WikiLeaks struggled to stay online Friday as corporations and governments moved to cut its access to the Internet, a potentially crippling blow for an organization dedicated to releasing secret information via the web.
Legal pressure increased on the site’s founder, Julian Assange, who appeared to move closer to arrest in a sex-crime case after Swedish authorities refiled a European arrest warrant in response to procedural objections from British officials that tied up the case for more than a day.
Assange’s lawyer said that he is in the U.K. but she hadn’t received a warrant by Friday afternoon.
Assange said that his arrest would do nothing to halt the flow of American diplomatic cables being released by his group and newspapers in several countries. Hundreds have been published in redacted form this week and Assange said that all of the cables had already been distributed in a heavily encrypted form to tens of thousands of people.
If something happened to him, he suggested, then the password needed to unencrypt the data would be released and all the secrets would go out at once.
“History will win,” Assange said in a web chat with readers of The Guardian newspaper, one of the media organizations helping to coordinate the documents’ publication. “The world will be elevated to a better place. Will we survive? That depends on you.”
Manchester, New Hampshire-based company EveryDNS, which had been directing traffic to the Web site wikileaks.org — stopped late Thursday after cyber attacks threatened the rest of its network. WikiLeaks responded by moving to a Swiss domain name, wikileaks.ch — and calling on activists for support. Two companies host the Swiss domain name, one of which is in France. The other is in Sweden.
Officials in France moved to ban WikiLeaks from servers there, with Industry Minister Eric Besson calling it unacceptable to host…