I think it’s interesting that WikiLeaks have been ‘late’ on actually releasing the cables directly to the public. At the time of writing only 219 cables are available out of what is supposed to be 250k+.
Sure, that could be because of the DDOS attack but it looks as though that is being aimed against the existing servers behind wikileaks.org whereas cablegate.wikileaks.org is running on a separate server. Presumably whoever is behind the DDOS attack wouldn’t have had prior knowledge about that server.
It has meant that the newspapers (who were given pre-public access to the dumps) have effectively “leaked” the information themselves as NYTimes and Guardian have started publishing the details before Wikileaks actually does the leaking.
I’m wondering if there was an agreed embargo when WikiLeaks was supposed to actually “press the button”. I further wonder if this will negatively effect the relationship between Wikileaks and the media going forward. Interestingly, Guardian which always prides itself on having data driven processes on stuff like this, has only released the metadata so far — I guess so that they are not the ones to do a complete leak before Wikileaks.