LONDON - Skirmishes raged across cyberspace between WikiLeaks supporters and the companies they accuse of trying to stifle the group, with websites on both sides of the battle line taken out of service or choked off by attacks.
The U.N.'s top human-rights official raised the alarm Thursday over officials' and corporations' moves to cut off WikiLeaks' funding and starve it of server space - something she described as "potentially violating WikiLeaks' right to freedom of expression."
Navi Pillay also expressed surprise at the scale of the online attacks that have targeted major American financial players - in some cases denying access to their websites for hours at a time.
"It's truly what media would call a cyber-war. It's just astonishing what is happening," Pillay told reporters in Geneva.
In the Netherlands, a 16-year-old boy suspected of being involved in digital attacks by WikiLeaks supporters was arrested.
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WikiLeaks has been under intense pressure since it began publishing 250,000 secret U.S. diplomatic cables, with attacks on its websites and threats against its founder, Julian Assange, now in a British jail fighting extradition to Sweden on sex-crime allegations.
U.S. officials say Wiki-Leaks' actions have thrown diplomacy into disarray, caused countries to curtail dealings with America and, in the case of an earlier release of classified military documents, put the lives of informants at risk.
While U.S. allies have also criticized WikiLeaks, some world leaders have questioned the arrest of Assange.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, questioning the reliability of leaked U.S. cables referring to his nation as undemocratic and corrupt, said the fact that Assange is in custody shows the West has its own problems with democracy.
Many U.S.-based Internet companies have cut their ties to WikiLeaks, including MasterCard Inc., Visa Inc., Amazon.com, PayPal Inc. and EveryDNS. Those moves have hurt WikiLeaks' ability to accept donations and support publishing efforts - and touched off a bout of Web-based warfare.
Retaliatory attacks - which WikiLeaks says it does not sanction - have been claimed by a loose-knit group of "hacktivists," who gather under the handle "Anonymous."
They are using a modified version of software generally used to conduct "stress testing" on websites, according to Paul Mutton, an analyst with the London-based company Netcraft, which tracks the attacks.
Mutton said the number of computers spewing spam had jumped from 400 to 2,000 on Wednesday - relatively small numbers, he said, but still apparently enough to overwhelm MasterCard and Visa.
"I've been surprised at how effective its been," he said. "You don't need huge numbers of people to carry out an attack like that."
The surprise was shared by Internet activist Gregg Housh, who is involved with Anonymous. "I was surprised Visa and MasterCard went down," he told The Associated Press.
Housh said the number of computers at Anonymous' disposal was rising rapidly, now about 3,000 strong. But he also said supporters were running out of anti-WikiLeaks targets.
