On December 3, 2010 WikiLeaks, which had found refuge in Internet hosting provider EveryDNS, after Amazon expelled it from its servers, was forced offline once more. The reason: WikiLeaks became the target of “distributed denial of service” (DDOS) attacks by hackers, who were on the side of the US government. Julian Assange spoke of “privatisation of state censorship” in the US.
Political Pressure and Cyber Attacks
EveryDNS said it had to protect its customers from cyber attacks which were directed towards WikiLeaks but have been affecting the whole site. It went on to drop WikiLeaks on Thursday 2 December, 10pm EST (Friday 3 December, 3am GMT). “These attacks will not stop our mission, but should be setting off alarm bells about the rule of law in the United States,” warned Julian Assange. In the meantime, US companies are under political pressure to disassociate themselves from WikiLeaks.
Amazon ended the hosting of the US Embassy cables on its EC2 cloud computer but insisted that this was not due to political pressure from Senator Joe Lieberman. WikiLeaks violated the terms of service, Amazon purported in its blogpost on Thursday: “For example, our terms of service state that ‘you represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all the rights to the content...’ It is clear that WikiLeaks doesn’t own or otherwise control all the rights to classified content.”
Bending to political pressure US Company Tableau Software removed from the Internet visualisations of the US Embassy cables, on the request of Senator Lieberman. The US Social Security Agency went one step further and warned its employees that “browsing at the leaked cables could constitute a criminal offence.”
WikiLeaks Fights Back
Being forced offline and subject to cyber attacks, WikiLeaks moved to Switzerland with a new domain name with the Swiss suffix “ch”, on December, 3. The new address points to an IP address (213.251.145.96). Meanwhile WikiLeaks,com does not work and WikiLeaks,org cannot be found by Google – a cache copy is available.
WikiLeaks fights back with the publication of a list of mirror sites which it is hoped to provide constant access to the site. Lieberman congratulated Amazon for its move to force WikiLeaks offline. Attacks on Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’ main man, come from across the US political spectrum but the site vows to continue. In its Twitter account, the site admits that “WikiLeaks,org domain is killed by everydns,net after claims of mass attacks” and appeals to the public: “Keep us strong.”
The UK newspaper The Guardian announced that Julian Assange will be live online to answer readers’ questions.
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Lito Apostolakou - Lito is a historian with an interest in digital archives and online historical resources. She is the author of blog Palimpsest.
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