WikiLeaks is an international non-profit organisation that publishes submissions of private,
secret, and classified media from anonymous news sources, news leaks, and whistleblowers. Its
website, launched in 2006 under The Sunshine Press[3] organisation,[4] claimed a database of
more than 1.2 million documents within a year of its launch.[5] Julian Assange, an Australian
Internet activist, is generally described as its founder, editor-in-chief and director.[6]
The group has released a number of significant documents which have become front-page news
items. Early releases included documentation of equipment expenditures and holdings in the
Afghanistan war and corruption in Kenya.[7] In April 2010, WikiLeaks published gunsight
footage from the 12 July 2007 Baghdad airstrike in which Iraqi journalists were among those
killed by an Apache helicopter, as the Collateral Murder video. In July of the same year,
WikiLeaks released Afghan War Diary, a compilation of more than 76,900 documents about the
War in Afghanistan not previously available to the public.[8] In October 2010, the group released
a package of almost 400,000 documents called the Iraq War Logs in coordination with major
commercial media organisations. This allowed every death in Iraq, and across the border in Iran,
to be mapped.[9] In April 2011, WikiLeaks began publishing 779 secret files relating to prisoners
detained in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.[10]
In November 2010, WikiLeaks collaborated with major global media organisations to release
U.S. State department diplomatic cables in redacted format. The release was nicknamed
CableGate. On 1 September 2011, it became public that an encrypted version of WikiLeaks'
huge archive of unredacted U.S. State Department cables had been available via Bittorrent for
months, and that the decryption key (similar to a password) was available to those who knew
where to look. WikiLeaks blamed the breach on its former partner, The Guardian, and that
newspaper's journalist David Leigh, who revealed the key in a book published in February
2011;[11] The Guardian argued that WikiLeaks was to blame since they gave the impression that
the decryption key was temporal (something not possible for a file decryption key).[12] Der
Spiegel reported a more complex story [13] involving errors on both sides. Widely expressed fears
that the CableGate release could endanger innocent lives have proved unfounded.
Founding
The wikileaks.org domain name was registered on 4 October 2006.[2] The website was unveiled,
and published its first document, in December 2006.[16][17] WikiLeaks has been predominantly
represented in public since January 2007 by Julian Assange, who is now generally recognised as
the "founder of WikiLeaks".[18] According to Wired magazine, a volunteer said that Assange
described himself in a private conversation as "the heart and soul of this organisation, its
founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organizer, financier, and all the rest".[19]
WikiLeaks relies heavily on volunteers and previously described its founders as a mix of Chinese
dissidents, journalists, mathematicians, and start-up company technologists from the United
States, Taiwan, Europe, Australia, and South Africa.[20] The site was originally launched as a
user-editable wiki (hence its name), but has progressively moved towards a more traditional
publication model and no longer accepts either user comments or edits. As of June 2009, the site
had over 1,200 registered volunteers[20] and listed an advisory board comprising Assange and
eight other people.[21]
Despite using the name "WikiLeaks", the website is no longer wiki-based as of May 2010.[22]
Also, despite some popular confusion[23] due to both having the term "wiki" in their names,
WikiLeaks and Wikipedia have no affiliation with each other ("wiki" is not a brand name);[24][25]
Wikia, a for-profit corporation loosely affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation, did however
purchase several WikiLeaks-related domain names (including wikileaks.com and wikileaks.net)
as a "protective brand measure" in 2007.[26]
[edit] Purpose
The WikiLeaks website says their goal is "to bring important news and information to the
public... One of our most important activities is to publish original source material alongside our
news stories so readers and historians alike can see evidence of the truth."
Another of the organisation's goals is to ensure that whistleblowers and journalists are not jailed
for emailing sensitive or classified documents. The online "drop box" (currently not functioning)
was designed to "provide an innovative, secure and anonymous way for sources to leak
information to our journalists."
In an interview on The Colbert Report, Assange discussed the limit to the freedom of speech,
saying, "[it is] not an ultimate freedom, however free speech is what regulates government and
regulates law. That is why in the US Constitution the Bill of Rights says that Congress is to make
no such law abridging the freedom of the press. It is to take the rights of the press outside the
rights of the law because those rights are superior to the law because in fact they create the law.
Every constitution, every bit of legislation is derived from the flow of information. Similarly
every government is elected as a result of people understanding things".[27]
The project has drawn comparisons to Daniel Ellsberg's leaking of the Pentagon Papers in
1971.[28] In the United States, the leaking of some documents may be legally protected. The U.S.
Supreme Court has ruled that the Constitution guarantees anonymity, at least in the area of
political discourse.[28] Author and journalist Whitley Strieber has spoken about the benefits of the
WikiLeaks project, noting that "Leaking a government document can mean jail, but jail
sentences for this can be fairly short. However, there are many places where it means long
incarceration or even death, such as China and parts of Africa and the Middle East."[29]