Today, key portions of the WikiLeaks website went down, prompting speculation that Amazon.com, the host for the WikiLeaks site, may have bowed to pressure to sever service to the whistle-blower group, The Associated Press reported.
While the main page at WikiLeaks.org has been sporadically available for some of the day, attempts to open a link that leads to the latest trove of classified U.S. government documents result in an error message.
Amazon.com has so far offered no confirmation of its possible role in the partial shutdown of the WikiLeaks site. But a statement released by Sen. Joe Lieberman confirms that Amazon has officially given WikiLeaks the boot:
This morning Amazon informed my staff that it has ceased to host the Wikileaks website. I wish that Amazon had taken this action earlier based on Wikileaks' previous publication of classified material. The company's decision to cut off Wikileaks now is the right decision and should set the standard for other companies Wikileaks is using to distribute its illegally seized material. I call on any other company or organization that is hosting Wikileaks to immediately terminate its relationship with them. Wikileaks' illegal, outrageous, and reckless acts have compromised our national security and put lives at risk around the world. No responsible company - whether American or foreign - should assist Wikileaks in its efforts to disseminate these stolen materials. I will be asking Amazon about the extent of its relationship with Wikileaks and what it and other web service providers will do in the future to ensure that their services are not used to distribute stolen, classified information.
Since releasing more than 250,000 State Department cables on a variety of sensitive topics, WikiLeaks.org has undergone attacks by hackers that have limited availability to the documents the group also released to The New York Times, The Guardian, Der Spiegel and Al-Jazeera.
According to The Washington Post, at least one of the hackers responsible for the attack on WikiLeaks is believed to be a "patriotic" American angered by the group's ongoing campaign to publish state secrets.
With Julian Assange now being hunted by Interpol, and WikiLeaks' losing its American web host, it might be tempting to think that the group will soon be out of business. But given the fact that Assange has made it known that he possesses a vast amount of potentially damaging information yet to leak, some possibly about the Bank of America, there's no indication that the world has heard the last of WikiLeaks.
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