Early this morning, the WikiLeaks Twitter feed reposted a tweet from EFF cofounder John Perry Barlow. "The first serious infowar is now engaged," Barlow wrote. "The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops."

Barlow is no stranger to theatrical overstatement; this, after all, is the guy who in 1996 penned "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" that opened with the lines: "Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather."

Barlow was wrong about sovereignty. Despite its name, "cyberspace" runs on physical infrastructure that sits in various governmental jurisdictions, and when sites like Wikileaks start irritating those governments, sovereignty is quite powerfully brought to bear.

Still, his recent tweet is accurate. There's a war on for WikiLeaks, and it's being fought all over the world.

Whack that mole

Senator Joe Lieberman's staff called Amazon yesterday and asked the company to look into the fact that WikiLeaks had moved some of its operations to Amazon's cloud. Hours later, Amazon booted the site from its servers. Wikileaks.org retreated to its Swedish host, Bahnhof.

But late last night, the other shoe dropped: the WikiLeaks DNS provider EveryDNS.net also booted the site, which remains inaccessible. In a note on its site, EveryDNS explains what happened.

"The services were terminated for violation of the provision which states that 'Member shall not interfere with another Member's use and enjoyment of the Service or another entity's use and enjoyment of similar services.' The interference at issue arises from the fact that wikileaks.org has become the target of multiple distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks. These attacks have, and future attacks would, threaten the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure, which enables access to almost 500,000 other websites."

WikiLeaks was notified by e-mail and Twitter that it had 24 hours to find a new DNS provider; those 24 hours ran out on December 2 at 10pm EST.

The site switched to a Swiss domain, wikileaks.ch, which is currently registered to the Swiss Pirate Party (Piratenpartei Schweiz). The main servers, however, appear to be currently located in France—and the French government isn't happy.

According to Reuters, French Industry Minister Eric Besson has sent a letter to his colleagues, asking them to "indicate to me as soon as possible what action can be taken to ensure that this Internet site is no longer hosted in France. This situation is not acceptable. France cannot host an Internet site that violates the secrecy of diplomatic relations and endangers people." (French text here.)

English Internet research and security firm Netcraft, which has been following the Wikileaks hosting saga, notes that traffic to wikileaks.ch currently goes to Sweden, where it is redirected to the French servers. Should those be taken down, however, "WikiLeaks can make wikileaks.ch redirect to a different IP address at the drop of a hat. Even if the Swedish hosting location (where the redirection takes place) is taken down, the DNS for wikileaks.ch has a TTL of only 10 minutes, allowing the domain to be pointed elsewhere promptly, should WikiLeaks have alternative hosting prepared."

Oddly, the whois record for wikileaks.ch shows that it continued to use EveryDNS.net as its DNS provider even after the company stopped supporting Wikileaks.org. Only minutes ago, EveryDNS updated its public statement to say that "the secondary DNS hosted domains, including wikileaks.ch, were disabled" today.

Calling it a "difficult issue to deal with," EveryDNS says "it is following established policies so as not to put any one EveryDNS.net user’s interests ahead of any others." But "regardless of what people say about the actions of EveryDNS.net, we know this much is true—we believe in our New Hampshire state motto, Live Free or Die."

This morning, the WikiLeaks Twitter feed appears to put some of the blame for this situation directly on the US government, saying, "Utterly surreal: Pravda justifiably criticising US for trying to stifle a free press. How times change."

Story update: Where's Waldo image credit updated to Melanie Coles.

Listing image by Melanie Coles