Since the Cablegate documents first started to trickle through the whistle-blower website Wikileaks a little more than a week ago, it has come under constant attack from government hackers hell bent on silencing the mouth of the website and its founder Julian Assange.
Online payment service PayPal on Friday blocked financial transfers to Wikileaks after governments around the world initiated legal action against the website. That shift came after Wikileaks’ domain name provider had cut off the site and servers belonging to Amazon.com had stopped hosting it. “If Amazon is so uncomfortable with the First Amendment, they should get out of the business of selling books.” WikiLeaks said.
The Swiss website, wikileaks.ch, has been handling a great deal of Wikileaks’ traffic since then, but on Monday it came under a distributed denial of service attack. Wikileaks, in a tweet to its followers on Twitter, confirmed it was having difficulty with its servers but did not elaborate.
To make matters worse, founder Julian Assange has received numerous death threats in the past week and has a warrant out for his arrest on charges of sexual assault in Sweden, a charge he has denied repeatedly. Whatever you think of the man that started the famous whistle-blowing website, no one can deny the impact the site has brought to corporate and government transparency.
I think that it is of vital importance that this website remains up and running not only in the name of free speech, but as a deterrent to keep the organizations that affect our daily lives both honest and proper. That being said, Wikileaks is trying to make it impossible for anybody to shut down the information that their website contains by having others mirror their site.
If you have a unix-based server that hosts a website, you can give wikileaks some of your hosting resources. “Wikileaks will take care of all the rest: sending pages to your server, updating them each time data is released, maintaining a list of such mirrors. If your server is down or if the account doesn’t work anymore, we will automatically remove your server from the list.”
This is the best way to ensure that the information Wikileaks shares stay pubic and free to everyone. No one can shut down the entire internet… although if someone could, Wikileaks would probably know who.
For information and instructions on mirroring the site, visit: http://213.251.145.96/mass-mirror.html
