WikiLeaks battle now a ‘cyber-war’

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This article was published 10/12/2010 (5795 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

LONDON — Skirmishes raged across cyberspace Thursday between WikiLeaks supporters and the companies they accuse of trying to stifle the group, with websites on both sides of the battle line taken out of service or choked off by attacks.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, raised the alarm over officials’ and corporations’ moves to cut off WikiLeaks’s funding and starve it of server space — something she described as a “potentially violating WikiLeaks’ right to freedom of expression.”

Navi Pillay also expressed surprise at the scale of the online attacks that have targeted major American financial players — in some cases denying access to their websites for hours at a time.”It’s truly what media would call a cyber-war. It’s just astonishing what is happening,” Pillay told reporters.

WikiLeaks has been under intense pressure since it began publishing some 250,000 U.S. State Department cables, with attacks on its websites and threats against its founder, Julian Assange, who is now in a British jail fighting extradition to Sweden on sex crime allegations.

U.S. officials say WikiLeaks’ actions have thrown diplomacy worldwide into disarray, caused countries to curtail their dealings with America and, in the case of an earlier release of classified military documents, put the lives of informants at risk.

The Obama administration has put intense pressure on U.S.-based Internet companies to cut any ties to WikiLeaks, and many have done so.

— The Associated Press