Banks Cut the Flow of Cash
WikiLeaks Down the Drain
Banks Cut the Flow of Cash
Banks Cut the Flow of Cash
WikiLeaks site may go 'dry', but mirror sites are popping up all over the Internet -
But Original Site Owners Going Down the Drain - As Investors Shut Cash Flow Off
The Internet is really flowing with mirror copies of WikiLeaks original site - But WikiLeaks may go down the drain.
The site's contents aren't going to disappear, thanks to hundreds of mirrors that popped up over the weekend. But even though more than 200 sites around the world now host the controversial leaked documents, WikiLeaks may face an all-too-familiar funding problem if it wants to continue publishing new leaks.
WikiLeaks has been server hopping lately thanks to a combination of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and pressure from politicians. A DDoS attack had originally pushed WikiLeaks to move some of its operations to Amazon, but then Amazon booted the site from its servers after Sen. Joe Liberman (I-CT) pressured the company to stop associating itself with WikiLeaks. That move was quickly followed by WikiLeaks' DNS provider EveryDNS pulling the plug, claiming that the continued DDoS attacks would threaten the stability of EveryDNS's other sites.
This prompted WikiLeaks to put up a plea on its website for a mass mirroring so that it would become "impossible to ever fully remove WikiLeaks from the Internet." The page has detailed instructions on how to set up a virtual host and upload the relevant content. Those who do so can then add thir sites to the list of mirrors; the number of sites on the list has fluctuated between 200 and 400 in the last few days, and currently sits at 208 (as of publication). There may actually be even more mirrors that haven't been added to the list, though.
Indeed, it certainly looks as if it will be all but impossible to eliminate WikiLeaks from the Web with so many places to find the current documents, though WikiLeaks has other challenges. On Friday, PayPal permanently yanked the site's account that was being used to collect donations, citing violations of PayPal's Acceptable Use Policy. "[O]ur payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity," PayPal said in a statement posted to its blog.
Meanwhile, Swiss bank Post Finance announced on Monday that it had frozen WikiLeaks' frontman Julian Assange's defense fund and personal assets. "The Australian citizen provided false information regarding his place of residence during the account opening process," the bank said in a statement, noting that Assange had allegedly given an address in Geneva as his place of residence.
According to a WikiLeaks statement on the matter, Assange had used his lawyer's address, the fund had housed about €31,000 (about $41,000), and he and WikiLeaks had collectively lost €100,000 in the last week.
WikiLeaks and Assange still have accounts in Iceland and Germany, but things are looking a little less rosy with the latest account freezes. There's still the possibility that WikiLeaks defectors may set up their own whistleblower site, which could help take some the world's focus away from WikiLeaks itself. Alternate sites won't get Assange off people's hit lists, though, so he will probably find himself on the run (both physically and online) for some time to come...
May Allah guide him to all truth and righteousness, ameen.
