Pirate Party launches Australian Wikileaks mirrors

Pirate Party Australia has joined an international mirroring initiative aimed at making it "impossible" to fully remove Wikileaks from the internet.

The political party today launched two sites, wikileaks.savetheinter.net and cablegate.savetheinter.net, joining 335 other "censorship resistant mirrors".

Both sites were hosted by DCP Networks in Sweden. A party spokesman said it planned to move the sites to an Australian data centre "as soon as feasible".

During the past week, Wikileaks and its Australian founder Julian Assange have come under fire for releasing classified US diplomatic cables to the public.

The site was booted from Amazon's cloud infrastructure last week, as it battled sustained denial of service attacks that exceeded 10 gigabits of traffic per second.

Attorney-General Robert McClelland said the release may have breached "a number of criminal laws", hinting that Australia would cooperate with the US to extradite Assange should he set foot in his home country.

Australian Greens Leader Bob Brown today urged the Government to make clear that Australian authorities would protect Assange's rights, and assure him that his citizenship is safe.

"Mr Assange has come across a great ream of documents which throw some light on US foreign policy. It is important that we know what drives governments to make decisions," Brown stated.

Pirate Party Australia spokesman Brendan Molloy said that it would maintain the mirrors "ad infinitum", noting that cost was the party's only constraint.

A local host would "prove that we can host such documents in Australia without any legal difficulty," he said.