A number of federal agencies have blocked access to Wikileaks from government computers, referencing a policy requiring the protection of classified information, apparently valid even while the rest of the uncensored Internet has access to it.

Among the blockers is the Library of Congress, which is preventing access to Wikileaks from its public computer terminals. The library released a statement Dec. 3 stating that "unauthorized disclosures of classified documents do not alter the documents' classified status." The Washington Post reports that the Education Department has also blocked access.

The Office of Management and Budget, meanwhile, reportedly sent agencies a memo on Dec. 3 requiring agency general counsels to send a notice telling federal employees and contractors not to access any classified material unless they've been cleared for access and have a need to know the information.

Some federal agencies have already warned employees against accessing Wikileaks on government computers, including the Commerce Department, which apparently sent a broadcast email warning that "accessing the Wikileaks documents will lead to sanitization of your PC to remove any potentially classified information from the system and result in possible data loss."

Wikileaks itself has undergone a period of instability the past few days, losing its .org web address on Dec. 2 when domain name system services provider EveryDNS.net pulled its support of the site, citing an inability to cope with the many distributed denial of service attacks launched against Wikileaks.

"These attacks have, and future attacks would, threaten the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure, which enables access to almost 500,000 other websites," EveryDNS said in a statement.

Wikileaks, meanwhile, has resurfaced online with a Swiss domain as wikileaks.ch, on a web address controlled by the Swiss Pirate Party, an organization that says it's in favor of copyright and patent reform. In addition, at least 335 mirror sites have sprung up to duplicate Wikileaks content.  

However, its ability to collect donations was limited when PayPal closed down Wikileak's account. Wikileaks violated PayPal's acceptable use policy, "which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity," the company said in a statement.

Amazon Web Services said in a Dec. 2 statement that governmental pressure was not responsible for its having severed a hosting relationship with Wikileaks earlier that week. Amazon's relationship with Wikileaks came under scrutiny from Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), but Amazon said Wikileaks was not following its terms of service.

"Our terms of service state that 'you represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content...that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity.' It's clear that Wikileaks doesn't own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content. Further, it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that Wikileaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren't putting innocent people in jeopardy," says the AWS statement.

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