Can WikiLeaks really be stopped? The United States government hopes so, as it is reportedly looking at all possible ways to prosecute its founder, Julian Assange, and bring down his now famous whistle-blowing Web site. And bowing to political and public pressure, company after company is lining up to publicly disassociate itself from WikiLeaks. The latest to pull the plug are Amazon.com, which provided web services, and PayPal, the payment processor. Both claimed that WikiLeaks violated a terms of service agreement.
Despite these headwinds, WikiLeaks’ story — and its influence — just seems to keep growing. The reasons lie in part, of course, in the WikiLeaks mission, which seeks to disseminate heretofore classified information under the precept that all information should be public. That message strikes a chord with many. But the other significant reason that WikiLeaks is almost impossible to quash lies in the technologies — past and present — that are fueling the Internet itself. Let’s look at a few.
Mirrors
Part of the problem of shutting down WikiLeaks — for those who want to — is that the site is now “mirrored” on over 500 servers around the world. Mirroring essentially means that a copy of the current site is maintained on that many different servers, and if one server is shut down, either by the company that hosts the server or by legal authorities within a country in which the server resides, a simple change to the site’s “Domain Name System,” or DNS, records can shift Internet users to one of the other mirrors when the site is accessed.
That’s a big reason why authorities in any given country have such difficulty in shutting down an Internet entity that has gained support — and mirrors — around the world, as in the case of WikiLeaks. In today’s interconnected world, unless…