Mirror Mirror on the Wall, Mirror Wikileaks and it Will Not Fall.

Or something like that.

On Sunday, Wikileaks began releasing classified documents from Guantanamo Bay Prison in Cuba:

These memoranda, which contain [the Joint Task Force at Guantánamo Bay] recommendations about whether the prisoners in question should continue to be held, or should be released (transferred to their home governments, or to other governments) contain a wealth of important and previously undisclosed information, including health assessments, for example, and, in the cases of the majority of the 171 prisoners who are still held, photos (mostly for the first time ever).

When Wikileaks last dumped a trove of sensitive documents, they were hit hard by a Distributed Denial of Service Attack that essentially took the site offline.

Half a year later, Wikileaks and its volunteers are now using the elasticity and redundancy of the Web to prevent DDoS attacks from preventing access to information again. How they’re doing it is through the use of mirrors.

What does that mean?

A mirror is simply a server that duplicates the data that is found on other servers. You can think of it as a type of file synchronization.

Commercial companies such as Amazon do this with their Elastic Cloud computing. The logistics are different (Amazon is duplicating data instances across their own servers) but the concept is the same: have multiple copies of information available across the globe so that if anything happens at one node, another can serve the data.

The video above visualizes the Wikileaks global mirror ecosystem via Google Earth. We recommend viewing it full screen so you can see the details of what’s being shown.

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