Wikileaks Now Mirrored at 500 Sites Around Globe

Following multiple attacks and attempts to shut down Wikileaks.org, the site's operators laid out a new plan. They asked Wikileaks supporters around the world to host their own copies of the site, known as mirrors, and created tools to make doing so easy. In just the last few days, more than 500 mirrors have sprung up.

Nonetheless, efforts to shut down the Wikileaks organization continued apace. In the latest move, the group's Swiss bank account was closed after the bank "discovered" that Julian Assange did not actually live in Geneva. Wikileaks continues to maintain other bank accounts in other countries.

Governments may be able to destroy Wikileaks itself, but it seems like it's going to be very, very difficult to keep the information contained in the State Department cables from reaching the public. There is no printing press to seize, no briefcase of documents to confiscate, nothing material that any government can get its hands on. What exists is a bunch of bits that are already zipping around the globe that can be instantly copied, mirrored, branched, and transmitted through the Internet. As Wikileaks continues to decentralize in the face of attack, "the only way to shut [the distribution of the cables] down will be to shut down the Internet itself," as Dave Winer put it.