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Anonymous turns on 'one man Julian Assange show' Wikileaks

Bond of chumship between DDOSers and Assange™ broken

Members of hacker collective Anonymous have stopped supporting Wikileaks after the site put up a paywall, saying that Wikileaks is more bothered about Julian Assange than getting information to the public.

In a statement on Pastebin, linked through from Anonymous Twitter account AnonymousIRC, the group said Wikileaks had turned into the "one man Julian Assange show".

"The idea behind Wikileaks was to provide the public with information that would otherwise being kept secret by industries and governments. Information we strongly believe the public has a right to know," the statement said.

"But this has been pushed more and more into the background, instead we only hear about Julian Assange, like he had dinner last night with Lady Gaga. That's great for him but not much of our interest. We are more interested in transparent governments and bringing out documents and information they want to hide from the public."

As well as getting ticked off with the site's focus on its founder, Anonymous also disagrees with the new way it's soliciting donations. Visitors to the site are now getting a pop-up donation page before they can read any documents. The only way to get around the donation page is to give Wikileaks some money or disable Javascript to get through to leaked documents.

"The casual user (which is the majority) usually has Javascript enabled and thus will be blocked by the donation banner and denied the content. Additionally, the casual user does not know that he needs to disable javascript to get to the content without paying - sorry, donating," Anonymous complained.

The anarchic online hacker collective and the leaked document website used to be good friends, with Anonymous supplying content to Wikileaks and supporting Assange's attempts to avoid extradition with attacks on websites.

But Anonymous has tweeted that its outrage at Wikileaks trying to drum up donations and said it won't "pay for Assange's lawyers".

The group said it still doesn't think Assange should be extradited but it "cannot support anymore what Wikileaks has become". ®

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