UMNo/BN's Dirty Tricks to Stop RFM, RFS & Sarawak Report

Radio Free Malaysia, Radio Free Sarawak and Sarawak Report all Hacked

The websites for Radio Free Malaysia, Radio Free Sarawak and the news portal Sarawak Report, which represent free media in Malaysia, have all been subject to relentless DDOS attacks since the beginning of this week.

Today, Thursday 11^th April, the sites were hacked and all three were brought down. The attacks have coincided with various forms of jamming which have been attempted against the broadcasts of both the independent Radio Stations, which operate from outside of Malaysia.

Radio Free Sarawak is at 1100-1300 UTC on 15230 kHz Short Wave and Radio Free Malaysia is at 1300-1500 UTC on 1359 kHz Medium Wave. Both stations are still available on Sound Cloud:

https://soundcloud.com/radiofreesarawak
https://soundcloud.com/radiofreemalaysia

Malaysia, which poses as a democracy, has nevertheless one of the most restrictive medias in the world, dominated by the ruling Barisan National coalition. Widespread access to the internet has broken into that monopoloy over information in recent years, however, evidently causing considerable concern to a government beset by recent scandals and corruption investigations involving senior figures.

Disruption of independent online news portals is regular in Malaysia and entirely expected after the disollution of Parliament finally took place last week, in anticipation of elections due on May 5^th. The human rights organisation Suaram has also been knocked offline as have the news outlets Free Malaysia Today and Malaysian Insider.

The Distributed Denial Of Service (DDOS) attacks have been mounting against the anti-corruption site Sarawak Report for the past few weeks. The site has focused on exposing timber corruption over the past three years, demonstrating how the destruction of the Borneo Jungle has been driven by a small number of politically connected individuals in the East Malaysian states of Sarawak and Sabah.

Yesterday, Wednesday 10^th April, the site was targeted by 64 million hits designed to take down its server. The sister sites for the two radio stations received similar attacks. Most of the attacks have radiated out of Russia and Eastern Europe and site administrators were able to fend off the onslaught until the site itself was hacked earlier today.

The NGO Access Now, which campaigns to support freedom of expression on the internet, has moved to assist the websites in their purpose of providing independent news and information to Malaysian voters in the run up to May 5^th.

  

“This is a pretty typical pattern for an automated attack”, explains Gustav Bjorksten from Access Now, “anyone opposing a dictatorial power tends to get attacked by DDOS.  With the calling of an election you can pretty much set your clock by it”.

Behind the attacks are criminals who build large ‘botnets’, which they then hire out to people who pay, for example governments trying to suppress inconvenient information. The cost is phenomenal, with the sort of major attacks sustained by Sarawak Report running into hundreds of thousands of dollars over a period of weeks.

The botnets operate through a web of a very large number of compromised computers, which send out millions of emails to disable the target sites. The common perpetrators are based in Russia and countries in Eastern Europe, including Lithuania and the Ukraine. Turkey is also a centre for this kind of activity.

“This is a pretty big attack” Bjorksten said of the assault on Sarawak Report and its sister sites, “they are serious, they want you off line”.

Clare Rewcastle Brown, the Editor of Sarawak Report and the Founder of Radio Free Sarawak and Radio Free Malaysia, which operate out of London in order to avoid Malaysian censorship, said today that the Malaysian Government was only showing itself up by resorting to such tactics.

“This is not a proper expenditure of taxpayers’ money and it only goes to prove how vulnerable this 50 year old regime feels to the truth” she said. “BN controls every single news paper and broadcast outlet in Malaysia, which are all forced to pour out propaganda favouring their party and to attack opposition leaders without allowing them their right of reply. And yet BN are nevertheless clearly terrified by even the most modest platforms providing independent news or alternative information".

"They are also plainly threatened by the evidence about outrageous corruption by the party’s top politicians, who have been robbing the country in recent years and amassing astonishing fortunes. Such evidence is suppressed in the mainstream media, yet Malaysia has been stripped of its resources and wealth by the political classes, who are exporting huge sums into tax havens abroad. Particularly in the rainforest states of Sabah and Sarawak the mass of ordinary people have been left poorer than ever".  

“The BN establishment clearly feel unable to defend themselves against the mass of available evidence of this corruption, so they are resorting to attempting to silence the messengers. It won’t work and it just reveals them for what they are, which is politicians who dare not subject themselves to free and open debate”.

“It is really quite shameful that a government such as Malaysia should consider it appropriate to resort to hiring criminals with taxpayers’ money. They talk about the benefits of winning the “cyber-war” as if there was some honour in what they are doing. This is a dishonerable tactic and it shows just what a sham this supposedly democratic election is, where the critics of bribes, gerrymandering and vote-rigging are being silenced by such means”.

What UMNo Malays Don't Realise Or Don't Want To Accept

Why can’t some Malays accept the fact?

April 10, 2013

FMT LETTER: From Fishmonger, via e-mail

It is very difficult to get many Malays to understand and accept the sad fact that Umno, the one founded by Tunku Abdul Rahman, is dead and gone. Deregistered as enginered by Mahathir a/l Iskandar Kutty.

Mahathir in his anger at being sacked from Umno by Tunku, plotted revenge against Tunku and Umno. Tunku saw in Mahathir an evil man and many in Umno supported his decision. Mahathir’s best vengence is to allow Umno to be de-registered. And to top it up, he rubbed salt into Tunku’s wound, he formed Umno baru, and coerced Umno members to join Umno Baru. Tunku died a sad man.

Till today, many Malays think that Umno Baru belongs to them, that Umno Baru and Umno is one and the same. They still think they are better off than before, than other Malaysians – which is far from the truth.

The new Umno Baru is solely his, Mahathir’s party. Mahathir made use of the blind patriotism of the Malays to his personal advantage. He used race, religion, royalty to hoodwinked the common Malays to give him their unwavering loyalty, support and adoration. He made sure that Malays became dependent on him, his Umno Baru. That they forever be grateful to him and can only stand on crutches, he said so himself.

Today we don’t have Umnoputras. We only have Umno Barua-putras, a different breed altogether. These new breed has no soul, no shame, no conscience, no integrity, utterly corrupt, resort to threats, blackmail, misuse the law, give out citizenship to undeserving foreigners while rejecting citizenship to bona fide Malaysians, abuse the judiciary, abuse religion for political gains, blackmail the PDRM, MACC, Jabatan Immigresen, civil service, election commission to do its biddings. I could go on and on and I could fill a volume larger and bigger than Rosmah’s biography.

For the past 30 years, Umno Baru held Malaysians to ransom in order to stay in power. With the GE13 looming, its colours begin to change like the chameleon. Goodies here, goodies there like an old santa who forgot that Christmas is over. It maintains that Umno Baru is the only party fit to rule Malaysia, the only pary that can govern.

Yet, today many Malays still support Umno Baru even when there is PAS and PKR as alternatives. Why is it so? I guess Mahathir a/l Iskandar Kutty has done a good job convincing many Malays to sink with the captain and the ship. The fact is that Umno Baru and its ardent supporters are the ones keeping the rest of Malaysia in perpetual slavery to elites like Mahathir and all his cronies.

Sarawak Headhunter's comments:

 

The presence of "illegal" branches participating in the elections was the main ground of Tengku Razaleigh's legal team but the argument for the deregistration of UMNo was put forward by Mahathir's legal team led by Zaki Tun Azmi.

This was done purposely. This was what they wanted and they knew what they were doing and what they would do (after deregistration) when the Judge accepted the argument, which he had to because that was the law.

The formation of UMNo Baru effectively locked out Tengku Razaleigh and his supporters, even though some including Tengku Razaleigh and "Burn his bridges" Rais Yatim have come crawling and slithering into UMNo Baru. 

What most present UMNo Baru members don't realise is that each of them stands guarantee for all of the old UMNO's liabilities, which could today run into billions of ringgit.

There has been no proper disclosure of UMNo Lama's assets and liabilities taken over by UMNo Baru.

The fact is that UMNo Baru never repaid a single sen of Bank Bumiputra's loan to finance the PWTC complex (RM850 million outstanding at the time of UMNo's deregistration) & thereby caused Bank Bumiputra's ultimate collapse has never been made public or acknowledged and has been covered up.

UMNo is long overdue for final deregistration and its members made to pay for all its liabilities and to pay back all that it has stolen.

It is not going to be easy but it must be done for the sake of all right-minded Malaysians.