Revelations by WikiLeaks have obviously hit a raw nerve. In the face of embarrassing diplomatic cables finding their way onto the internet and into the press, the US government is doing what it can to close the floodgates. The US State Department seeks to prevent the passage of its own documents – leaked by disgruntled employees – to the press and the public through the whistleblowing site.

Pressure is being brought to bear on domain name routers, internet hosting companies, money transfer services and governments. There is even an attempt to use trumped up sex related charges to personally criminalize Assange, the most exposed link in the chain of transmission, in addition to distributed denial of service (DDS) attacks on the WikiLeaks servers – but nothing so far has had the desired effect of burying the site and stopping the leaks.

There has however been an unintended consequence: The campaign against WikiLeaks initiated by the US government has led to hacker-activists setting their sights on those payment services that have – on the insistence of the US State Department – to the people running the WikiLeaks site.

It is called Operation Payback, and it’s being organized by a hacktivist group that goes by the name of Anonymous. Their first target: Bring down the websites that are following the lead of State Department officials to cut off financial flows that sustain the WikiLeaks campaign. Using its own brand of DDS organizing software, anonymous was successful in taking some of those payment sites off line.

Two articles that report on the anonymous campaign:

WikiLeaks: Who are the hackers behind Operation Payback?

The Story Behind the Mastercard and VISA DDoS Attacks

With hundreds of mirror WikiLeaks sites springing up all over the world and with the documents being passed on from user to user, it seems increasingly unlikely that the campaign to shut down WikiLeaks is going to work.

Has anyone in the US State Department or, for that matter, in the US government apparatus, got a full understanding of what they are up against? I very much doubt that.