WikiLeaks uses Swiss web address as options narrow

Supporters say Julian Assange, an Australian living in Britain, is considering seeking asylum in Switzerland.He told a Spanish newspaper that he faced "hundreds of death threats," including some targeting his lawyers and children, aside from the pressure he is getting from prosecutors in the US and other countries.

After a number of web companies dropped WikiLeaks, much of the site's traffic was coming through the wikileaks.ch web address yesterday.The address is controlled by the Swiss Pirate Party, a group that formed two years ago to campaign for freedom of information.

The site's main server in France went offline but it remained reachable through a Swedish server.The site showed Assange had begun seeking donations to an account under his name through the Swiss postal system in Bern, the Swiss capital, while also using a Swiss-Icelandic credit card processing center and other accounts in Iceland and Germany.
He lost a major source of revenue when the online payment service provider PayPal cut off the WikiLeaks account over the weekend.

Assange has been widely praised and criticised. Supporters view him as a saviour of the media and free speech; critics vilify him for brazenly unleashing diplomatic secrets, as well as for earlier leaks involving the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

US Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell called Assange "a high-tech terrorist." He told NBC's "Meet the Press" he hopes Assange will be prosecuted for the "enormous damage" the disclosures have done to the country and to its relationship with its allies.
But even as governments put pressure on Assange, WikiLeaks lives on. The Swiss Pirate Party said yesterday that wikileaks.ch was receiving about 3,000 visitors a second.
The party also said supporters are creating "mirrors" of the WikiLeaks site on their own servers, meaning the diplomatic cables will remain available even if WikiLeaks loses its own site.

"Even if you take down the server in Sweden, it's too late," Swiss Pirate Party vice-president Pascal Gloor told The Associated Press yesterday."There are hundreds of mirrors of WikiLeaks now," he said.