US senators praise firms dropping WikiLeaks

WASHINGTON: Two US senators on Thursday praised companies that have severed ties with WikiLeaks and are being targeted for retaliatory cyber attacks by supporters of the website.

Amid calls in the US Congress to prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, a member of the House of Representatives introduced a House version of a Senate bill that would make it easier to target the anti-secrecy website.

"Companies that are cutting off their services to WikiLeaks in the wake of its release of 250,000 stolen and classified State Department cables are doing the right thing as good corporate citizens and deserve the support of the American people," senators Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins said in a joint statement.

"The WikiLeaks data dump has jeopardized US national interests and the lives of intelligence sources around the world," said Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut, and Collins, a Republican from Maine.

"While corporate entities make decisions based on their obligations to their shareholders, sometimes full consideration of those obligations requires them to act as responsible citizens," they said.

"We offer our admiration and support to those companies exhibiting courage and patriotism as they face down intimidation from hackers sympathetic to Wikileaks' philosophy of irresponsible information dumps for the sake of damaging global relationships," they said.

Lieberman is the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, while Collins is the top-ranking Republican on the committee.

Lieberman's website came under cyber attack from WikiLeaks supporters on Wednesday and went down briefly, according to computer security firm Panda Security, a claim rejected by the senator's office.

A Lieberman spokeswoman confirmed the senator's website came under attack, but said the assault was "detected and thwarted" by Senate security services and the site never went down.

Lieberman last week welcomed Amazon's decision to no longer host WikiLeaks on its servers, and urged other companies to do the same.

"No responsible company -- whether American or foreign -- should assist WikiLeaks in its efforts to disseminate these stolen materials," he said.

Lieberman was among the supporters of a bill introduced in the Senate last week that would amend the US Espionage Act and make it illegal to publish the names of informants serving the US military and intelligence community.

Representative Peter King, a Republican from New York, introduced a House version of the Senate bill on Thursday that a King spokesman said is identical in order to ensure speedy passage.

"WikiLeaks presents a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States, and Julian Assange, an enemy of the US, should be prosecuted under the Espionage Act," King said in a statement. "This legislation will give the Attorney General additional tools to do just that."