US judge Liam O’Grady ruled this past Thursday that Twitter must hand over information regarding Birgitta Jonsdottir, a member of the Icelandic parliament and also a supporter of the controversial anti-secrecy site Wikileaks. The ruling comes after months of fighting to keep what Jonsdottir views as private information out of the court’s hands, and could have far wider implications.

Due to the excessive costs of various lawsuits and the problems of a blockcade by nearly all large credit cards, WikiLeaks has stopped leaking and is diverting all power to shields aggressive fundraising in order to get enough money to fight the credit card companies in court. Bank of America, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal and Western Union all refused to accept donations for WikiLeaks on December 7th of 2010 and the situation has reached a particularly dire point.

While it seems that the companies engaged in the blockade have gotten what they’ve wanted, WikiLeaks doesn’t look like it’ll be going down easy. The site is not shutting down and is, instead, fundraising like crazy. On every page a “donate” window pops up and upon clicking the donate button, users are provided with several walkthroughs explaining exactly how they can donate so that the money actually gets to WikiLeaks.

A recently leaked diplomatic cable reveals that starting in 2009, entertainment entities teamed up with government agencies and at least considered the possibility of purposefully leaking media in hopes of infiltrating topsites. It’s unclear whether or not this actually happened, but the leaked cable discusses the option in detail.

The 2009 cable outlines a meeting involving the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), a representative from the U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE), and representatives from the South Korean government. While the cable makes no mention of any specific plans or instances of topsite infiltration, there is language which strongly implies that ICE is familiar with the process as a result of campaigns taking place here in the states.

LulzSec and Anonymous have again teamed up and this time they are urging a boycott of PayPal. OpPayPal was announced yesterday and the weapon of choice was not, oddly enough, DDOS attacks, but a comparatively gentle boycott. As per usual, the obligatory Pastebin announcement cited motivations for the operation, which include the arrest of Anonymous and LulzSec affiliates across the globe and PayPal’s continuing refusal to be associated with WikiLeaks.

Anonymous is currently claiming to have been responsible for the closure of some 35,000 PayPal accounts and a reported 1 billion dollar drop in stock value, but whether this is cause and effect or just a lucky coincidence has yet to be determined. Anonymous definitely has a vested interest in spinning their facts.

Aside from Julian Assange’s house arrest and sundry legal troubles, his brainchild WikiLeaks has been at the center of a so-called “financial blockade” by payment processing companies for over six months. In response, WikiLeaks has announced that unless the blockade is ended by Thursday, July 7, they will file a lawsuit against the companies involved.

At issue are services such as PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard which have refused to process payments supporting WikiLeaks. The companies claim that they cannot support any illegal activity, and have cut off the secret-spilling website from some much needed donation money. WikiLeaks and their payment processor DataCell counter in their suit that the continued blockade constitutes an unfair use of the companies’ market dominance.

The LulzBoat may have sailed off into the sunset, but LulzSec weren’t the only ones who knew how to make waves. Anonymous and the People’s Liberation Front launched HackerLeaks earlier this week in a bid to make hacked information more widely accessible. The site is apparently the brainchild of several PLF members and was concieved during “Operation Orlando”, an attack against the city of Orlando after the repeated arrest of members of the group “Food Not Bombs.” This new site which is admittedly modeled after WikiLeaks, provides hackers with a centralized site with which they can publicize their hacked data.

In the site’s own words

In both security as well as overall strategy, HackerLeaks is closely modeled on WikiLeaks. Our firstpriority is to provide a safe, secure – and anonymous way for hackers to disclose sensitive information.
Our team of analysts first carefully screens each submission for any possible trace of the senders
identity. Our second commitment is to ensure that each and every leak receives the maximum exposure
possible in order to achieve the most profound political impact for the risks taken by those submitting
material. To that end, we work with media outlets all over the world.

Julian Assange is worth $1,735. While that isn’t his net worth, it is what he’s going for these days. Time spent with the founder of the now infamous WikiLeaks is going for $1,735 on Ebay. Embattled in legal struggles related to a Swedish rape case in addition to defending the actions of his controversial company has drained both the company and Assange of funds. So, he is selling himself on the auction website.

More specifically, Assange is selling spots at a luncheon with himself, followed by a seat at a Frontline Club conversation with himself and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek where the two will discuss the impact of WikiLeaks on the world and in the future. Currently the seventh of eight spots at the event is going for $1,735 on Ebay in Britain. According to Ebay, 100% of the proceeds from the sale of time with Assange will go to WikiLeaks.

A hacker group trading under the name “lulzsec” was able to gain control of PBS‘ servers, defaced several websites, and posted an article to the PBS Newshour site claiming that deceased rapper Tupac Shakur was found alive in New Zealand. The group then posted several taunting messages to Twitter before methodically tweeting out PBS website passwords and other information the group gleaned during the attack. As of this morning, PBS was still struggling to contain the attack.

The motive behind the attack seems to stem from a May, 24 Frontline report on WikiLeaks called “Wikisecrets,” which the group found to not be to their liking. Some of the defaced pages also made reference to the continued incarceration of Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of leaking the documents to Wikileaks. The Frontline piece has received some criticism from Manning’s supporters and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange as being an unfair and hostile portrayal of Manning and the Wikileaks operation.

Attacks on Wikileaks, perceived or otherwise, has set off cyber attacks in the past, most notably with the hacker collective Anonymous. However, Lulzsec apparently claims no connection with the group. According to Wired, Lulzsec was responsible for a security breach at Sony and also for an attack on Fox.com which resulted in personal information from X-Factor applications being made publicly available.

To read the hacked article in its entirety, and to see other pages defaced by Lulzsec, head over to our sister site Mediaite.

(via NYTimes, Wired)

WikiLeaks may be in the business of disseminating corporate and government information, the owners of which would rather keep it in the dark, but when it comes to its own sensitive information, WikiLeaks plays tough too. According to a leaked non-disclosure agreement [PDF] signed by WikiLeaks staff, all of the collected leaks and documents are “solely the property of WikiLeaks,” and a “significant breach” of WikiLeaks’ NDA is assigned a monetary value of £12 million — A little under $20 million.

Wired:

“You accept and agree that the information disclosed, or to be disclosed to you pursuant to this agreement is, by its nature, valuable proprietary commercial information,” the agreement reads, “the misuse or unauthorized disclosure of which would be likely to cause us considerable damage.”

…

Interestingly, the agreement warns that any breach is likely to cause WikiLeaks to lose the “opportunity to sell the information to other news broadcasters and publishers.”

Leaking the NDA is considered a breach by the NDA, but whoever leaked the copy of the NDA to the New Statesman didn’t sign the NDA, so they might not be subject to the NDA’s penalty for leaking the NDA.

(New Statesman via Wired via Slashdot)

Despite a history of bashing WikiLeaks in its editorial pages, yesterday, the Wall Street Journal launched a whistleblower site of its own called SafeHouse, the aim of which is to allow potential leakers to keep their identities confidential while using “a special system built to be secure.” Whatever opinion one holds of WikiLeaks, however, SafeHouse is probably not the best option for would-be whistleblowers: It has gotten low marks on both preserving confidentiality and observing good web security practices.