WikiLeakS.org has effectively been offline this morning.
The various domain names and cover aliases and SSL/TLS protected webservers, still seem to resolve ok, but they are currently pointing to Swedish IP addresses, which seem to be online, for which the webservers are not working.
e.g., from the Wikipedia article about wikileaks:
- http://wikileaks.org
- https://secure.wikileaks.org
- http://wikileaks.org.uk
- http://wikileaks.org.au
- http://wikileaks.cn
- http://wikileaks.in
- http://wikileaks.org.nz
- https://secure.ljsf.org
- https://secure.sunshinepress.org
- https://secure.freedomsbell.org
- https://secure.libertypen.org
Whether this situation is due to the sudden popularity of the website(s) as a result of the latest leak of a US Military document about the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp, or due to active denial of service or other attacks, or due to legal threats, is unclear..
We note that lots of visitors to this blog are searching for "Guantanamo" or "camp delta standard operating procedures" etc. - do not bother - you will not find that document here.
UPDATE:
N.B. there are no copies of wikileaks.org whistleblower leaks or documents mirrored here on this blog
wikileaks.org have been hyping their leaks to the media like the worst political spin doctors, before they have established a trustworthy or scalable security and anonymity infrastructure.They have not published even a high level security and anonymity architecture design, and they have let their PGP encryption and signing key expire over 2 weeks ago, without replacement.
The analysis of the leaked documents produced so far seems quite good, but it has not been done through any secure, anonymous "wisdom of crowds" collaboration through the Wiki discussion and editing model. If you have the requisite insider knowledge to comment sensibly on the authenticity of a leaked document, or to provide extra details, then you as an analyst will be suspected by some people, of being involved in the initial whistleblower leak itself.
At the moment, we do not yet trust wikileaks.org sufficiently to make use of either their whistleblower document submission methods, or their Wiki facilities for analysis, commentary and or editing of articles, (which is effectively switched off for the public anyway).
You guys have been slashdotted.
@ Ishmael - this blog is not part of the official WikiLeakS.org project, but there is a noticable peak in traffic from people who cannot get through to the supposedly uncensorable anonymous wikileaks.org website.
Slashdot isn't what it used to be, but the fact that there is a link from a BoingBoing article and Wired news etc. is probably compounding whatever the problems there are with the wikileaks.org systems.
NPR Radio was discussing wikileaks.org today, this would have a much greater effect than other sources I think.
wired and slashdot get several thousand people actually linking, not enough to crash a typical server, but NPR might get a hundred thousand (like me) to look and subsequently crash a server.
boingboing.net has nearly 63,000 subscribers via the Bloglines RSS and Atom syndication feed aggregator alone,which must be equivalent to a much larger mainstream print a or broadcast media website or audience. The number of people checking out a link published there is enough to cause a webserver some bandwidth related problems, but should not be enough to crash the webserver.
However, even a server crash should really have been sorted out by now, but wikileakS.org is still not responding.
There have not been any email list announcements, so conspiracy theories about what is happening will start to fester.