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WikiLeaks Faces Repercussions for Illegal Activity

 

            WikiLeaks has been under what it calls a massive cyber attack after posting around 250,000 classified diplomatic cables on November 28. Since that day, the website has gone offline several times in the US, as companies that provide server space for the website in the US and Europe have abandoned it. Also, the company that handles its online payments, PayPal, has frozen the site's account, stating that the site was engaged in illegal activity (Karmi). Because of these actions against the site, WikiLeaks was forced to move to a Swiss domain name, wikileaks.ch (Africana Online). However, WikiLeak's problems did not start gaining public attention until Amazon decided to stop hosting the site at the request of Joseph Lieberman, a US senator and the chairman of the Senate's homeland security committee, who questioned Amazon about its relationship with WikiLeaks and asked US internet providers to stop hosting the site. Amazon claims that the political pressure was not the reason for their decision, but that because WikiLeaks had breached their contract by not owning the rights to its content, they were forced to sever the relationship (Karmi). .
             Despite the repercussions of its actions, WikiLeaks is receiving support from free speech activists. The Swiss Pirate Party, a group that formed two years ago to campaign for freedom of information, provided the site with its new domain. WikiLeaks.ch is getting about 3,000 hits per second. Furthermore, supporters are creating "mirrors" of the site on their own servers, which means that diplomatic cables will remain available even if WikiLeaks loses its own site. "Even if you take down the server in Sweden, it's too late. There are hundreds of mirrors of WikiLeaks now. It's a test for Internet censorship. Can governments take something off the Net? I think not. There are copies of the website everywhere," said Swiss Pirate Party Vice President Pascal Gloor (Heilprin).


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