wikileaks diplo cables links blocked in U.S.?

[commanderW]

I just saw a story on news, that wikileaks.org has been publishing 1000's of U.S. diplomatic cables that they acquired somehow. So, out of pure curiosity, I visitied the site. There was nothing on the landing page but the links to a previous 'leak' - the Afghan war material.

This didn't make sense, so I visited the site through a proxy server located in a country outside of U.S. (I am in U.S.). I was surprised to find the diplomatic cable material at the top of this same page. The page I got from U.S. simply seems to have had this topmost text deleted, and begins with last months scandalous material.

Since I'm not an investigative journalist and so have neither any interest in, or the time to peruse 1000's of random diplomats communications, I didn't even bother to download this stuff. But now I am very very curious to know how and why I got these 2 different pages. I do feel irritated at the prospect that my government may be starting to act like the Chinese govt. After all, if people in other countries can get this data, then it is only us American citizens who are being blocked or diverted to a different webpage, possibly by our own Govt. ( though wikileaks.org itslef might be serving up a different webpage to U.S. IP's, but this doesn't make sense.) . This looks bad, and is bad, if true. If Americas enemies can read these cables, but free American citizens cannot, then we don't know what our enemies know. That is just plain stupid !

Any knowledgable people out there care to check this out ?

[J_RaD]

fine for me, the cables aren't actually on the wikileaks site

[public.tableausoftware.com...]

[commanderW]

Well, I found some mirror sites for wikilinks.org. One of them looks just like the one I get when I type in wikilinks.org in my browser(Last months Afghan leaks but not this months diplomatic cable leaks). A second looks just like the site I got through a proxy server located in Europe.(Both recent sets of leaks.). A third mirror appears to be old news from 2009. Other mirrors have notices saying they are "undergoing scheduled maintenance." So maybe this is all a product of the fact that wikileaks has a complicated mirror server system. All I know is registrar/dns/hosting :) Perhaps the actual server that gets contacted when typing in wikilinks.org from where I am just hasn't been updated yet. I hope this is the case. I don't want the U.S. Govt. to turn into it's own worst enemy. Censorship is a symptom of incipient despotism.

I hope this post wasn't a wrong headed move resulting from my own unease and ignorance of serverside technology. But I feel it is important for people to be alert and check out suspicious looking situations. The U.S. is supposed to be a bastion of democracy and free speech. The entire world needs it to remain one.

It would still be of great service if someone knowledgable could check this odd looking situation out.

CAVEAT -I realize that Webmasterworld is a forum for learning and teaching for webmasters and designers. It is not an Internet watchdog. So I won't mind at all if a moderator feels that the entire subject of this thread is irrevelant, imprudent or in any way out of line, and deletes it before it gets started. Thank you all for being here, and providing this wonderful resource.

[Rugles]

I can see them just fine from here in Canada. By the way, they have only released about 300 documents so far. Not sure why they are releasing them so slowly and in little batches each day.

[Rugles]

Apparently it's under endless DOS attacks. I just read it's being hosted on an Amazon server at this moment.

This guy is very clever, he must have had dozens of servers ready to keep it a moving target from the DOS attacks.

[geekie]

The subdomain with the cables hasn't been down since he first posted but the newspapers here keep reporting that the Wikileaks site is down. I try to comment that is isn't down but my comments usually aren't posted.....