Where does it all end for WikiLeaks? The site has commanded the headlines all week following the release of more than a quarter million U.S. diplomatic cables, nearly half of which were confidential.
As a result, the site’s DNS provider has cut off service. Not to make any statement of principal about the relative ethical merit of the disclosure, but because of a violation of its terms of service stemming from a DDoS attack viewed as retaliation for the document dump. So now WikiLeaks has found refuge in Europe, setting up shop first in the Swiss domain, and now, apparently, in Germany, Finland and the Netherlands.
This follows Amazon’s decision to cut off service to WikiLeaks, citing its own usage agreement, which requires customers to have a legal ownership claim to the content they post. Datamation reports on the latest with WikiLeaks’ efforts to keep itself online while the manhunt for founder Julian Assange intensifies.
After being effectively booted off the Web by its U.S. domain name system (DNS) provider, the whistleblower website WikiLeaks has managed to reemerge on the Swiss domain, where it continues to publish classified cables detailing the activities of U.S. diplomats around the world.
EveryDNS.net, a group providing free domain name services, terminated WikiLeaks’ service followed what it described as a severe distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.