Pirate Party Keeps WikiLeaks Live After DNS Shutdown

The WikiLeaks website has been removed from the Internet’s domain name service (DNS) after posting thousands of secret US diplomatic documents, but now has an address in Switzerland, Wikileaks.ch, apparently provided by the local Pirate Party.

Domain name service provider EveryDNS.net terminated services to the whistleblosing site last on 2 December, claiming denial of service (DoS) attacks on Wikileaks.org had threatened its infrastructure and endangered access to thousands of other websites.

The Swiss address was announced this morning on Wikileaks’ Twitter feed, hours after WikiLeaks effectively disappeared from the Internet. According to a Whois record at DomainTools.com the domain was registered to the Swiss Pirate Party earlier this year.

While the site’s web address is fluid, users can also reach the wikilieaks.org, and cablegate.org sites if they bypass the DNS lookup, and type in their respective IP addresses, http://88.80.13.160/ and http://204.236.131.131/.

Blowing away the whistleblower

WikiLeaks announced its removal from EveryDNS’ service this morning, in a Tweet: “WikiLeaks,org domain killed by US everydns.net after claimed mass attacks,” and asked for donations.

EveryDNS said it gave WikiLeaks 24 hours notice and terminated its free service because WikiLeaks had violated part of its Acceptable Use Policy, which requires members not to “interfere with another member’s use and enjoyment of the service or another entity’s use and enjoyment of similar services.”

WikiLeaks had interfered with other members’ service because, said EveryDNS, “wikileaks.org has become the target of multiple distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. These attacks have, and future attacks would, threaten the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure, which enables access to almost 500,000 other websites.”

WikiLeaks has said that it has been under DoS attack since before it released the 250,000 confidential Embassy cables, and EveryDNS is the second US service provider to pull the plug on it, after Amazon told it to get off its EC2 cloud hosting service.

Hey, you! Get off of my cloud!

The site moved to servers in Europe on 1 December tweeting that Amazon had “ousted” it. Amazon later claimed, like EveryDNS, that WikiLeaks had breached its terms and conditions.

While the address is in Switzerland, the site’s content is apparently still hosted on a number of sites, including one in the town of Roubaix in France, uncovered by our colleagues on Gizmodo.fr.

Amazon denied it had come under any pressure from the US government, but sais it objected to the content WikiLeaks was hosting, arguing that the whistleblower did not own the rights to it, and that it might cause harm to people.

WikiLeaks “doesn’t own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content,” said Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener, in a statement, which also said the site might breach Amazon conditions that hosted content must not “cause injury to any person or entity.”

“It is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren’t putting innocent people in jeopardy,” said the Amazon statement.

WikiLeaks dismissed Amazon’s announcement, saying it “does not accord with the facts on public record. It is one thing to be cowardly. Another to lie about it.”