WikiLeaks made public thousands of US diplomatic cables on Wednesday hours after its Californian DNS host was ordered to hand to authorities everything it had on Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.
The order to US DNS host Dynadot was issued under the Patriot Act and demanded it hand over all subscriber and payment information of the accounts WikiLeaks held since November 1, 2009, according to a copy of the order released by Wikileaks Wednesday.
“Our Californian DNS hoster, Dynadot, has received a PATRIOT act production order for information on Julian Assange. It has complied,” WikiLeaks Tweeted on Wednesday afternoon.
“Further proof has emerged of the United States secret Grand Jury investigation into Julian Assange and WikiLeaks,” the whistleblower group said in a statement Wednesday.
“Information has been demanded on the organisation and its founder for the US courts, this time under the PATRIOT Act. The Grand Jury has been meeting in Alexandria, Washington DC trying to work up an espionage case against the organisation’s founder Julian Assange."
Earlier in the day WikiLeaks claimed it was under a massive denial of service attack, which forced it to run off backup servers. It later suggested they were state-led attacks, questioning whether “state directed Denial of Service attacks” were legally a “war crime against civilian infrastructure”.
Shortly after the DDoS and court order revelation, the under-siege organisation let fly with thousands of cables from US embassies relating to Libya, China, Taiwan, Israel, Russia, Venezuala, Iran, Germany, France, Indonesia, Rwanda and Turkey.
WikiLeaks also intended to release a further 35,000 US diplomatic cables over Wednesday night and Thursday morning, and established the #wlfind tag to corral reader revelations.
However, according to former WikiLeaks staffer turned Guardian data journalist, James Ball, there was nothing in the cables that The Guardian had not had access to for the past nine months.