Sarah Palin says website was attacked in Operation: Payback
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Sarah Palin said her political action committee website and credit card were both hacked earlier today, possibly as a part of Operation: Payback, according to a blog post from ABC News.
Palin told ABC about the cyber attack in an e-mail, blaming hackers from London affiliated with the Operation: Payback campaign in defense of WikiLeaks.
Operation: Payback claimed responsibility for temporarily shutting down the websites of Visa and MasterCard earlier today, as a response to the two credit card companies stopping their acceptance of payments to WikiLeaks after the controversial file-sharing site began releasing secret U.S. diplomatic documents last week.
A group of hackers that is known as Anonymous is behind Operation: Payback, but as of Wednesday evening, the group made no mention of targeting Palin on Twitter or Facebook — their two main venues for claiming responsibility for their attacks.
The group had not responded to Twitter messages regarding Palin’s accusations as of Wednesday night.
Palin also told ABC in her e-mail that her husband Todd’s credit card had been hacked, too.
“No wonder others are keeping silent about Assange’s antics,” Palin wrote to ABC, referring to Juilan Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. “This is what happens when you exercise the First Amendment and speak against his sick, un-American espionage efforts.”
The reality TV star, former vice presidential candidate and former governor of Alaska, has criticized Assange on her Facebook page in the past, writing that his “past posting of classified documents revealed the identity of more than 100 Afghan sources to the Taliban. Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders?” ABC reported.
Rebecca Mansour, a spokeswoman for Palin’s political action committee, told ABC that Palin had “voiced her opinion knowing full well that she was speaking out against a shady disreputable organization with no regard for laws or human life.”
Mansour also told ABC that the cyber attack Palin reported showed the hypocrisy of WikiLeaks’ supporters who claim to be “in favor of free speech yet they attack Sarah Palin for exercising her free speech.”
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— Nathan Olivarez-Giles