Category Archives: Transhuman News

After facing a DDoS attack, an activist group isnt backing down in its attempts to end Chinas Internet censorship.

I think that we are more confident than we were before that our successful execution of our strategy is going to lead us to achieve our mission, said the group via email on Tuesday.

GreatFire.org suffered a distributed denial of service attack last month that threatened to cripple its activities. The anonymous group, which is based out of China, believes the countrys government was behind the attack.

Although China has always denied any involvement in state-sponsored hacking, the country has been suspected of carrying out cyberattacks against U.S. companies and other activist groups.

GreatFire tries to offer ways to bypass Chinas censorship, including by hosting mirror websites to blocked destinations such as Google, the BBC and The New York Times.

Links to these mirror websites are hosted on GitHub, a software development platform China hasnt censored. But last month, GitHub also suffered a DDoS attack that was the largest in its history and appeared to target GreatFires page on the platform.

Both DDoS attacks have ended. During the attack against GreatFire, the group requested public support, and said that its bandwidth costs had reached up to US$30,000 a day, as a result.

We learned a lot from the attacks and there was a great outpouring of support and folks offering their financial and technical assistance, GreatFire said.

GitHub continues to host links to the mirror websites the group has created. But on Tuesday, the actual mirror websiteswhich are hosted through Amazon.com and othersappeared to be down.

We are experiencing minor hiccups but everything is moving forward on our end, the group added, without elaborating.

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Group fighting 'Net censorship in China presses on despite DDoS attack

Big corporations have a history of bullying whistleblowers into submission. Photograph: Grant Faint/Getty Images

Corporations intent on blunting the whistleblower reforms embodied in the Dodd-Frank Act have long been muzzling their employees with non-disclosure agreements. Restrictive confidentiality agreements are nothing but corporate censorship - and it needs to end.

People working in big financial services industries need to be able to alert the public and the courts of questionable practices. Thats why President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Act into law in July 2010: it was designed to address the fraud that contributed to the massive financial meltdown experienced in Europe, the United States and the rest of the world.

Its thanks to whistleblowers that we learned about illegal activity at Enron, Bernie Madoffs offices and Swiss banks like UBS and HSBC, resulting in the collection of billions of dollars in sanctions. Any doubt as to the importance of whistleblower protections in exposing corporate fraud was laid to rest in 2012 by the US Attorney General Eric Holder who described them as nothing short of profound.

No wonder that companies tried to undermine Dodd-Frank from the get go.

Numerous companies have developed broadly worded non-disclosure agreements that restrict the release of confidential information to the companys legal department as a condition of employment though the exact number is unknown. When leaving the company, employees who have threatened to file a whistleblower claims were also forced to accept non-disclosure requirements as a condition of a settlement or before they could obtain a severance payment after they were fired or laid off.

These agreements explicitly prohibit employees from communicating with anyone, except attorneys hired by the company. Some go as far as explicitly barring communication with regulators, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission.

We have seen numerous companies require employees questioned by the government to secretly provide them with insights into the scope of the investigation. These employees can then be effectively turned into informers against the government itself.

Whats even more Kafkaesque is that almost every non-disclosure agreement strictly prohibits the employee from telling the government of the existence of these secrecy agreements, and the restrictions placed upon them.

But thats about to change. On 1 April, the US Securities and Exchange Commission fined the mammoth defense contractor, KBR, Inc. (formerly Kellogg, Brown & Root), for requiring employees to sign restrictive non-disclosure agreements. It took the courage of a single whistleblower, Harry Barko, to get us to this point.

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Corporations cannot muzzle whistleblowers with secrecy agreements any longer