WikiLeaks fights to stay online

WikiLeaks, the whistle-blowing website at the centre of a political furore following its release of a flood of secret diplomatic cables, is trying to keep the material online after three US technology companies dropped it as a customer.

PayPal, the online payments service owned by Ebay, said it had “permanently restricted the account used by WikiLeaks”. PayPal denied being contacted by any government agencies, saying that WikiLeaks broke its acceptable use policy by facilitating or encouraging “illegal activity”.

WikiLeaks, which says it relies largely on small donations from individuals for its funding, is still able to accept donations via bank transfer to accounts in Iceland and Germany, a Swiss online payment processor and via mail to Australia.

As pressure on US organisations intensifies, WikiLeaks has looked to bolster its presence in Europe by creating sites under German, Finnish and Dutch domains, all of which display prominent calls for financial support. WikiLeaks said its operational costs have been three times higher than it expected at the beginning of the year.

Meanwhile, the US Library of Congress has blocked access to WikiLeaks from its reading rooms, citing laws that oblige it to protect classified information.

Its long-standing online home, Wikileaks.org, became unavailable late on Thursday after EveryDNS.net, the company administering its domain name system, terminated its services.

The site had already been forced to relocate its main website to a Swiss domain and seek new server capacity after Amazon, the online retailer, threw it off its web hosting platform earlier in the week.

WikiLeaks has been pushed into a cat-and-mouse game, constantly having to move service providers to keep its site live.

While both companies said they had acted because WikiLeaks violated customer agreements, their moves followed intense political pressure, including calls from powerful US senator Joe Lieberman, to take the material off line.

Mr Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said “no responsible company should assist WikiLeaks in its efforts to disseminate these stolen materials”.

Meanwhile, Eric Besson, the French industry minister, on Friday called for measures to bar companies from hosting WikiLeaks after tracers found the website had been in part hosted by Roubaix-based, OVH.

Mr Besson said the site jeopardised diplomatic relations but OVH said it would take legal action if the government tried to close the site down in France.

The pressure was buttressed by hacking attacks on WikiLeaks’ hosts and on its domain-name provider. The latest assaults were modest in size and sophistication, security experts said, and could have been unleashed by any parties embarrassed by disclosures.

On The Guardian UK newspaper website on Friday, Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder, said he and his staff had had death threats, adding they had taken “appropriate precautions to the degree that we are able when dealing with a superpower”.

Amazon denied accusations that it had acted in response to political pressure, arguing that WikiLeaks was offering content for which it did not own or control the rights, breaching its terms of service. Mr Assange said that since 2007 WikiLeaks had deliberately placed some of its servers “in jurisdictions that we suspected suffered a free speech deficit in order to separate rhetoric from reality. Amazon was one of these cases”.

The US state department said it was unaware of any contacts between the Department of State and Amazon, but Mr Lieberman praised Amazon for its actions.

EveryDNS, a company that helps bridge the connection between a website’s URL and the numerical IP address that lies behind every domain name, said that cyber attacks on WikiLeaks were threatening the stability of its service.

Swedish prosecutors said they had filed a revised warrant for Mr Assange, who is wanted on suspicion of “rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion”. He has denied any wrongdoing.

Separately, an aide to Guido Westerwelle, German foreign minister, quit after he identified himself as the adviser in leaked cables who had passed files to the US embassy in Berlin.

Additional reporting by Andrew Ward in Stockholm, Peggy Hollinger in Paris and Quentin Peel in Berlin