Wikileaks WASHINGTON: WikiLeaks came under intense pressure Tuesday after its mass dump of sensitive US documents, with China demanding action, the website facing cyber attack and a defector announcing a rival site.Two days after the whistle-blower website began releasing a trove of files, signs emerged that more damaging disclosures were on the way with officials saying WikiLeaks had thousands of cables on the sensitive US role in Taiwan.
China warned against "any disturbance to China-US relations" after leaked cables indicated that Beijing was frustrated with longtime ally North Korea and may accept its collapse and absorption by the US-backed South.
"We hope the US side will properly handle relevant issues," Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei said of the documents, which were released amid high tensions on the Korean peninsula.
WikiLeaks, led by shadowy Australian hacker Julian Assange, said it obtained 250,000 US cables -- in which US diplomats relay conversations and observations that are usually withheld from public view for decades.
Allegations from the 250,000 cables include that Iran's supreme leader has cancer and will die "within months" and that Saudi King Abdullah urged the US to attack Iran and "cut off the head of the snake" over its nuclear program.
WikiLeaks said Tuesday that it had come under cyber attack for the second time this week, although the website could be accessed from Washington mid-Tuesday.
In a Twitter message, WikiLeaks said it was under a DDoS, or distributed denial of service, attack in which legions of "zombie" computers, normally infected with viruses, are commanded to simultaneously visit a website.
WikiLeaks' disclosures have enraged the US government, which says that the cables' release undermines the ability to converse with foreign officials and could put US personnel and their sources at risk.
NATO, the trans-Atlantic alliance, joined the United States on Tuesday, with spokeswoman Oana Lungescu saying "we strongly condemn the leaking of confidential documents."
"It is illegal, irresponsible and dangerous, regardless of whether the leaked material is diplomatic or military," she said.
Assange has also faced criticism within the ragtag WikiLeaks ranks for what some associates call a top-down style. Assange is under an international arrest warrant for questioning about rape allegations in Sweden.
In Iceland, former WikiLeaks member 25-year-old student Herbert Snorrason said that he and others planned to create an alternative whistle-blower site.
"We broke from WikiLeaks because a few ex-WikiLeaks members had been very unhappy with the way Assange was conducting things," Snorrason told AFP in Reykjavik.
Nonetheless, Snorrason insisted the project was "not a personal attack." He said the new project will be a "a safe haven where people can share information anonymously," unlike WikiLeaks which dumps documents onto its site.
WikiLeaks and US authorities have not explained how the massive security breach transpired. But suspicion has fallen on Bradley Manning, a disgruntled 23-year-old ex-Army intelligence officer.
Manning was arrested in May after WikiLeaks released a video showing a 2007 US Apache helicopter strike in Baghdad that killed civilian reporters.
Some of the most damaging disclosures may be still to come. WikiLeaks said it obtained 3,456 cables from the American Institute in Taiwan, the de facto embassy in Taipei since the United States switched recognition to Beijing in 1979.
The US relationship with Taiwan is highly sensitive. US administrations tell Beijing that they provide the island with weapons for self-defense in line with US law but do not support Taiwan's independence.
Taiwanese legislator Lin Yu-fang warned that he feared the documents, if released, "may cause misunderstanding and even negative impacts on bilateral ties."
WikiLeaks, however, won praise from Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez, even though he was described as "crazy" by a French diplomat in a cable. Ecuador even offered Assange sanctuary.
But another US nemesis, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, denounced WikiLeaks as "worthless" and "mischief."
Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu poked fun at a leaked memo's description of him as "exceptionally dangerous," saying that he sees only a smiling face in the mirror.
Officials in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain said the memos reflected "an American point of view" of conversations. The cables quoted leaders of Gulf Arab monarchies as being fixated on a threat from Iran.
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