Fingered

TAKING sides on WikiLeaks' release of American secrets is increasingly costly. That is the lesson of a hectic week in which Julian Assange was arrested on sexual assault charges, the flow of secrets continued, and companies such as Amazon, PayPal, Visa, MasterCard and Facebook were sucked into the battle.

Initially, WikiLeaks was on the defensive. Its main sites suffered disabling “denial of service” attacks, commonly used by cybercriminals and terrorists. These bombard a target with bogus requests for information: death by a billion clicks. An American activist called Jester claimed to be behind that. He describes himself as an ex-soldier, uses his own software, called Xerxes, and usually targets jihadist websites.

Then Amazon (which rented computer space to WikiLeaks) and EveryDNS (an internet-addressing service) dumped their client. Visa and MasterCard followed suit, blocking donations. So did PayPal, an internet payment firm. It cited a State Department complaint about the site's “illegal activities”. A Swiss-based bank, PostFinance, did the same, saying Mr Assange had falsely claimed to live in Switzerland.

None of that proved disabling. Hundreds of other servers started hosting “mirrors”—copies of the site, with names like wikileaks.ch. Attacking so many targets is all but hopeless. In France the industry minister, Eric Besson, demanded that French hosting-companies ban WikiLeaks. But a court in Lille declined to enforce the request. An Icelandic company, DataCell, stepped in to process credit-card payments. Visa and MasterCard blocked its account. The company says it will sue. But determined donors can still use bank transfers (in two countries, tax-deductible for Germans); or simply post cheques to a mailbox in Australia.

WikiLeaks' fans cried treachery and launched boycotts. A loose-knit activists' group called Anonymous, in what it calls Operation Payback, disrupted the sites of PostFinance, PayPal, Visa, MasterCard (including, on one of the year's busiest shopping days, its SecureCode payment system). They also hit the websites of the politicians Sarah Palin and Senator Joe Lieberman, who are among WikiLeaks' loudest critics, and the Swedish prosecutor and lawyers involved in pressing for Mr Assange's extradition from London.

Those efforts were co-ordinated on Twitter and Facebook, putting those companies in the eye of the storm. Both have business models that celebrate free speech. But cyber-attacks are illegal. So far Facebook has closed a page used by the hackers. Twitter blocked an account that released what appeared to be credit-card numbers stolen during the attacks. But even that attracts opprobrium.

WikiLeaks itself says it neither applauds or condemns these actions. Its main defence is public support, stoked by its media allies' continued release of purloined cables (see article). The New York Times and others are unmoved by politicians' outrage or possible legal pressure. But for now WikiLeaks must manage without its founder, who describes himself as its “heart and soul…founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organiser, financier and all the rest.”

Mr Assange was arrested when he presented himself to police officers in London on the morning of December 7th. A judge denied bail, despite pleas from a clutch of celebrity supporters, and remanded him in custody until December 14th. Though he faces no criminal charges yet, prosecutors there want to question him. They are responding to complaints from two women with whom he had initially consensual sexual encounters. His lawyer, Mark Stephens, plans to appeal, saying the extradition is “politically motivated”.

The row over Mr Assange's Swedish sexual shenanigans does look rum. The women's complaints came only after they had compared notes. The story seems to involve a broken condom, fears of a sexually transmitted disease, a failure to return phone calls and hurt feelings. Prosecutors initially dismissed the allegations but reopened the case after a delay.

By accident or design, Mr Assange's Swedish entanglements divert attention from a hard question for America: whether it can or should seek to try him in its own courts and, if so, on what charge. Some Republicans have suggested using the 1917 Espionage Act but lawyers suggest that to bring a case would be hard. America says it may ask for his extradition from Sweden.

Mr Assange is insured against foul play. He has distributed 100,000 encrypted copies of a 1.4-gigabyte file containing the entire cache of the 250,000 purloined diplomatic cables, including sensitive bits such as names that in the few hundred published so far have been blanked out. If necessary, friends will release the decryption key—a “thermonuclear” option, says Mr Stephens.