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anonymous operation paybackThe Wikileaks controversy hasn't gone away since the arrest of Julian Assange. In fact, it's escalated into a full-on information war. In one corner, you've got the internet, represented by Anonymous, the loosely-organized mischief makers from 4chan's /b/ board. They're armed with hundreds of mirrors of Wikileaks and enough Denial of Service attack scripts (like the infamous "Low Orbit Ion Cannon") to take down a big, corporate website. Their opponents are the corporations that have tried to stop (or just refused to support) Wikileaks: Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, Amazon and others have come under boycotts and DDoS attacks (definition) in the past week.

Anonymous' campaign, "Operation Payback," has been slowed down by Twitter and Facebook banning pages that broadcast Anon's plans and calls to action. Although Twitter has said they're not blocking Wikileaks tweets from the trending topics list, they did shut down the Anonymous Operations Twitter account. Facebook took down the equivalent page on its site, too. Naturally, several more have popped up in their place. There are conflicting claims about whether the US government has put pressure on financial services and social media sites to stifle support for Wikileaks.

Of course, it's important not to lose sight of Anon's goal here (other than just trolling and "doing it for the lulz," I mean): they want to keep Wikileaks' documents in circulation. To that end, there's a rumor that the cables have been published and put up for sale on Amazon. It's not strictly true. There is, however, a book of commentary on the cables that have been released so far, and it's available to purchase on Amazon.com as a Kindle e-book. It's already cracked the top 100 e-books, and it's number one in the politics category. That's a bold move by the Wikileaks supporters, considering that Amazon pulled out as Wikileaks' web host last week.

According to reviews, Amazon is being hypocritical for taking down the Wikileaks servers and then making money on a Wikileaks-related e-book. Of course, the alternative would be to have the book taken down from Amazon, which would also anger Wikileaks supporters. Looks like Amazon can't win.


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