Get your WikiLeaks cables in e-book form before Amazon gets hacked

Joe Pompeo
·Media Reporter

In case you haven't had a chance to really dig through the classified diplomatic cables recently disseminated by WikiLeaks, good news! The nearly-1,000 documents so far released out of the cache of 250,000 are available in e-book form via Amazon's U.K. Kindle store.

The "author" of the Kindle book is Heinz Duthel, presumably the same Heinz Duthel who wrote the e-books "WikiLeaks: Is truth dangerous?" and "Julian Assange. The Whistleblower. Traitor or Hero?" -- a "Master in Philosophy, Retd. Colonel (KNLU) ex Consul of Uganda in German, ex-Consul of Angola in France," according to his bio on the website academia.edu.

"In a revelation that should surprise no one, the US State Department and American diplomacy in general turn out to be a vast nest of spies," Duthel writes in the product description.

The title costs £7.37, but get it while you still can: The latest buzz in the Twittersphere is that the group of hackers known as Operation Payback appears to have set its sights on Amazon.

The hackers, who are affiliated with the anti-Scientology group Anonymous, have been targeting companies that recently suspended their WikiLeaks accounts. So far this week, they've managed to wreak havoc on PayPal, MasterCard and the website of a Swiss postal service bank.

"TARGET: WWW.AMAZON.COM LOCKED ON!!!" said a tweet Thursday morning from what is believed to be Operation Payback's Twitter account.

Under pressure from Sen. Joe Lieberman last week, Amazon.com removed the WikiLeaks documents from its cloud servers, which had been hosting them.

"The company's decision to cut off Wikileaks now is the right decision and should set the standard for other companies," Lieberman said in a statement.

The pro-WikiLeaks hackers clearly disagree.

(Photo of e-book via Amazon.co.uk)