Swiss Freeze Wikileaks Bank Account
The AP reports:
Swiss authorities stripped WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange of a key fundraising tool Monday — his new bank account — and the secret-spilling web site fended off more suspected computer attacks as it maneuvered to stay online.
Scotland Yard was now considering the Swedish arrest warrant for Assange, who is staying at an undisclosed location in Britain, the BBC reported. It didn't cite its source and the U.K. police force declined to comment. WikiLeaks tweeted that UK has received the warrant and "may issue it shortly."
In contrast to official moves against the group, an unlikely band of computer-savvy advocates were riding to its rescue, determined to ensure free information via the Internet. These geek-warriors described their efforts as new form of guerrilla combat, where sophisticated online protests were replacing traditional street marches.
"It's the start of the information war, it really looks like that," said Pascal Gloor, vice president of the Swiss Pirate Party, whose Swiss Web address, wikileaks.ch, has been serving as a mainstay for WikiLeaks traffic.
"There is a whole new generation, digital natives, born with the Internet, that understands the freedom of communication," he told The Associated Press. "It's not a left-right thing anymore. It's a generational thing between the politicians who don't understand that it's too late for them to regulate the Internet and the young who use technology every day."
WikiLeaks has been under intense international scrutiny over its disclosure of a mountain of classified U.S. diplomatic cables, after previously releasing tens of thousands of classified U.S. military documents on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The unprecedented disclosures have embarrassed the U.S. and other governments worldwide and prompted U.S. officials to pressure the WikiLeaks site and its facilitators.
American web companies Amazon.com, Paypal, and EveryDNS had pulled the plug on their relationships with WikiLeaks one after the other. The decision by Amazon to yank the site from its servers — over alleged terms of service violations — saw WikiLeaks fall back on a Swedish host. The French government has also promised a crackdown on its Web presence there, while governments such as China have moved to block the website altogether.
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