Efforts to “shut down WikiLeaks” are largely ineffective, as explained by Dave Winer in his article WikiLeaks on the run at scripting.com.

WikiLeaks on the run

After explaining how Amazon closed their cloud computers to WikiLeaks, how their DNS host refused to route traffic and how France indicated that the site is welcome on French servers, Winer adds that traditional media and politicians are in a bind:

While the politicians and reporters are getting a fumbling on-the-job education in the architecture of the Internet (an NPR reporter said, hesitatingly, that it appears as if the server is now in Switzerland), the next question is where does the running stop? When does the situation reach equilibrium? What’s the best outcome for the people of the planet?

It seems to me that at the end of this chain is BitTorrent. That when WikiLeaks wants to publish the next archive, they can get their best practice from eztv.it, and have 20 people scattered around the globe at the ends of various big pipes ready to seed it. Once the distribution is underway the only way to shut it down will be to shut down the Internet itself. Politicians should be aware that these are the stakes. They either get used operating in the open, where the people they’re governing are in on everything they do, or they go totalitarian, around the globe, now.

That must be what they’re discussing behind the scenes in government. And don’t miss that this is equally threatening to media. They won’t be able to engage in spin rooms and situation rooms, appearances and perception. When we can see the real communiques, that kind of mush won’t do.

But … as I found out the other day when downloading the “all released links archived” … that is already the case. All I got was a bunch of bit-torrent pointers to download individual files from others who decided to share.

Ethan Zuckermann, quoted in Winer’s article, says the same thing.

“Dave, [the torrents are] already there – the cables themselves are being distributed as a torrent. What’s so crazy about all this is that the ‘illegal content’ everyone claims to be worried about hosting is basically just a promotional page – the sensitive stuff is out there in torrentspace and virtually impossible to stop from being distributed.”

All we need to get the information (and help distribute it further) is a bit torrent client, a program that allows any personal computer to talk with others who have a certain file and at the same time to re-distribute it to those who also want the data. uTorrent seems to work well, according to an article – Wikileaks Cablegate File (how to) on Xenophilia. My personal preference is Transmission, a Mac specific bit torrent client.

For a discussion of how the files are spreading on the bit torrent network world wide, see the article

Wikileaks on Pirate Bay: The Facts & Figures

So could it be – with data being shared by the users themselves – that it is effectively too late to close the door, that the genie is out of the bottle and can’t be stuffed back in?

This may very well be the case.

Short of an activation of the [U.S. presidential] “kill switch” I don’t see anything that can stop the distribution of documents once they have been leaked. And then – the kill switch, once activated, might turn out to be doing more damage to the nation that is clamping down, than to everyone else’s communications.