Wikileaks domain finally killed

by Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury
December 3, 2010

http://www.weeklyblitz.net/1150/wikileaks-domain-finally-killed

Wikileaks, which has been continuing to release classified cables sent by U.S. officials, causing huge embarrassment to diplomatic and world leaders amid growing outrage and call for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to be prosecuted under the U.S. Espionage Act, has finally been 'killed' as the U.S. firm EveryDNS, which has been providing its domain name system, terminated its services to Wikileaks, stating attacks made by massive disclosure of classified information by Wikileaks would 'threaten the stability' of the company's services to nearly 500,000 other websites. In response to the website going off-line, WikiLeaks sent out a message on social media site Twitter appealing for financial support.

The outage came after Amazon.com Inc. announced yesterday it would no longer host WikiLeaks from its web servers because the site violated its terms of service. WikiLeaks will now need to register wikileaks.org - which it owns until 2018 - with another domain host in order to get its site up and running again.

Meanwhile, U.S. President Barack Obama has appointed an anti-terrorism expert to lead US effort to mitigate the damage of the Wikileaks breach and prevent future illegal data disclosures. Washington has been in damage control mode ever since the whistleblower website last weekend began publicly disclosing some 250,000 secret US diplomatic cables, many of which revealed embarrassing assessments of foreign leaders.

Swedish authorities won a court ruling yesterday in their bid to arrest the WikiLeaks founder for questioning in a rape case, British intelligence is said to know where in England he's hiding, and US pundits and politicians are demanding he be hunted down or worse. Sweden's Supreme Court upheld an order to detain him - a move that could lead to his extradition.

Posts on WikiLeaks' website detailed a host of embarrassing disclosures, including allegations that Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi accepted kickbacks and a deeply unflattering assessment of Turkmenistan's president. Wikileaks put a large number of leading politicians and diplomats into serious embarrassments following publication of top secret leaks.

WikiLeaks is an international non-profit media organization that publishes submissions of otherwise unavailable documents from anonymous sources and leaks. Its website, launched in 2006, is run by The Sunshine Press. Within a year of its launch, the site claimed a database that had grown to more than 1.2 million documents. The organization has described itself as having been founded by Chinese dissidents, as well as journalists, mathematicians, and start-up company technologists from the United States, Taiwan, Europe, Australia, and South Africa. Newspaper articles and The New Yorker magazine [7 June 2010] describe Julian Assange, an Australian Internet activist, as its director.

WikiLeaks has won a number of awards, including the 2008 Economist magazine New Media Award. In June 2009, WikiLeaks and Julian Assange won Amnesty International's UK Media Award [in the category "New Media"] for the 2008 publication of "Kenya: The Cry of Blood – Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances", a report by the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights about police killings in Kenya. In May 2010, the New York Daily News listed WikiLeaks first in a ranking of "websites that could totally change the news".

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