All right here is a new one. WikiLeaks.org got set up a while ago to offer a WikiPedia-style spot for edgy secret documents to get dumped. And they are getting some press. Now, a Situation has arisen, knocking the main server offline as their CA-based domain registrar folds under legal pressure. Because WikiLeaks was leaking.... suspicious bits about the Cayman Islands fronts of some bank or something. Apparently the UK server, among others, are still fine. Here is the list of mirrors.
Some are more peculiar in that unencrypted URLs either time out or are not working,
Some of the Cover Names presumably just re-direct traffic to the now missing www.wikileaks.org and so are effectively not working either i.e.
Here is a list of Wikileaks Cover Name URL links which worked ok for us in the last few hours:
There are some caveats about the secure proxy certificates and whatnot - I.E. what are these 'moskva orts' Russians really up to? [Something quite cool i would bet, anyway]
There is a blog here: WikiLeak.org with more news on that.
http://wikileaks.org.uk/wiki/Wikileaks_survives_censorship%2C_ddos%2C_fire :
Spy Blog: Wikileaks survives a fire, but is under Temporary Restraining Order partial censorship
Link http://spyblog.org.uk Country United Kingdom Date 2008-02-17
It looks as if the interesting and controversial, Wikileaks website, which promises "anonymous, untraceable, uncensorable" publication of leaked documents from whistleblowers, and which recently published the devastating No2ID Campaign annotated leaked UK National Identity Scheme document , is weathering some technical hitches and legal litigation attacks.
It seems that there has been a fire in an Uninterruptible Power Supply, which took the WikiLeaks web servers offline for much of Saturday, at their Swedish co-location hosting company, PRQ Inet, which has experience of attempts at censorship, through their former hosting of the peer to peer filesharing and political phenomenon, The Pirate Bay.
[editor: shortly before the fire unknown persons launched a 500Mbps distributed denial of service attack. It is not known if or how the attack is related to the other events described in this article].
More seriously and for the longer term, the brand name of WikiLeaks.org is no longer online, due to a Temporary Restraining Order issued by the California Northern District Court in San Francisco, aimed at a Domain Name Registrar, rather than just the actual publishers of controversial material, who happen to be outside of US legal jurisdiction..
See this partial public list of Wikileaks Cover Names for alternative URLs which have not yet been censored.
The plaintiffs in the California case are a Swiss Bank bank - Bank Julius Baer and its associated Cayman Islands tax avoidance subsidiaries, egged on by their expensive Hollywood media celebrity shyster lawyers Lavely & Singer. Julius Baer have been pursuing a Swiss whistleblower, some of whose leaked documents have been allegedly published on WikiLeaks.org. Why this is a problem when the world's financial monitoring and tax authorities appear to have already had access to them, is a mystery.
See Bank Julius Baer vs. Wikileaks
WikiLeakS.org have also had legal threats from ineptitude lawyers Schillings -- who in tried to censor blogs critical of the dubious Russian / Uzbek billionaire Alisher Usmanov] which caused much of the UK political and Arsenal football club fan blogosphere, to rally together in condemnation of the "collateral damage" which was to caused to innocent political bloggers, across the political spectrum.
Schillings are acting against WikiLeaks.org because of their publication of a prospectus to potential rescue investors of the Northern Rock plc bank scandal, something which is now obsolete, but was of massive public interest to all UK taxpayers and investors, and which the mainstream media caved in to after Schillings shyster threats, and an expensive (effectively taxpayer funded) High Court Injunction.
See Northern Rock vs. Wikileaks.
It is interesting that the first threats to this supposedly "uncensorable, anonymous, mass whistleblowing" project, do not come from Government Big Brother authorities, but from the private sector, and from equipment failures at a Single Point of Failure.
As with the Alisher Usmanov affair, the tactics of the media celibrity shysters in the Bank Julius Baer case is to threaten parts of what should be neutral, exempt internet infrastructure companies, with potentially expensive litigation in court rather than just the actaul publishers of the allegedly defamatory or confidential or copyright material.
Even if such companies win in court, the expense of kegal advice is such that it could cost them far more money in legal fees, than they are getting from a cheap domain name registration or webhosting package, so they are tempted to cave in to such shyster demands for censorship.
Only by pointing out the damage to their own brand names and potential profits, as a result of the disgust that most active internet customers feel, when the rich and powerful and their shysters, try to bully individuals or small groups of activists, can this economic threat be counterbalanced.
See the Censorship Threats from Lawyers category archive of blog postings on the WikiLeak.org blog, which comments on the technical, legal and ethical aspects of the WikiLeakS.org project.
The website WikiLeaks.org has been taken off line in many parts of the world. Wikileaks is a website dedicated to leaking documents that are "anonymous, untraceable, uncensorable."

Several factors have taken the site off line including DDoS attacks, which was followed by a fire which took out the main servers hosting the site in Sweden, and a restraining order on the domain name 'WikiLeaks.org' issued in the United States.

According to the website ''HongPong.com'', ''Wikileaks'' experienced "a 500Mbps distributed denial of service attack" before the fire, but it is not known if the DDoS attack is connected to it.

After the attack, a fire was reported in the Uninterruptible Power Supply of the servers which host the site.

The third and final factor taking the site off line is a permanent injunction granted in the California Northern District Court in San Francisco, California to Bank Julius Baer, a Swiss Bank, which has caused the domain to be taken off line in the U.S.. Wikileaks previously published hundreds of documents obtained from a whistleblower of the Swiss Bank, "purportedly showing offshore tax evasion and money laundering by extremely wealthy and in some cases, politically sensitive, clients from the US, Europe, China and Peru."

According to a ''Wikileaks'' press release received by e-mail, the injunction issued by the court states, "Dynadot Wikileaks host shall immediately clear and remove all DNS hosting records for the wikileaks.org domain name and prevent the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org website or any other website or server other than a blank park page, until further order of this Court."

"The order was entirely written by Cayman Island's Bank Julius Baer lawyers and was accepted by judge White without amendment, or representations by Wikileaks or amicus. The case is over several Wikileaks articles, public commentary and documents dating prior to 2003. The documents allegedly reveal secret Julius Baer trust structures used for asset hiding, money laundering and tax evasion.
The bank alleges the documents were disclosed to Wikileaks by offshore banking whistleblower and former Vice President of the Cayman Island's operation, Rudolf Elmer. Unable to lawfully attack Wikileaks servers which are based in several countries, the order was served on Wikileaks's California registrar Dynadot ("the power company"). The order also enjoins every person who has heard about the order from even linking to the documents," said ''Wikileaks'' in the release.

Despite the injunction, ''Wikileaks'' states that they will "keep on publishing, in-fact, given the level of suppression involved in this case, Wikileaks will step up publication of documents pertaining to illegal or unethical banking practices."

Despite the injunction, the site can still be accessed at http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks.