Online attackers and international governments have so far failed in their many attempts to take down the WikiLeaks website. Every time an online support has been removed in one country, the site has reappeared elsewhere, “mirrored” hundreds of times over.
Supporters of the whistleblowing group are hoping that the same regeneration game can be played by the organisation as a whole, after its most prominent figure, Julian Assange, was refused bail over allegations of sexual misconduct in Sweden.
Mr Assange has made himself into the personal embodiment of WikiLeaks in recent months, complete with elusive whereabouts and defiant attitude to authority.
He recently told readers of the Guardian newspaper’s website that he initially wanted the organisation “to have no face”. He decided to become its “lightning rod”, however, after that initial approach “quickly led to tremendous distracting curiosity about who [we are] and random individuals claiming to represent us”.
But with only a handful of other WikiLeaks operatives standing up in the public domain, outsiders must trust Mr Assange’s word that it is a large, distributed group.
Addressing reporters after its publication of 75,000 classified reports about the Afghan war in July, Mr Assange said that WikiLeaks had a “small team of dedicated and overworked” individuals full-time, with about 800 part-time volunteers, an extended network of 10,000 people and a “loose network” of 70,000 supporters.
None has yet made good on Mr Assange’s threat that 100,000 people would dump a fresh batch of diplomatic cables if “something happens to us”.
Mark Stephens, Mr Assange’s lawyer, told reporters outside the London courtroom on Tuesday that in spite of its leader being remanded in custody, “WikiLeaks will continue”. Offers of financial support for Mr Assange from celebrity supporters Jemima Khan, John Pilger and Ken Loach, all three of whom appeared in court on Tuesday, were the “tip of the iceberg”, he said.
“This is going to go viral,” Mr Stephens said. “Many people believe Mr Assange to be innocent. Many people believe the prosecution is politically motivated.”
That support has even extended to other online hacker networks, which have struck back at companies that abandoned WikiLeaks. They have tried to crash the websites of PayPal and PostFinance, two payment processing firms that have ceased serving WikiLeaks in recent days.
In spite of this retaliation, funding mechanisms available to WikiLeaks are shrinking. On Tuesday both Visa and Mastercard said they would stop processing payments to WikiLeaks. Supporters can now only provide funds via direct bank transfers to accounts in Germany and Iceland and postal donations to a post office box in Australia.
WikiLeaks’ spokeswoman, Kristinn Hrafnsson, told an event at the Frontline Club in London that WikiLeaks relies on a large network of individuals for its financial support, with none donating more than €2,000 ($2,700).
But WikiLeaks has already had to triple its operational budget for 2010, and that rapid growth has put strains on the organisation beyond the purely financial.
In an interview with Der Spiegel in September, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who quit as spokesman for WikiLeaks earlier this year, suggested that there were technical and fundamental structural problems within the organisation.
“We grew insanely fast in recent months and we urgently need to become more professional and transparent in all areas,” he told the magazine. But, he added, “this development is being blocked internally. It is no longer clear even to me who is actually making decisions and who is answerable to them.”
Mr Hrafnsson said last week that the media had exaggerated the problems within WikiLeaks. In a recent debate at City University in London, Mr Assange said there were “other reasons” behind Mr Domscheit-Berg’s departure.
But at the same event, Mr Assange was vague about the process WikiLeaks uses to select which pieces of information to publish.
He said that every effort was taken to ensure that no information that would put anyone’s life at threat was revealed, though he admitted that WikiLeaks had limited resources and was not infallible.
No wonder, then, that he and Mr Hrafnsson have repeatedly stressed the role of the other media organisations – including the New York Times and the Guardian – which have jointly analysed, redacted and published the latest leaks.
After together releasing just 301 of the 250,000 cables WikiLeaks claims to hold, those news organisations may be able to proceed with publication of the remainder without the site’s chief lightning rod.
But whether WikiLeaks could cope with a prolonged absence of the mercurial Mr Assange is as difficult to determine as the size of the organisation itself