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When payment providers, service providers and even visualization software services cut off services, Wikileaks struggled to keep their site online, going down for periods of time and reducing the content they carry. But while the availability of Wikileaks content was restricted, the demand from readers and media organizations to access that information stayed strong. Now a new generation of Wikileaks-inspired websites is populating the Internet — decentralizing the concept of whistleblowing and making it harder to shut down speech merely by cutting off services to one site.

Our goal is to bring important news and information to the public. We provide an innovative, secure and anonymous way for sources to leak information to our journalists (our electronic drop box).

One of our most important activities is to publish original source material alongside our news stories so readers and historians alike can see evidence of the truth.

. The companies did so, which prompted a group of hackers to hit back. The group, which goes by the moniker "Anonymous," launched a series of cyber attacks against those three companies and others, in what the hackers dubbed "Operation Payback."

Barr's braggadocio didn't sit well with the hacker collective, who then apparently broke into HBGary Federal's computer system and stole tens of thousands of E-mails and posted them on the Internet, hijacked Barr's Twitter account, posted his supposed home address and social security number, and defaced HBGary Federal's website.

In a precedent post we showed the list of top 20 American companies most affected by Wikileaks in terms of news generated worldwide. Bank of America appeared as ranked number five.

One can argue whether the privacy provisions were weakened or not. In the case of the WikiLeaks, Twila Brase, president of the Citizens' Council for Health Freedom, got to the heart of the matter when she said, "What WikiLeaks shows you is how security information is all about the integrity of individuals." The bottom line is that someone in the State Dept. leaked the documents. No iron-clad privacy provision in the world can protect against a person leaking information - whether it's paper based or computerized. Brase went on to say, "Once you get information on any kind of electronic format, it is very easy to take it, to access it, to share it, to download it."

The silver lining in the WikiLeaks scandal is that it puts a laser focus on privacy and security issues, which are things we need to keep working on to make it right.

The Japanese government has said it is doing all it can to contain the crisis at Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, which was critically damaged in last week's earthquake. But according to U.S. diplomatic papers released by WikiLeaks, that atomic disaster might have been avoided if only the government had acted on earlier safety warnings.

The overall picture that emerges from the cables is of a government afraid of interfering with the powerful nuclear industry, which supplies about one-third of Japan's electricity.

Another cable sent from Tokyo to Washington in October 2008 alleged that the government had hidden past nuclear accidents. In 2008, Taro Kono -- a senior member of Japan's lower house of parliament -- told U.S. diplomats that the ministry of economy, trade and industry was "covering up nuclear accidents, and obscuring the true costs and problems associated with the nuclear industry."

take down” a major American bank and

That Mr. Assange might shift his attention to a private company — especially one as politically unpopular as Bank of America or any of its rivals, which have been stained by taxpayer-financed bailouts and the revelation of improper foreclosure practices — raises a new kind of corporate threat, combining elements of law, technology, public policy, politics and public relations

reveal an “ecosystem of corruption” with a cache of data from an executive’s hard drive. With Bank of America’s share price falling on the widely held suspicion that the hard drive was theirs

"using defensive domain registration to block others from exploiting domain names associated with your brand," according to its website.

snapping up more than 400 domain names (such as brianmoynihansucks.com) in recent weeks that could feasibly be used as destinations for leveling hatred at the company.

Why the sudden burst in apparent pre-emptive action? One theory is that Bank of America is bracing for a fresh release of documents from the anti-secrecy site WikiLeaks.

Paul Mutton at the security firm Netcraft, who is monitoring the attacks, said Visa is considered a more difficult target and the attack on it required a much larger number of "hacktivists" - politically motivated hackers - 2,000 compared with 400 for Mastercard.

Anonymous, which claimed to have carried out the attack, is a loose-knit group of hacktivists, with links to the notorious message board 4chan.

WikiLeaks, the controversial whistleblowing site that exposes secrets of governments and corporations, bootstrapped itself with a cache of documents obtained through an internet eavesdropping operation by one of its activists, according to a new profile of the organization’s founder. The activist siphoned more than a million documents as they traveled across the internet through Tor, also known as “The Onion Router,” a sophisticated privacy tool that lets users navigate and send documents through the internet anonymously.

The siphoned documents, supposedly stolen by Chinese hackers or spies who were using the Tor network to transmit the data, were the basis for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s assertion in 2006 that his organization had already “received over one million documents from 13 countries” before his site was launched, according to the article in The New Yorker.

The dispute cuts to the core of the question of whether WikiLeaks allies are part of a criminal conspiracy or a political discussion

The U.S. is investigating whether WikiLeaks should be held responsible for leaking classified information, even though it was not the original leaker.

"The First Amendment guarantees their right to speak up and freely associate with even unpopular people and cause," attorneys wrote.

On Sunday, five international news outlets published a selection of more than 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables, provided by the website WikiLeaks.

According to one cable, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has repeatedly asked the U.S. to "cut off the head of the snake"

3. The Obama administration offered sweeteners to try to get other countries to take Guantanamo detainees, as part of its (as yet unsuccessful) effort to close the prison. Slovenia, for instance, was offered a meeting with President Obama, while the island nation of Kiribati was offered incentives worth millions.

The move by Ambassador Carlos Pascual comes amid tension between the United States and Mexico after a U.S. diplomatic cable released last fall by the WikiLeaks website quoted U.S. officials talking about "widespread corruption" in Mexican security agencies and "a dysfunctionally low level of collaboration."

A small number of names and passages in some of the cables have been removed (———) by The New York Times to protect diplomats’ confidential sources, to keep from compromising American intelligence efforts or to protect the privacy of ordinary citizens.

Below are a selection of the documents from a cache of a quarter-million confidential American diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks. A small number of names and passages in some of the cables have been removed (———) by The New York Times to protect diplomats’ confidential sources, to ke