Wikileaks on closure rumors: “Do not feed the Troll”

Earlier today we reported on rumors that controversial whistleblower site Wikileaks was to be abandoned. A Wikileaks spokesperson has just got back to us denying the claims made in what he calls a “bulls**t campaign”.

“Hi Martin, we just read your story and can basically only make one comment: Do not feed the troll. There is no substance to this posting at all. We will be issuing a press release soon I think in order to address this bulls**t campaign once and for all.”

The note seems like admission that addressing these rumors only via occasional tweets was only encouraging them to continue. Indeed, a tweet published by Wikileaks just now confirms that the organisation believes they should have nipped it in the bud earlier: “WikiLeaks will NOT be abandoned. Don’t listen to disinfo being spread! We’ll issue clarifications soon. Should’ve done earlier.”

Part of the rumors we reported on related to Wikileaks supposedly moving to Iceland, a country with liberal freedom of speech laws. A comment on our earlier report noted that Wikileaks had recently registered an Icelandic site at wikileaks.is. The spokesperson told us this doesn’t necessarily indicate a move is imminent:

“We control 500+ domain names. And try to register a wikileaks domain in any possible TLD. Iceland had been discussed long ago, I thought it had long happened. Might have just been a delay, we mainly depend on volunteers to register domains, so cant say for sure, but it certainly is nothing special.

Looking at the DNS record:

wikileaks.is has address 88.80.2.32
wikileaks.org has address 88.80.2.32

Don’t see why anyone would be worried?”

It looks like we can expect Wikileaks to be a bit more open about its future plans soon.