WikiLeaks: Saw It Coming..

WikiLeaks backlash: The first global cyber war has begun, claim hackers  Excerpts:

He is one of the newest recruits to Operation Payback. In a London bedroom, the 24-year-old computer hacker is preparing his weaponry for this week's battles in an evolving cyberwar. He is a self-styled defender of free speech, his weapon a laptop and his enemy the US corporations responsible for attacking the website WikiLeaks.
And:
Before WikiLeaks, Operation Payback's initial target was America's recording industry, chosen for its prosecutions of music file down loaders. From those humble origins, Payback's anti-censorship, anti-copyright, freedom of speech manifesto would go viral, last week pitting an amorphous army of online hackers against the US government and some of the biggest corporations in the world.

Charles Dodd, a consultant to US government agencies on Internet security, said: "[The hackers] attack from the shadows and they have no fear of retaliation. There are no rules of engagement in this kind of emerging warfare."

The battle now centres on Washington's fierce attempts to close down WikiLeaks and shut off the supply of confidential US government cables. By Thursday, the hacktivists were routinely attacking those who had targeted WikiLeaks, among them icons of the corporate world, credit card firms and some of the largest online companies. It seemed to be the first sustained clash between the established order and the organic, grassroots culture of the net.

But the clash has cast the spotlight wider, on the net's power to act as a thorn not only in the side of authoritarian regimes but western democracies, on our right to information and the responsibility of holding secrets. It has also asked profound questions over the role of the net itself. One blogger dubbed it the "first world information war".

This is happening, and it's been planned longer and more sophisticated than you think.  I'm interested to see how the American government and corporate interests respond to attacks world wide, not just from American hackers, and how each side will respond to the other's attacks and how the hackers' increased and increasing cohesion will factor into future strategies..

I'm guessing it'll be bad timing for some entity that Stuxnet was introduced right before this first world wide cyber war..