[Infowarrior] - BAC Prepares to Get WikiLeaked by Buying Up Negative Domain Names

[Richard Forno]

Bank of America Prepares to Get WikiLeaked by Buying Up Negative Domain Names

	• 12/22/10 at 08:55 AM

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2010/12/wikileaks_newest_ally_gorbache.html

Bank of America isn't waiting around for the media to confirm whether or not it's the target of WikiLeaks's next leak. The company has been trying to hoover up negative domain names about its CEO, Brian Moynihan, registering BrianMoynihanBlows.com, BrianMoynihanSucks.com, BrianTMoynihanBlows.com, and BrianTMoynihanSucks.com — in some case, the .net and .org versions as well, all in the last month. Oh, Bank of America, you vastly underestimate the Internet's creativity. In addition to giving the hacktivists a handy "To Hack" list, you've also shown your hand. What exactly does Bank of America think is in these documents, which WikiLeaks said will expose “flagrant violations” and “unethical practices," that would make the public want to launch websites about their leader sucking and blowing? Maybe the CIA's WikiLeaks Task Force (known around headquarters by its initials) has some idea.

Julian Assange, meanwhile, is not at a loss for media partners after picking a fight with the Guardian for publishing a leak on the leaker. Rupert Murdoch's Times U.K. was happy to take up the cause. And now it looks like former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has joined in. Novaya Gazeta, a Moscow newspaper controlled by Gorbachev and Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev, the 488th richest billionaire in the world, has joined forces with WikiLeaks and agreed to make public some material on Russia that has yet to be published.

Novaya Gazeta is known for its muckraking coverage on the Kremlin, exposing bribes under Vladimir Putin and military abuses in Chechnya. In fact, the paper is so good at exposing injustices that one of its reporters discovered that Israel Shamir, WikiLeaks's anti-Semitic content aggregator in Russia, faked some information in a cable about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. We would say the plot thickens, but really at this point, the WikiLeaks saga could use some thinning out.