With  its founder in the custody of British authorities, and the  organization’s website under sustained attacks, Wikileaks is now  receiving significant support from the international Pirate Party  movement.

Wikileaks  has dominated the news since it began publishing a vast trove of leaked  State Department cables last week in conjunction with media outlets  such as the UK Guardian, Germany’s Der Spiegel, The New York Times and Spain’s El Pais.  The reaction from the US political establishment has been swift and,  at times, virtually hysterical.  The incoming chairman of the House  Homeland Security Committee, Republican Peter King, stated, “This is  worse even than a physical attack on Americans, it’s worse than a  military attack,” and promptly called for Wikileaks to be designated a  foreign terrorist organization.  Self-styled Independent Democrat, Joe  Lieberman, who chairs the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, successfully pressured Amazon.com to cease hosting any portion of the Wikileaks website.  The next day,  the site’s domain name provider, EveryDNS.net, terminated its contract  with the controversial organization, stating that distributed attacks  against the Wikileaks website would jeopardize the stability of its own  infrastructure, which enables access to hundreds of thousands of other  websites.

Yet,  Wikileaks is still online and its vast database of leaked documents is  arguably now more widely accessible than ever before due to a concerted  effort by the international Pirate Party movement.  Shortly  after EveryDNS cut its ties with Wikileaks, the organization announced  that is had simply moved to a new domain, wikileaks.ch, which had been  registered by the Pirate Party of Switzerland earlier this year,  according to an article at Torrent Freak.  Reportedly, Wikileaks is also being hosted by the Swedish broadband provider Bahnhof, among other European carriers.  At Forbes, Andy Greenberg reports that, “WikiLeaks first moved into Bahnhof’s Pionen data center in August, using servers officially owned by the Swedish Pirate Party.”  However, the Pirate Party is not only helping keep Wikileaks online, it  is also ensuring that the contents of the site remain accessible on the  Internet, even despite attacks against the main site.

On Sunday, the Pirate Party International announced that Pirate Party organizations from around the world had  “decided in a joint resolution to make Wikileaks available on a  worldwide distributed mirroring infrastructure.”  By setting up sites to  mirror the main Wikileaks website, the joint action aims to “guarantee  that the release of US diplomatic cables can continue and   previous publications will stay online.”  The Pirate Parties of Germany,  Austria, Switzerland, Russia, Luxembourg, the Czech Republic, and  Serbia are specifically named in the PPI announcement, but others are  also on board.  In a separate press release, the Pirate Party UK  announced that it would also be participating in the action.  The US  Pirate Party has not released any statements regarding this matter, but  its New York affiliate appears to be participating in the mass-mirroring  action, and has apparently devoted its home site to the effort.

Originally  founded in Sweden in 2006, the Pirate Party burst onto the  international scene in 2009, when its Swedish supporters elected two  representatives to the European Parliament.  Among the party’s top  priorities are copyright and patent reform, the strengthening of the  individual right to privacy, and transparency in government.  According  to Pirate Party International, there are active Pirate Party  organizations in nearly 50 countries around the world.

Pirate  Party International was careful to state that the mass-mirroring action  should not be seen as an endorsement of the Wikileaks organization, but  is rather an “affirmation of their commitment to whistle-blowing  worldwide.”  The announcement quotes the organization’s co-chairman,  Gregory Engels of the Pirate Party Germany, stating:

“This is a fight  for fundamental freedoms on the Internet. Pirates will not accept  governmental attempts to restrict access to free press and constrain  freedom of speech."

It  should be deeply troubling to all Americans that so many politicians  and political commentators in the United States are unwilling to take a  similar stand in support of the freedom of the press and the freedom of  speech.  Texas Rep. Ron Paul is one of the few elected officials  who has voiced his dissent with the establishment consensus regarding  Wikileaks.  In a statement on his website, Paul writes:

“state secrecy is anathema to a free  society.  Why exactly should Americans be prevented from knowing what  their government is doing in their name? In a free society, we are  supposed to know the truth.  In a society where truth becomes treason,  however, we are in big trouble.”

It  may well be the case that the most vocal opponents of Wikileaks are the  least informed on the matter.  In an interview with Fox News on  Tuesday, Senator Joe Lieberman was asked what he thought of the fact  that the Justice Department has not yet charged Wikileaks founder Julian  Assange with treason.  Lieberman replied, “I don’t understand why that  hasn’t happened yet.”  The answer to this question is actually quite  simple: Julian Assange is not an American citizen, and therefore, by  definition, cannot commit treason against the United States.  Senator  Lieberman was clearly unaware of even the most basic facts regarding the  organization.

Others  have stated that by leaking and publishing over 250,000 diplomatic  cables, Wikileaks has effectively declared war on the United States.   Yet, Wikileaks does not actually leak documents, but rather publishes  documents it receives from individuals who have determined to leak  documents on their own, which is why it is frequently called a  “whistle-blower website.”  In the present case, Wikileaks has not even  published .004% of the cables in question.  As the New York Times reported:

“only around 1,000 of the cables have so far been  released; in many, names of sources who might be compromised or  endangered were redacted.”

Since many if not most of these cables have  been published by the news outlets mentioned above, sometimes even  before they had been released by Wikileaks, and since those outlets also  possess the entire trove of documents, calls to prosecute Wikileaks for  possessing and publishing them are effectively an attack on the freedom  of the press on a global scale.

In  this context, the Obama administration might consider taking its own  words to heart.  In a town hall meeting with future Chinese leaders in  November 2009, President Obama stated:

“the more freely information flows, the stronger the society  becomes, because then citizens of countries around the world can hold  their own governments accountable.”

Just two months later, Secretary of State Clinton echoed these words from the President and warned that:

“technologies  with the potential to open up access to government and promote  transparency can also be hijacked by governments to crush dissent and  deny human rights.”