Arrest of Julian Assange sparks online ‘operation payback’

The arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has sparked an online furor. By utilizing “distributed denial of service” attacks to attempt to overwhelm companies’ web servers, the activist group “Anonymous” has targeted organizations that they feel worked against WikiLeaks’ efforts in the days leading up to Assange’s arrest on Monday. Anonymous has vowed to continue its online efforts, which have so far been directed at Amazon, PayPal, Visa…and even took the MasterCard website offline for much of yesterday morning. How serious are these attacks, and what are the methods of the people behind them?

For the details on this distributed online campaign, we speak with New York Times Magazine and Wired contributing writer Mattathias Schwartz, and James Lewis, Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.