J.D. Tuccille on TrapWire and Surveillance

If you were trying to attract the attention of every conspiracy-minded, government-suspecting cyberactivist on the planet, you couldn't have done a better job with sky-writing and billboards. A previously unknown hacker group calling itself Anti-Leaks stages an impressively powerful and extended distributed denial of service attack against WikiLeaks, even while improbably claiming to represent "young adults, citizens of the United States of America," and targeting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as "a new breed of terrorist."

And what was WikiLeaks doing during this assault? It was attempting to release documents about a creepy-sounding, high-tech surveillance system called TrapWire. It's all very interesting, says Reason 24/7 Managing Editor, J.D. Tuccille, even if many of the documents had more to do with price tags than paranoia.