape were launched. The women are Sofia Wilen and Anna Ardin. It has been suggested that Wilen is fairly impressionable and that she was convinced by Anna Ardin to press charges for rape.
Evidence is mounting that Sofia Wilén and her associate Anna Ardin pre-planned "revenge" on Julian Assange by setting him up for false rape allegations. The primary mastermind behind the setup is thought to be Ardin.

Sofia Wilén has been outed as one of the two women who have accused WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange of rape. Assange was taken into custody today, and is fighting extradition to Sweden. We will have more pictures of Sofia Wilén as we find them, but for now you can at least get a sense of what she looks like in the photo below, after the jump:

Anna Ardin, joins Sofia Wilén in accusing Julian Assange of rape. Ardin previously had ties to a CIA backed anti-Fidel Castro group, which kind of makes you wonder. We’ve got the first picture that’s been put out there of Anna Ardin, and we’ll have more pictures as they come to light. Check out the photo after the jump, and check back for more as we find them:

Julian Assange's Mother Defending her son

The mother of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has emerged to defend her son as fighting a good fight, saying she raised a highly intelligent and sensitive boy, and gave him a strong grounding in ethics.

"Whether you agree with what Julian does or not, living by what you believe in and standing up for something is a good thing," she told the Australian newspaper Herald Sun, in an article dated Dec. 2. "He sees what he's doing as doing a good thing in the world, fighting baddies, if you like."

But that’s not exactly what government authorities are considering as they seek to arrest the renegade Australian. Mr. Assange is wanted on rape allegations in Sweden, the international police organization Interpol has issued a “red notice” alert for his arrest, and Australian and American law enforcement agencies are reportedly studying the possibility of issuing criminal charges against him.

Julian Assange : The man behind WikiLeaks

The man behind WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, is coming in for both praise and criticism after his classified information clearinghouse published thousands of secret military and diplomatic documents relating to the war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and many other countries.

Mr. Assange’s work is much better known than he is. The newest leaks have uncovered evidence about a number of things previously reported but not confirmed, including:

• Numerous incidents of American forces killing innocent Afghan civilians.

• The existence of a secret unit of American special forces tasked with killing or capturing top Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders.

• Worries among US officials that elements of Pakistani intelligence were aiding the Taliban.

However, the documents have also sparked renewed interest in the WikiLeaks founder, whose roots as a computer hacker inform his ethos, which he terms “scientific journalism” – a desire to get to underlying facts by turning to encyclopedic volumes of raw material.

Assange was born in northeast Australia in 1971 and lived a nomadic life in his early years. According to a profile of Assange in a June issue of The New Yorker, he and his mother moved 37 times before he turned 15. With conventional education rendered impossible, Assange self-taught at libraries and learned to program on early PCs.

Programming quickly became hacking once Assange got an Internet connection, and soon he was accessing government networks and bank mainframes. He was arrested in 1991 and charged with more than 30 criminal counts related to his hacking. Facing as many as 10 years in prison, Assange struck a plea deal.

During sentencing, the judge ruled that Assange only had to pay a fine. Assange's hacks were not malicious; they were the harmless result of “inquisitive intelligence,” said the judge.

The same “look/see” mentality that drove Assange’s hacking now drives WikiLeaks. Assange described his organization to The New Yorker as “scientific journalism,” comparing it to biology researchers publishing their data sets along with their papers. In recapping a talk by Assange at London’s Center for Investigative Journalism, a reporter for the British newspaper The Guardian cheekily pointed out that “if Assange was producing this article, he would post the rambling hour-and-a-half talk he delivers” instead of quoting from it.

“Journalism should be more like science,” Assange told The Guardian. “As far as possible, facts should be verifiable.”

Though Assange’s most recent, well-known projects have had an antiwar bent – the recent Afghan war leaks, the infamous “collateral murder” video of a US helicopter crew gunning down a group that included two Reuters journalists in Iraq – his site does not appear to have an obvious ideology beyond exposing secrets.

In other projects, Assange published a trove of text messages sent in the US on September 11, 2001, and e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, which led many to believe that scientists were suppressing anti-global warming research and results.

WikiLeaks: DDoS attacks reflect 'public opinion'

WikiLeaks neither supports nor condemns the cyber attacks that have targeted its critics, it said Friday, just as it appears the attackers are mounting a fresh operation against Moneybookers.com.

The whistleblowing website wrote on its Twitter feed that it is not affiliated with Anonymous, a group of online activists that have attacked websites of companies that cut off services to WikiLeaks.

On its website, WikiLeaks went further.

"There has been no contact between any WikiLeaks staffer and anyone at Anonymous," said a statement there. "WikiLeaks has not received any prior notice of any of Anonymous' actions."

"We neither condemn nor applaud these attacks. We believe they are a reflection of public opinion on the actions of the targets," the statement continued, attributing the remarks to WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson.

Meanwhile, those with Anonymous appear to be looking for more computing power to use in attacks on websites such as Moneybookers.com.

Early on Friday, "Anonymous Operations" wrote on its Twitter feed that they had begun targeting Moneybookers.com, which banned WikiLeaks from using its services in August. Anonymous has been targeting companies that have halted business with WikiLeaks, including Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, Amazon.com and PostFinance, a Swiss financial institution.

The attacks against Moneybookers.com have been somewhat successful, with data showing the site was unavailable for some time on Friday morning, said Paul Mutton , a security analyst with Netcraft.

One of the tools used to attack Moneybookers.com is the LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Cannon), which is a denial-of-service tool that sends garbage traffic to a website.

Those behind the attacks have set up command-and-control servers that can automatically issue instructions to computers running LOIC. Those command-and-control servers can issue commands via IRC chat channels and even Twitter, Mutton said. There is also a Web-based version of LOIC that can be manually configured to attack websites.

Security researchers have been monitoring chatter on IRC between those involved in Anonymous. There are indications that other people who control vast numbers of computers owned by people who are not aware they are infected with botnet code are interested in joining the action, said Amichai Schulman , chief technology officer for the security vendor Imperva.