(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — The controversial WikiLeaks organization (www.wikileaks.org) has faced opposition from government officials since releasing close to 100 thousand military documents Sunday, which provided the basis for allegations that Pakistan has been aiding Afghan insurgents.
In order to continue its mission of exposing secrets of all kinds, Sweden’s Pirate Party has offered to host the site, according to sources. The Pirate Party’s main tenets, says the party website, include the protection of privacy, a halt to online censorship, doing away with medical patents and legalizing file-sharing.
The Pirate Party entered the ISP space in May when a German court imposed an injunction on a data center to prevent bit torrent tracker The Pirate Bay (www.thepiratebay.org) from accessing the Internet. The Pirate Bay was offline for about 24 hours before the Pirate Party stepped in, providing it bandwidth for its homepage and search engine. Prior to that point, the political party had never had an official affiliation with the tracker.
According to the New York Times, WikiLeaks gave only a handful of news agencies access to some 92,000 individual reports prior to making the data widely available online on July 25.
WikiLeaks describes the leaked materials as follows: “The reports, while written by soldiers and intelligence officers, and mainly describing lethal military actions involving the United States military, also include intelligence information, reports of meetings with political figures, and related details.”
The leaking of these reports has, unsurprisingly, drawn a lot of negative response from officials including White House National Security Adviser Gen. James Jones, who was reportedly one of many US officials calling the release of the documents irresponsible. He stated, “The United States strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organizations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk and threaten our national security.”
Given the backlash from officials, the WikiLeaks site could become a target of action similar to what was taken against The Pirate Bay. According to torrent news site TorrentFreak, the Pirate Party has positioned itself as a backup option should its current provider become vulnerable.
It is still unknown, however, if WikiLeaks will accept this offer, since aligning itself with a political party could damage its reputation as a free and unbiased source of information.
A Mashable piece by Samuel Axon notes that WikiLeaks and The Pirate Bay have been customers of Swedish ISP PRQ, what he calls “the Swiss bank of Internet providers, and a bastion of 21st century hacker values and individualism.” He also posits that WikiLeaks and The Pirate Bay are the products of a long-established culture, and share a similar philosophy.
“Computer hackers with this Internet-born, fundamentalist philosophy of information and individual entrepreneurship are not just dictating the terms of technology and digital entertainment, but of journalism, political discourse and military engagement,” Axon writes.
In a press conference held in London, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said anger and outrage were the expected reaction to its activities from the groups being exposed.
“We’re familiar with groups whose abuse we expose attempting to criticise the messenger,” Assange said. “We don’t see any difference in the White House response to this case.”
Founded in December 2006, Wikileaks has provided a venue for whistleblowers to anonymously distribute sensitive materials, such as the US military’s operating manual for its Guantánamo Bay prison. It was the subject of wide media attention earlier this year for releasing a video of a US helicopter attack in Iraq, in which a journalist was killed.
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