Wikileaks Mirror Sites Grow in Number

While there is a move to shut down Wikileaks, and the hunt for editor Julian Assange is still on, the site continues to multiply through mirrors. Wikileaks said that in order to make it impossible to ever fully remove the site from the Internet, a list of mirrors of Wikileaks website and CableGate pages are established.

Amazingly, Wikileaks is currently mirrored on 748 sites (updated 2010-12-07 08:33 GMT).

U.S. government scientists are being blocked from accessing WikiLeaks’ Web sites for fear it will “contaminate” their computers, CNET has learned.

The Library of Congress, part of the legislative branch, acknowledged blocking WikiLeaks in a blog post on Friday. Also that day, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget told federal workers not to visit WikiLeaks’ Web site–but stopped short at ordering that it, or its mirror sites, be blocked.

“That guidance did not advise agencies to block WikiLeaks or other Web sites on government computer systems.”

That decision appears to have originated with the Department of Energy, which sent a memo to its installations saying: “Any document that is on an Internet Web site that is purported to be classified cannot be downloaded to an unclassified computer system without contaminating the unclassified computer system.”

Fermilab’s Leininger echoed this, telling employees that, “if someone downloaded a classified document to a computer on the Fermilab network, our network would be considered ‘contaminated.'”