The London-based daily, the Guardian, has published an unusually strong editorial suggesting that recent cyber-attacks on Visa, MasterCard. Amazon and PayPal were understandable acts akin to  “non-violent action or civil disobedience.”  An excerpt from the Guardian editorial:

The hacktivists of Anonymous may be accused of many things – such as immaturity or being run by a herd instinct. But theirs is the cyber equivalent of non-violent action or civil disobedience. It disrupts rather than damages. In challenging the credit card companies and the web hosts in this way, they are reminding these businesses that their brand reputation relies not only on how the state department sees them, but also on how they maintain their independence in the eyes of their users.

The same editorial voiced unreserved support for Wikileaks saying its “chief crime has been to speak truth to power.”

American commentator and lawyer Glenn Greenwald, writing in Salon,  called the British daily’s editorial “remarkable and remarkably good” and argued that no American MSM outlet would dare to take such a bold stand.

Greenwald writes:

"It is impossible to conceive of any establishment media outlet in the U.S. uttering a peep of support for what those protesters did.  The immediate consensus in the American political and media class was that these activists were engaged in pure, unmitigated destruction -- even evil -- and should be severely punished. That's because the greatest sin in our political culture is doing anything other than meekly submitting even to assertions of lawless and thuggish government and corporate power.  If the Government and the largest corporations collaborate to lawlessly destroy WikiLeaks for the crime of engaging in threatening journalism, then you simply write polite letters to Congress or complain on your blog; what you don't do under any circumstances is resist or fight back using even symbolic gestures of disobedience.  That's the authoritarian mentality pervading -- defining -- not only the establishment media but (as a result) much of the citizenry."