war

a) Swiss bank freezes Assange's account
b) hackers take down Swiss bank's site!



from the New York Times:

Operation Payback, a group of Internet activists and hackers, took credit on Monday for crashing the Web Site of a Swiss Bank hours after it froze an account set up by the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange.

Writing on Twitter the group called on fellow hackers to attack the PostFinance.ch site and within minutes it was knocked offline.

Earlier on Monday, the same group of activists said they attacked PayPal, which froze a WikiLeaks account three days ago.

from the group's Youtube page:

Operation Payback (is a bitch), this is the Internet, we run this. An open message from Anonymous to the governments of the world and their legal leeches regarding the motivation of the cyber protests.

and here is their "anonymous message" (which is fairly generic and does not mention Wikileaks.)



i'm sure this video is designed to put the fear of god - or at least of the unwashed masses - into the hearts of the banker types. well maybe.
and i'm pretty sure that the Swiss bank's website will be back to normal in the morning.
and i'm sure that any institution will think twice about having anything to do with Assange from now on.
still, payback is a bitch.

UPDATE:

the Guardian and the Telegraph are reporting that Assange will surrender to U.K. police sometime tuesday.
next stop for Assange: Gitmo!