The hacking of Google that forced the search engine to withdraw from mainland China was orchestrated by a senior member of the communist politburo, according to classified information sent by US diplomats to Hillary Clinton’s state department in Washington.

The leading politician became hostile to Google after he searched his own name and found articles criticising him personally, leaked cables from the US embassy in Beijing say.

That single act prompted a politically inspired assault on Google, forcing it to “walk away from a potential market of 400 million internet users” in January this year, amid a highly publicised row about internet censorship.

The explosive allegation that the attack on Google came from near the top of the Communist party has never been made public until now. The politician allegedly collaborated with a second member of the politburo in an attempt to force Google to drop a link from its Chinese-language search engine to its uncensored google.com version

WikiLeaks itself has been using Twitter and Facebook as the main communication channels, in spite of pressure from all corners for these open source communities to pull support.  Amazon, PayPal, Visa and MasterCard have all stopped working with WikiLeaks over the last week.  They claim that Wikileaks has breached terms of service as oppose to admitting to responding to this pressure.  PayPal often poses as you “young man’s” bank but make no mistake…they are old school banking in every sense.

Anonymous, working independently from WikiLeaks, has targeted some of these sites, saying it disapproved of anything akin to censorship on the internet. On Wednesday it caused disruption for MasterCard’s online payment processing service on one of the year’s busiest days for online shopping.

Social networking giant Twitter has revealed the WikiLeaks saga is not trending is because it is not as popular as people may think, and that they have not blocked it as a trending topic.