Beijing used hackers to find US secretsTiming of sex case sparks claims of political influencePM has betrayed me: Assange China link to attack on Google Prosecutor defends move against AssangeRudd the butt of WikiLeaks exposé
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WikiLeaks continues to duck and dodge powerful cyber assaults by seemingly patriotic hackers. The radical whistleblower website, led by its co-founder and editor, Julian Assange, has been forced to move numerous times since it started leaking US files seven days ago.
The site was offline for much of the day yesterday due to so-called denial of service attacks.
These involve attempts to overwhelm websites with millions of requests for access by computers hijacked by hackers. It appears most of the requests have come from Europe, Russia and Asia.
There has been chatter in technology circles that the attacks are the work of governments displeased with WikiLeaks, though that is impossible to prove, given the anonymity of the web.
Someone portraying himself as an American patriot took credit for the first spate of disruptions to the site, a claim that security experts said was credible.
On Friday, the French government moved to ban WikiLeaks from servers there, saying it was ''unacceptable'' that companies in France were hosting a ''criminal'' website.
And the US-based online financial transactions service PayPal has said it will stop taking donations for WikiLeaks, a move that WikiLeaks blamed on ''US government pressure''.
As the cyber attacks increased last week, WikiLeaks sought refuge on the servers of the bookseller Amazon, only to be booted at the request of the US Democratic senator Joe Lieberman.
As WikiLeaks moved around the web, Mr Assange hit back at moves by the Australian government to aid in his prosecution.
''[The federal Attorney-General] Robert McClelland is a US suckhole, worse than [John] Howard on [David] Hicks, and needs to go,'' he wrote on his Twitter account, which is followed by about 360,000 people.
On Saturday, Mr Assange said it was ''impossible'' to return to Australia because of comments by Mr McClelland and the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, who labelled his actions ''illegal''.
But yesterday Mr McClelland seemed to offer some concession to the Townsville-born former hacker, saying: ''Mr Assange is entitled to the same rights as any other Australian citizen.
''This includes the right to return to Australia and also to receive consular assistance while he is overseas if that is requested.''
Mr Assange also revealed that more than 100,000 people had downloaded an ''insurance'' file containing an encrypted version of the cables, and the key to that code would be released if ''something happens to us''.
with agencies
