Video-hosting site LiveLeak pulled the controversial anti-Quran film Fitna Friday afternoon, citing a barrage of threats.
The 17-minute film by Dutch politician Geert Wilders, posted Thursday, received more than 3 million views before being taken offline. Fitna juxtaposes passages from the Islamic holy book with graphic footage of terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe. In one scene,the sound of paper ripping can be seen as a reader pages through the Quran.
Put together as a warning that Islam poses a threat to the Netherlands, Fitna includes newspaper headlines about terror attacks, graphic images of beheadings at the hands of Islamic radicals, and a riot-provoking Danish cartoon from 2005 that depicts the prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban.
In place of the video Friday afternoon, a brief and poignant message appears on-screen: "Following threats to our staff of a very serious nature.... LiveLeak has been left with no choice but to remove Fitna from our servers.
"This is a sad day for freedom of speech on the net.... We would like to thank the thousands of people from all backgrounds and religions who gave us their support."
Wilders released the 17-minute film via LiveLeak despite concerns voiced by the Dutch government and international organizations.
UPDATE: A copy of Fitna can still be seen on Google Video.
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Wikileaks logo 
The Wikileaks website, which publishes sensitive and censored material submitted by anonymous contributors, has experienced unprecedented levels of Internet traffic today through public interest. This interest has caused the website's servers to be unable to meet the demand of over 164 gigabytes of download traffic within twenty-four hours, leading the site to be temporarily inaccessible. 

The film , directed and produced by Dutch politician , has caused controversy for its presentation of Wilders' negative view of Islam as being committed to world domination and acts of terrorism. A trailer for the film was widely uploaded to many video sharing sites, including ''YouTube'' and ; this met with anger from Islamic nations, the debacle culminating in Pakistan's government ordering the nation's internet service providers to block the YouTube site. This caused YouTube to be inaccessible to residents of other countries whose Internet service providers' equipment automatically began routing traffic to YouTube via Pakistan Telecom's servers, due to their ban accidentally propagating to other providers. Ultimately, YouTube acquiesced to the demands made by Pakistan and other organisations, in exchange for access being restored. The site '''' originally hosted  a copy of the trailer, which has now been replaced with a video message stating that the lives of their staff have been put at risk due to hosting it. 

As a consequence of this censorship, Wikileaks mirrored the video, receiving heavy access traffic through hosting one of the few copies remaining on the Internet. ''Wikinews'' has obtained an exclusive statement from a representative of Wikileaks, affirming that the site has not been taken off-line due to external pressure, and is instead suffering technical problems due to this high demand. The representative gave the following statement:


Wikileaks gained recent public attention in the ''Bank Julius Baer vs. Wikileaks'' lawsuit, following publication of leaked documents that were alleged to provide evidence of money laundering, tax evasion and asset hiding by Swiss financial institution Bank Julius Baer. The documents are said to have been uploaded by Rudolf Elmer, a former chief operating officer of the bank's Cayman Islands division, who was sacked following an investigation by the bank that involved polygraph testing. Wikileaks has not, however, stated that Elmer was the source of the documents. Bank Julius Baer sought an injunction against the operator of Wikileaks' domain name, Dynadot, to remove access to the site from the Wikileaks.org domain; this was granted by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The site was consequently inaccessible through this domain, although access could be obtained through many alternate addresses. Following activity by organisations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union, who sought to defend the right to free speech that Wikileaks relied upon, the lawsuit was dropped and access was restored.