Chris Floyd: Back From the Hack, and Once More Into the Breach

[babylonsister]

http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/2524/81/

Back From the Hack, and Once More Into the Breach
Wednesday, 03 October 2007
by Chris Floyd

As all the world knows – oh, all right, as a handful of people in the world knows – over the weekend we were savagely hacked, yet again, by the enemies of truth and enlightenment. (That is the current term of art for political hackers, isn't it?) This was in fact the worst hack yet, a most expert and sophisticated operation that penetrated some very heavy security and wreaked enormous damage, essentially wiping out the entire server with a number of dissident websites.

It was the precise equivalent of firebombing a newspaper or printing press whose works displeased some powerful entity or individual. Fortunately, almost everything had been backed up by our intrepid publisher, Rich Kastelein, who by dint of Herculean labor has finally restored Atlantic Free Press (and Empire Burlesque) to rude health. (Some pictures are still missing, but we're working on that.)

Rich marshals several dissident sites on his server, including Empire Burlesque, Pacific Free Press (both still being restored as of this writing), and now the website of Craig Murray, the courageous truth-teller who blew the whistle on the atrocities and depradations of Bush's one-time "Terror War" ally, autocrat Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan, where Murray served as UK ambassador.

For his pains, Murray was subjected to the usual sacking and villification by the powers-that-be. Undaunted, he has carried on speaking out, most recently about the Russian-Uzbek oligarch Alisher Usmanov, the convict who has parked his lard on top of $3 billion in the usual murkily-gotten "privatization" gains and is now ensconsced in Britain, buying his way into a top UK soccer club, like fellow murkigarch Roman Abramovich. (Boys and their toys; what can you do, eh?) Usmanov has also been tossing his bulk around Britain's ludicrously skewed libel courts, which are designed to protect the high and mighty (and down and dirty) from the prospect of having their soiled rainment exposed to the generality.

In brief, Usmanov made with the legal hit-men, and strong-armed Murray's website host into pulling the plug. But Murray found a new home for his website, when our main man Rich stepped into the breach, offering to host the site on his server, in defiance of oligarchical bluster. This new Murray site was due to launch on Monday, October 1; but lo and behold, Rich's server was hit by the hacker firebomb on Sunday, September 30 – just hours before the Murray site was to go live. Certainly an interesting juxtaposition of events, to say the least. (The new Murray site is not quite ready to go, but you can see a backup version here.)

Anyway, we're back, again, and loaded for bear, as usual. Thanks for your patience. If in the future we should be temporarily muzzled for a considerable time again, you might buzz over to the old Empire Burlesque site here, where we will use for stop-gap blogging.