Why can’t they plug the WikiLeaks?

Is this the end for WikiLeaks?

Extreme Right-wingers in America, such as Sarah Palin, have long been calling for him to be prosecuted for espionage but Assange is merely a figurehead. The 39-year-old calls himself WikiLeaks' founder but as The Nation magazine pointed out: "This is not a one-man operation. It is a network of thousands motivated by a shared culture. With or without Assange, it is not going away."

Why don't they raid the WikiLeaks HQ?

WikiLeaks doesn't exist in a physical sense. There is no headquarters with a team of staff - it's run and funded by volunteers who operate in cyberspace.

But hasn't America banned it already?

No. Congressman Joe Lieberman managed to get Amazon to stop hosting WikiLeaks - which sounds tough but in reality is meaningless.

So, Americans can still read WikiLeaks?

Like many internet sites, Wikileaks has a number of domain names registered in different countries, which allows it to set up mirror sites. Its central server is based in Sweden because it is illegal for the authorities there to make enquiries about the source of stories. Whenever changes are made to the main site these are automatically reproduced on all of its mirror sites - of which there are 335 in countries such as Germany, Poland and Switzerland - keeping WikiLeaks up to date no matter where in the world you are accessing it from.

What if you can't access a mirror site?

WikiLeaks has also distributed its unique IP address, http://213.251.145.96, via social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter so people can access the site without having to use a search engine. "WikiLeaks doesn't need the sanction of a country domain name," says Mike Butcher, editor of TechCrunch, a news blog. "Eventually we may just refer to WikiLeaks by its number, as we do 118 118."

So you're saying it's impossible to police the internet?

Butcher notes that the internet was set up to withstand nuclear war. "The music industry has spent 10 years trying to stop music piracy and the best brains in the CIA have tried to trace traffic between senior al Qaeda operatives - they've all failed. The US government can't control the internet."

What if someone assassinates Assange?

He is one step ahead. He has distributed 100,000 encrypted files and vowed that if anything happens to him or WikiLeaks, a cyber key to unlock the files will be released.