Wikileaks

Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay and writing in The Huffington Post, asked whether distributed denial of service attacks are a legitimate form of protest --- such as when Anonymous hackers targeted Paypal for refusing to send donations to Wikileaks. Fourteen criminal defendants facing federal charges for the Paypal DDOS attacks are due in court this week.

On one hand, "a denial of service attack is damaging and costly. Many of PayPal's customers rely on PayPal for their livelihood," Omidyar says. On the other hand, Omidyar writes "I can understand that the protesters were upset by PayPal's actions and felt that they were simply participating in an online demonstration of their frustration. That is their right, and I support freedom of expression, even when it's my own company that is the target."

However, Omidyar concludes such attacks are not the same as other forms of free expression because one protestor's computer is turned over to a central controller and has a magnified impact of making "hundreds of web page requests per second."

The Washington Post reports that law enforcement sources indicate no sealed indictment has been filed against Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks. "The Justice Department, at least for now, appears to be drawing a distinction between those who were government employees or contractors and were required by law to protect classified information and those who received and published the material," The Post furthe reports.