Classified document publishing website Wikileaks has now been kicked off of Amazon, Paypal, its DNS server and its Swiss bank account – but it lives on, including across hundreds of mirrored sites and is the subject for widespread discussion on Facebook and Twitter.
Site leader Julian Assange is hiding on the run but said to be facing imminent arrest in multiple countries. US Republican party figureheads have reportedly called for him to be hunted down like a Taliban leader and executed. He may very well be named TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year for pushing the envelope on questions of technology disruption of media and diplomatic secrecy. Senator Joe Lieberman called on US corporations to stop doing business with Wikileaks but tonight Facebook has issued a statement about its stance: for now at least, Wikileaks can continue publishing updates to supporters on the world’s largest social network.
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ReadWriteWeb’s question, by email: “Does Facebook have a statement on the Wikileaks account there? Will it be allowed to continue publishing, despite government calls to stop doing business with the organization? Is Facebook considering shutting down the account?”
Facebook’s response, from Andrew Noyes, the company’s D.C. based Manager of Public Policy Communications: “The Wikileaks Facebook Page does not violate our content standards nor have we encountered any material posted on the page that violates our policies.”
That’s notably different from what Twitter told us today. Twitter passed around a press statement this morning stating that it is not censoring Wikileaks from its “trending topics” section, but when we asked point blank about whether it will permit the Wikileaks account to remain online or whether it will be shut down, Twitter’s Matt Graves told ReadWriteWeb, “We’ve got no additional comment beyond the statement.”
Don’t expect this to be the last that’s heard from either company on this matter.
Every company online is likely considering how to relate to Wikileaks. Google, for example, appears to have indexed almost 1500 pages of the site, while Bing appears to have indexed only 10 pages of Wikileaks.ch.
Wikileaks began publication, in conjunction with a handful of media outlets around the world, of 250,000 US diplomatic cables late last month. The subject of heated international debate, the collection includes documents with a variety of security classifications, ranging from unclassified to “classified” to “secret.” An estimated 3 million people in the United States have been granted clearance to access documents set as classified and according to Wikileaks, only 5% of the cables set for release are classified as secret. None of the documents are believed to be classified as “top secret,” the most sensitive security classification.
The most recently reported release from the site is an aggregated list of infrastructural facilities around the world deemed most important to US interests. The publication of that list may be one of the most controversial steps the site has taken yet. It is unclear, however, how unknown any of those sites were prior to disclosure of the list.
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