Take out WikiLeaks

In a column titled “WikiLeaks must be stopped”, the Washington Post’s Marc Thiessen writes on a subject that I have often thought about recently as a result of the WikiLeaks website publishing of more than seventy five thousand US Military classified documents:

WikiLeaks is not a news organization; it is a criminal enterprise. Its reason for existence is to obtain classified national security information and disseminate it as widely as possible -- including to the United States' enemies. These actions are likely a violation of the Espionage Act, and they arguably constitute material support for terrorism. The Web site must be shut down and prevented from releasing more documents -- and its leadership brought to justice.

Thiessen continues by outlining his reasoning for shutting down WikiLeaks, arresting the operators and the methods that are available to the United States government to do both. This article is more than overdue. It is hard to understand why the recently commissioned U.S. Cyber Command and/or the National Security Agency seemingly do not have the initiative and authority to remove WikiLeaks from cyberspace.

The owner of WikiLeaks is an Australian who travels through friendly countries in Europe and brags that his web site is impenetrable which surely can’t be true. There must be some government agency, specifically the two listed above that could have taken this threat and wiped it from the web. This gross criminal act, if another country did this it would be rightly considered an act of war, is not the first time that this site has posted classified U.S. documents and they even allowed U.S. and European newspapers to look at the current batch before they were posted online. There was plenty of warning and time for some government agency to take positive action to protect this information.

And in the absence of government action, why are there no patriotic hackers able to attack the web site as an act in service of their country? Certainly there are hackers in this country capable to taking out WikiLeaks and covering their tracks so that they cannot be found. It would be a source of national pride that some individual or group with the capability to do so would.

The opinion exists that much of the documentation is old and therefore not all that important. This opinion completely misses the point. The point is that a criminal has taken it on their own to illegally obtain and share secrets of our country. It does not matter that the harm done is less than if the documents were more current. That argument requires blind luck and the next time that WikiLeaks posts U.S. classified information that luck may not be there.

It is frustrating and pathetic that our government either can’t or will not confront the criminals that comprise WikiLeaks. It cannot be soon enough that the decision is made to take this criminal organization out and a visit to their website leads to a site not found error and the operators themselves are in jail.