It’s not our normal beat to cover so much breaking news on ReadWriteCloud, but U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman has changed that with his attacks on Wikileaks and the threats he has made to the technology community.
We’ve seen a cascading series of events culminating tonight with Wikileaks losing its DNS. That means if you are in the United States, you can’t access the Wikileaks website. According to EveryDNS.net:
” EveryDNS.net provided domain name system (DNS) services to the wikileaks.org domain name until 10PM EST, December 2, 2010, when such services were terminated. As with other users of the EveryDNS.net network, this service was provided for free. The termination of services was effected pursuant to, and in accordance with, the EveryDNS.net Acceptable Use Policy.”
Wikileaks confirmed the news tonight on its Twitter account:
“WikiLeaks,org domain killed by US everydns.net after claimed mass attacks KEEP US STRONG https://donations.datacell.com/”
EveryDNS.net serves about 500,000 websites that could be in jeopardy due to the continuous DDOS attacks on the Wikileaks site. They say the attacks threaten the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure.
Losing the DNS means most people can’t access the site. This has come about through the actions of the U.S. Government. The government’s statements about Wikileaks have forced companies to analyze their Terms of Service. Tableau dropped Wikileaks data due to what Lieberman said. In the name of security, our government has decided to force others to block information that they fear would have terrible, terrible impacts.
The next step? It looks like Sen. Lieberman has decided to attack journalists and the technology community with legislation that would outlaw the right to publish the name of a U.S. intelligence source.