Diplomatic Cables Online, Wikileaks Subject to US Pressure

Hillary Clinton phoning world leaders in diplomatic damage control, UK issues DA notice warning media over publishing secrets endangering national security, US sends more warnings to the Whistleblower Website, Wikileaks crashed Sunday afternoon and said via its twitter account it has been attacked. And this is only the beginning.

The contents of more than 250,000 leaked state department cables, sent from, or to, US embassies around the world are online already, with five major world newspapers -including the NY Times and The Guardian- publishing the cables as well as reports on them.
Diplomatic cables are internal documents that would include a range of secret communications between U.S. diplomatic outposts and State Department headquarters in Washington.

According to the Guardian, typical cables describe summaries of meetings, analysis of events in other countries and records of confidential conversations with officials of other governments and with members of civil society. These also include candid and often unfavorable commentaries on foreign leaders, as well as coverage of almost every major issue of recent years.

WikiLeaks has said the release will be seven times the size of its October leak of 400,000 Iraq war documents, already the biggest leak in U.S. intelligence history.
The secret cables are believed to be from January 2006 to December 2009.

The United States had warned WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange that publishing the papers would be illegal and endanger peoples' lives.
In its statement on Twitter, Wikileaks said it was experiencing a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack. That's an effort to make a website unavailable to users, normally by flooding it with requests for data.

WikiLeaks has crashed Sunday afternoon; just hours before it was reportedly schedule to defy the Obama administration with the publication of millions of documents the U.S. claims will endanger "countless lives".