 Nukes WikiLeak 'illegal, irresponsible and dangerous': NATO Brussels (AFP) Nov 30, 2010 - NATO slammed Tuesday the release of confidential US files revealing where the United States has deployed nuclear weapons in Europe as "illegal, irresponsible and dangerous," spokeswoman Oana Lungescu said. "As a matter of policy we won't comment on classified information and we strongly condemn the leaking of confidential documents," Longescu insisted. However, "it is illegal, irresponsible and dangerous, regardless of whether the leaked material is diplomatic or military," she underlined. Sensitive US diplomatic cables placed on the Internet show that most of the 200 US nuclear bombs still left in Europe are located in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Turkey. While these countries have raised the issue of disarmament, the precise location of these tactical bombs had not been made official prior to the latest leaks. In the text files, a top Berlin official is logged as having told US counterparts it "made no sense to unilaterally withdraw 'the 20' tactical nuclear weapons still in Germany while Russia maintains 'thousands' of them." He added that a "withdrawal of nuclear weapons from Germany and perhaps from Belgium and the Netherlands could make it very difficult politically for Turkey to maintain its own stockpile." WikiLeaks at the weekend began releasing around 250,000 cables, after two other leaks this year involving hundreds of thousands of classified files on the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The whistleblowing site's Australian founder Julian Assange on Tuesday appealed to Sweden's Supreme Court to overturn a ruling he should be detained for questioning on allegations of rape. |
"We are currently under another DDoS attack," WikiLeaks said on its official Twitter feed.
DDoS stands for distributed denial of service. Classic DDoS attacks occur when legions of "zombie" computers, normally machines infected with viruses, are commanded to simultaneously visit a website.
Such a massive onslaught can overwhelm servers, slowing service or knocking them offline completely.
A later message on the WikiLeaks Twitter feed said "DDoS attack now exceeding 10 Gigabits a second."
Jon Karlung, chairman of the Swedish firm Bahnhof which hosts some of WikiLeaks including documents on the Iraq War, confirmed that there was an attack, but the primary target was not its servers in Stockholm.
"We don't have the primary cable logs (the diplomatic leaks), we don't host that. But we can see that there is an attack, we can't see very much but we can see that their servers are very slow," he said.
Karlung said that WikiLeaks was primarily hosted by US online retailer Amazon, at an address in Seattle.
"An American company is hosting WikiLeaks, that's fairly remarkable," said Karlung, adding that WikiLeaks had in recent weeks used France-based servers.
There was no immediate reply from Amazon to a request by AFP for confirmation that it was hosting WikiLeaks on its servers.
Amazon is a major provider of Web-hosting services, renting out space on its computer servers to customers around the world.
WikiLeaks is reportedly being hosted on Amazon's "cloud," or Internet-based platform, the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, known as Amazon EC2.
On Sunday, just as it began the release of some 250,000 US embassy cables, WikiLeaks said on Twitter the website had come under a DDoS cyber attack.
But it insisted El Pais, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, The Guardian and the New York Times would go ahead with the publication of the first of such documents even if the WikiLeaks website was down.
WikiLeaks later circumvented the attack by creating a sub-website -- http://cablegate.wikileaks.org -- as its main website -- http://wikileaks.org -- became inaccessible after the attack.
As of 1800 GMT on Tuesday, both websites were still online.
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