Anonymous Dumps Long-Time Ally Wikileaks [VIDEO]

 By 
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai
 on 
Anonymous Dumps Long-Time Ally Wikileaks [VIDEO]

[brightcove video="1897124055001" /]

After a more than two-year love affair, Hacktivist collective Anonymous is distancing itself from Wikileaks.

In a tweet sent from one of the many accounts controlled by Anonymous, the group said goodbye to the whistleblowing website controlled by Julian Assange.

"The end of an era. We unfollowed @Wikileaks and withdraw our support. It was an awesome idea ruined by Egos. Good Bye," the statement read.

Anonymous was complaining about a change that Wikileaks made to its website earlier this week: A donation page would automatically appear every time a user tried to access the Global Intelligence Files page, Wikileaks' latest leak. For Anonymous, this was the same as establishing a paywall, something that clashes with Wikileaks' stated goals of transparency and public service.

Anonymous also criticized Wikileaks' founder for taking too much of a prominent role, and turning the organization into "the one man Julian Assange show."

This repudiation comes after years of mutual support. When Visa and Mastercard blocked payments to Wikileaks in 2010, for example, the hacker collective organized a series of denial-of-service attacks on the two financial institutions. And just this year, in what was seen as an unprecedented collaboration, Wikileaks started publishing documents obtained by an Anonymous raid on intelligence company Stratfor.

Find out more about this latest development in the Anonymous-Wikileaks relationship by checking out the video above.

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