Can WikiLeaks be stopped?

Is WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange an anarchist profiting from the sale of stolen goods, his stock in trade being the illicitly downloaded 250,000 US diplomatic cables.
Or is he as lauded by some the wild child of free speech, a modern day version of the civil rights advocates of America and a cyber-age freedom fighter. 
Whatever you think of him, this university drop-out with 42 convictions for computer crime, has made a fatal flaw in his crusade for transparency.
That was the interview he gave last month to a journalist. In this, he claimed to have information about a major American bank that would cause a scandal to rival the one about Enron. Assange had already taken on the establishment; now he was daring the big business as well.
But if governments vacillate in face of a challenge, big business is unforgiving.
And we all need to ask what next for Assange and his band of cyber thieves? Will we be okay with him breaking into our home computers and laying bare our emails?
Will we be okay with the dumping of our personal financial statements on the web?
While Assange will undoubtedly be the topic of many a Christmas dinner table conversation, the big question is can WikiLeaks really be stopped?
The United States government hopes so, as it is reportedly looking at all possible ways to prosecute its Assange, and bring down his now famous whistle-blowing website.
And bowing to political and public pressure, company after company is lining up to publicly disassociate itself from WikiLeaks.
Among those to pull the plug are Amazon.com, which provided web services, and PayPal, the payment processor. Both claimed that WikiLeaks violated the 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 fuelling the Internet itself.
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 it 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 you procure almost unprecedented cooperation from authorities in all countries in which mirrors for a site reside, you’re going to have difficulty shutting an operation like WikiLeaks down, especially if the means to fund and run the site are shared by many people around the world as well.
Heavily mirrored sites like WikiLeaks can, in fact, be brought down for a while – that is, until the DNS records get updated to point to the newly-active mirror.
But thanks to social networks, much of the WikiLeaks message – and news about where the site is active – can be propagated today through the major social networks like Twitter and Facebook where millions follow the latest leaks and news about the site’s ongoing struggles with authorities.
No “good” idea on the Internet goes uncopied for long. Whether you like the idea behind WikiLeaks or not, you cannot argue with the notoriety it has gained. And where there’s notoriety, there are copycats.
The essential ingredients behind WikiLeaks, after all, are not exactly secret. Take some fairly standard wiki software – which allows content to be freely contributed and edited by users, as is the case with the famous Wikipedia – and mix in an activist mission with visibility, and you have yourself another WikiLeak site.
Activists in China are already reportedly planning a Chinese version of WikiLeaks.
So what’s the solution to stopping WikiLeaks? Technologically speaking, it will not be easy.
What some are attempting to do in reigning in the site itself is actually attacking the messenger, not the message.
The better long-term strategy is undoubtedly to address the security leaks at their source.
- DPA