The U.S. establishment is playing hard ball. This now includes an array of figures such as Lieberman, Palin, Huckabee, Susan Collins, Peter King, and major media pundits and outlets. They are out for Assange’s head. There is already a no-bail situation. These people can rewrite the laws to their pleasure. Sweden is already carrying on with trumped up charges. Companies are already rolling over without so much as a whimper. The PayPal action is especially disturbing to me because it interrupts funds to Assange. The effect is to hamper his defense and work. They have already judged him as guilty.

This is part of the background against which denial of service attacks are being made against Amazon, PayPal, and Sweden, among others. Who is doing that? Mainly a younger contingent of persons who support Assange. They have chosen these targets for now. Maybe next they will choose the U.S. officials and media who have called for his blood. Maybe they will choose the Swedish prosecutors or the people making the charges. I hope so. They are recruiting more people to their cause using internet methods. I hope that proves effective.

I’m not  very computer literate and so I do not actually know what a denial of service is. What I’d like to see is that when hundreds of thousands of people contact a web site, they do so with a message of protest or with questions they are raising or with their concerns. That legitimizes such a communication. Everyone has a right to communicate with Amazon, PayPal, the Swedish government, Sarah Palin, or Joe Lieberman and express their opinions. If such queries happen to be coordinated, well, what’s really wrong with that? Petitions with many names carry more weight than those with few.

The war is going to grow into calls for further government control over the internet. Young people will be tracked down and prosecuted and made examples. One 16-year old is now under arrest. Assange is and will be under tremendous pressure.

One case that bothered me a lot is when PayPal denied service to Assange and to those who wanted to help him with funds. It shows the horrible government intrusion into the finances of anyone and everyone. I am pleased when denial of service attacks attract negative publicity on the web site of PayPal. Same for Sweden.  The attack on Amazon does not trouble me either. (I speak for myself always, not LRC. No one monitors my blogs here.) Any collateral damage, and it is slight anyway, is small potatoes in comparison with the Assange case and with the mobilization of a generation of younger persons and not-so-young persons in defense of a free internet and a free Assange. If those who denied Assange had shown even a trace of backbone, I might say differently, but instead they rolled over.

These denial of service attacks have weaknesses. I doubt very much that the attacks gain adherents to the cause of Assange among the general public. Their overall effectiveness at achieving the liberty goal is unknown. If tea is to be dumped, the tea should be carefully chosen and the reasons for dumping it articulated carefully far and wide. The attacks also have the large strength of active resistance to totalitarianism. Resistance has to be made active at some junctures. Words alone will not stem totalitarians who are active against Assange and would just as soon hang him or torture him.

I am pleased as punch to see very young people want to defend their internet, and these attacks are a signal of that. Yet I wonder whether they will articulate their cause and get it out and overcome the counter maneuvers of government. I’d like to see them show a long run staying power. I’d like to see some smart and imaginative strategy that surprises the rest of us and places the government on the defensive and that enlightens the general public about its government. I doubt that much can be won in the long run by these attacks alone. It’s going to take more.

I am concerned that more young people will be detected, rounded up, and sent up for years and made an example. I am glad that many more programs are being downloaded that aid the denial of service attacks. That decreases the risks for any one person.

I’m rooting for the resistance and against the government and its media shills. I’d like to see the resistance also take a more articulate and direct form against the Swedish prosecutors and the denial of bail in England and the bloodthirsty Senators and American conservatives like Palin and Huckabee. I suppose they’ll get around to that or already have.

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