WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks is an international non-profit organisation that publishes submissions of private, secret, and classified media from
anonymous news sources and news leaks. Its website, launched in 2006 under The Sunshine Press organisation, [3] claimed a
database of more than 1.2 million documents within a year of its launch. [6] WikiLeaks describes 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.[3] Julian Assange, an AustralianInternet activist, is generally described as its director.[7] The site was
originally launched as a user-editable wiki, but has progressively moved towards a more traditional publication model and no
longer accepts either user comments or edits.
In April 2010, WikiLeaks posted video from a 2007 incident in which Iraqi civilians and journalists were killed by US forces, on
a website called Collateral Murder. In July of the same year, WikiLeaks released Afghan War Diary, a compilation of more than
76,900 documents about theWar in Afghanistan not previously available for public review. [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 November 2010, WikiLeaks began
releasing U.S. State department diplomatic cables.
WikiLeaks has received praise as well as criticism. The organisation has won a number of awards, including The
Economist's New Media Award in 2008[10] and Amnesty International's UK Media Award in 2009.[11][12] In 2010, the New York
City Daily News listed WikiLeaks first among websites "that could totally change the news", [13] and Julian Assange was named
the Readers' Choice for TIME's Person of the Year in 2010.[14] The UK Information Commissionerhas stated that "WikiLeaks is
part of the phenomenon of the online, empowered citizen". [15] In its first days, an internet petition calling for the cessation of
extra-judicial intimidation of WikiLeaks attracted over six hundred thousand signatures. [16] Supporters of WikiLeaks in the media
and academia have commended it for exposing state and corporate secrets, increasing transparency, supporting freedom of the
press, and enhancing democratic discourse while challenging powerful institutions.
At the same time, several U.S. government officials have criticised WikiLeaks for exposing classified information, harming
national security, and compromising international diplomacy.[24][25][26][27][28] Several human rights organisations requested with
respect to earlier document releases that WikiLeaks adequately redact the names of civilians working with international forces, in
order to prevent repercussions.[29] Some journalists have likewise criticised a perceived lack of editorial discretion when releasing
thousands of documents at once and without sufficient analysis.[30] In response to some of the negative reaction, the UN High
Commissioner for Human Rights has expressed her concern over the "cyber war" against WikiLeaks, [31] and in a joint statement
with the Organization of American States the UN Special Rapporteur has called on states and other actors to keep international
legal principles in mind.[32]
History

Founding
The wikileaks.org domain name was registered on 4 October 2006. [4] The website was unveiled, and published its first document
in December 2006.[33][34] The site claims to have been "founded by Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and start-up
company technologists, from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa".[3]
The creators of WikiLeaks have not been formally identified.[35] It has been represented in public since January 2007 by Julian
Assange and others. Assange describes himself as a member of WikiLeaks' advisory board. [36] News reports in The
Australian have called Assange the "founder of WikiLeaks".[37] 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, organiser, financier, and all the rest".[38] As of June 2009, the site had over 1,200 registered volunteers[3] and listed
an advisory board comprising Assange and eight other people.[39]
Purpose
WikiLeaks states that its "primary interest is in exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa
and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to people of all regions who wish to reveal unethical behaviour in
their governments and corporations."[3][36]
In January 2007, the website stated that it had over 1.2 million leaked documents that it was preparing to publish.[40] An article
in The New Yorker said:
One of the WikiLeaks activists owned a server that was being used as a node for the Tor network. Millions of secret
transmissions passed through it. The activist noticed that hackers from China were using the network to gather foreign
governments’ information, and began to record this traffic. Only a small fraction has ever been posted on WikiLeaks, but the
initial tranche served as the site’s foundation, and Assange was able to say, "[w]e have received over one million documents from
thirteen countries."[34][41]
Administration
According to a January 2010 interview, the WikiLeaks team then consisted of five people working full-time and about 800
people who worked occasionally, none of whom were compensated. [50] WikiLeaks has no official headquarters. The expenses per
year are about €200,000, mainly for servers and bureaucracy, but would reach €600,000 if work currently done by volunteers
were paid for.[50] WikiLeaks does not pay for lawyers, as hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal support have been donated by
media organisations such as the Associated Press,Los Angeles Times, and the National Newspaper Publishers Association.[50] Its
only revenue stream is donations, but WikiLeaks has planned to add an auction model to sell early access to documents.
[50]
 The Wau Holland Foundation helps to process donations to WikiLeaks. In July 2010, the Foundation stated that WikiLeaks
was receiving no money for personnel costs, only for hardware, travelling and bandwidth.[71] An article in TechEye wrote:
Financing
WikiLeaks is a non-profit organisation, and it is dependent on public donations. Its main financing methods include
conventional bank transfers and online payment systems. Wau Holland Foundation, one of the WikiLeaks' main funding
channels, stated that they received more than €900,000 (US$1.2 million) in public donations between October 2009 and
December 2010, out of which €370,000 has been passed on to WikiLeaks. Hendrik Fulda, vice president of the Wau Holland
Foundation, mentioned that the Foundation had been receiving twice as many donations through PayPal as through normal banks,
before PayPal's decision to suspend WikiLeaks' account. He also noted that every new WikiLeaks publication brought "a wave of
support", and that donations were strongest in the weeks after WikiLeaks started publishing leaked diplomatic cables.[98][99]
Verification of submissions
WikiLeaks states that it has never released a misattributed document. Documents are assessed before release. In response to
concerns about the possibility of misleading or fraudulent leaks, WikiLeaks has stated that misleading leaks "are already well-
placed in the mainstream media. WikiLeaks is of no additional assistance. [110] The FAQ states that: "The simplest and most
effective countermeasure is a worldwide community of informed users and editors who can scrutinise and discuss leaked
documents."[111]
Legal status
Potential criminal prosecution
The U.S. Justice Department opened a criminal probe of WikiLeaks and founder Julian Assange shortly after the leak of
diplomatic cablesbegan.[117][118] Attorney General Eric Holder affirmed the probe was  “not sabre-rattling”, but was "an active,
ongoing criminal investigation."[118]  In Australia, the government and the Australian Federal Police have not stated what
Australian laws may have been broken by WikiLeaks, butJulia Gillard has stated that the foundation of WikiLeaks and the
stealing of classified documents from the US administration is illegal in foreign countries. [125]  On threats by various governments
toward Assange, legal expert Ben Saul argues that founder Julian Assange is the target of a global smear campaign to demonise
him as a criminal or as a terrorist, without any legal basis.[128] The Center for Constitutional Rights has issued a statement
highlighting its alarm at the "multiple examples of legal overreach and irregularities" in his arrest.[129]
Leaks

2006–08
WikiLeaks posted its first document in December 2006, a decision to assassinate government officials signed by Sheikh Hassan
Dahir Aweys."[34] In August 2007, The Guardian published a story about corruption by the family of the former Kenyan
leader Daniel arap Moibased on information provided via WikiLeaks. [133] In November 2007, a March 2003 copy of Standard
Operating Procedures for Camp Deltadetailing the protocol of the U.S. Army at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp was
released.[134]  WikiLeaks published what they referred to as "the collected secret 'bibles' of Scientology," and three days later
received letters threatening to sue them for breach of copyright.[139] In September 2008, during the 2008 United States presidential
election campaigns, the contents of a Yahoo account belonging to Sarah Palin (the running mate of Republican presidential
nominee John McCain) were posted on WikiLeaks after being hacked into by members of Anonymous.[140] In November 2008,
the membership list of the far-right British National Party was posted to WikiLeaks, after briefly appearing on a blog.[141] A year
later, on October 2009, another list of BNP members was leaked.[142]
2009
In January 2009, WikiLeaks released 86 telephone intercept recordings of Peruvian politicians and businessmen involved in
the 2008 Peru oil scandal.[143] In February, WikiLeaks released 6,780 Congressional Research Service reports[144] followed in
March, by a list of contributors to the Norm Coleman senatorial campaign[145][146] and a set of documents belonging to Barclays
Bank that had been ordered removed from the website of The Guardian.[147] In July, they released a report relating to a serious
nuclear accident that had occurred at the Iranian Natanz nuclear facility in 2009.[148] Later media reports have suggested that the
accident was related to the Stuxnet computer worm.[149][150] In September, internal documents from Kaupthing Bank were leaked,
from shortly before the collapse of Iceland's banking sector, which led to the 2008–2010 Icelandic financial crisis. The document
shows that suspiciously large sums of money were loaned to various owners of the bank, and large debts written off. [151] In
October, Joint Services Protocol 440, a British document advising the security services on how to avoid documents being leaked
was published by WikiLeaks.[152] Later that month, they announced that a super-injunction was being used by the commodities
company, Trafigura to gag The Guardian newspaper from reporting on a leaked internal document regarding a toxic dumping
incident in the Ivory Coast.[153][154] In November, they hosted copies of e-mail correspondence between climate scientists, although
they were not originally leaked to WikiLeaks. [155][156] They also released 570,000 intercepts of pager messages sent on the day of
the 11 September attacks.[157] During 2008 and 2009, WikiLeaks published the alleged lists of forbidden or illegal web addresses
for Australia, Denmark and Thailand. These were originally created to prevent access to child pornography and terrorism, but the
leaks revealed that other sites covering unrelated subjects were also listed.[158][159][160]
2010
In March 2010, WikiLeaks released a secret 32-page U.S. Department of Defense Counterintelligence Analysis Report written in
March 2008 discussing the leaking of material by WikiLeaks and how it could be deterred. [161][162] In April, a classified video of
the 12 July 2007 Baghdad airstrike was released, showing two Reuters employees being fired at, after the pilots mistakenly
thought the men were carrying weapons, which were in fact cameras. [163] In the week following the release, "wikileaks" was the
search term with the most significant growth worldwide in the last seven days as measured by Google Insights.[164] In June 2010,
A 22-year-old US Army intelligence analyst, PFC (formerly SPC)Bradley Manning, was arrested after alleged chat logs were
turned in to the authorities by former hacker Adrian Lamo, in whom he had confided. Manning reportedly told Lamo he had
leaked the "Collateral Murder" video, in addition to a video of the Granai airstrike and around 260,000 diplomatic cables, to
WikiLeaks.[165] In July, WikiLeaks released 92,000 documents related to the war in Afghanistan between 2004 and the end of
2009 to The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel. The documents detail individual incidents including friendly
fireand civilian casualties.[166] At the end of July, a 1.4 GB "insurance file" was added to the Afghan War Diary page, whose
decryption details would be released if WikiLeaks or Assange were harmed. [130] About 15,000 of the 92,000 documents have not
yet been released on WikiLeaks, as the group is currently reviewing the documents to remove some of the sources of the
information. WikiLeaks asked the Pentagon and human-rights groups to help remove names from the documents to reduce the
potential harm caused by their release, but did not receive assistance. [167] Following the Love Parade stampede in Duisburg,
Germany on 24 July 2010, a local published internal documents of the city administration regarding the planning of Love Parade.
The city government reacted by acquiring a court order on 16 August forcing the removal of the documents from the site on
which it was hosted.[168] On 20 August WikiLeaks released a publication titledLoveparade 2010 Duisburg planning documents,
2007–2010, which comprised 43 internal documents regarding the Love Parade 2010. [169][170] Following on from the leak of
information from the Afghan War, in October 2010, around 400,000 documents relating to the Iraq War were released in
October. The BBC quoted The Pentagon referring to the Iraq War Logs as "the largest leak of classified documents in its history."
Media coverage of the leaked documents focused on claims that the U.S. government had ignored reports of torture by the Iraqi
authorities during the period after the 2003 war.[171]
Diplomatic cables release
On 28 November 2010, WikiLeaks and five major newspapers from Spain (El País), France (Le Monde), Germany (Der Spiegel),
the United Kingdom (The Guardian), and the United States (The New York Times) started to simultaneously publish the first 220
of 251,287 leaked confidential—but not top secret—diplomatic cables from 274 US embassies around the world, dated from 28
December 1966 to 28 February 2010.[172][173] WikiLeaks plans to release the entirety of the cables in phases over several months.
[173]

The contents of the diplomatic cables include numerous unguarded comments and revelations regarding: critiques and praises
about the host countries of various US embassies; political manoeuvring regarding climate change; discussion and resolutions
towards ending ongoing tension in the Middle East; efforts and resistance towards nuclear disarmament; actions in the War on
Terror; assessments of other threats around the world; dealings between various countries;
US intelligence and counterintelligence efforts; and other diplomatic actions. Reactions to the United States diplomatic cables
leak include stark criticism, anticipation, commendation, and quiescence. Consequent reactions to the US government include
sympathy, bewilderment and dismay. On 14 December 2010 the United States Department of Justice issued asubpoena directing
Twitter to provide information for accounts registered to or associated with WikiLeaks. [174] Twitter decided to notify its users.
[175]
 The overthrow of the presidency in Tunisia has been attributed in part to reaction against the corruption revealed by leaked
cables.[176][177][178]
Backlash and pressure

Governments
Germany
The home of Theodor Reppe, registrant of the German WikiLeaks domain name, wikileaks.de, was raided on 24 March 2009
after WikiLeaks released the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) censorship blacklist.[192] The site was not
affected.[193][194]
People's Republic of China
The WikiLeaks website claims that the government of the People's Republic of China has attempted to block all traffic to web
sites with "wikileaks" in the URL since 2007, but that this can be bypassed through encrypted connections or by using one of
WikiLeaks' many covert URLs.[195]
Australia
On 16 March 2009, the Australian Communications and Media Authority added WikiLeaks to their proposed blacklist of sites
that will be blocked for all Australians if the mandatory internet filtering censorship scheme is implemented as planned.[196]
[197]
 The blacklisting was removed 30 November 2010.[198]
Thailand
The Centre for the Resolution of the Emergency Situation (CRES) is currently censoring the website WikiLeaks in
Thailand[199] and more than 40,000 other webpages[200] because of the emergency decree in Thailand imposed as a result of
political instabilities (Emergency decree declared beginning of April 2010[201]).
United States
Access to WikiLeaks is currently blocked in the United States Library of Congress.[202] On 3 December 2010 the White House
Office of Management and Budget sent a memo forbidding all unauthorised federal government employees and contractors from
accessing classified documents publicly available on WikiLeaks and other websites. [203] The U.S. Army, the Federal Bureau of
Investigation and the Justice Department are considering criminally prosecuting WikiLeaks and Assange "on grounds they
encouraged the theft of government property",[204] although former prosecutors say doing so would be difficult.[119] According to a
report on the Daily Beast website, the Obama administration asked Britain, Germany and Australia among others to also consider
bringing criminal charges against Assange for the Afghan war leaks and to help limit Assange's travels across international
borders.[205] Columbia University students have been warned by their Office of Career Services that the U.S. State Department
had contacted the office in an email saying that the diplomatic cables which were released by WikiLeaks were "still considered
classified." and that "online discourse about the documents 'would call into question your ability to deal with confidential
information.'"[206]
All U.S. federal government staff have been blocked from viewing WikiLeaks.[207] Some Department of Homeland Security staff
say the ban on accessing WikiLeaks on government computers and other government devices is hampering their work; "More
damage will be done by keeping the federal workforce largely in the dark about what other interested parties worldwide are going
to be reading and analysing." One official says that the ban apparently covers personal computers also.[208]
Reception

Support
In July 2010 Veterans for Peace president Mike Ferner editorialised on the group's website "neither Wikileaks nor the soldier or
soldiers who divulged the documents should be prosecuted for revealing this information. We should give them a medal."[252]
Documentary filmmaker John Pilger wrote an August 2010 editorial in the Australian publication Green Lefttitled "Wikileaks
must be defended." In it, Pilger said WikiLeaks represented the interests of "public accountability" and a new form of journalism
at odds with "the dominant section ... devoted merely to taking down what cynical and malign power tells it."[253]
Daniel Ellsberg, the man who released the Pentagon Papers in 1971, has been a frequent defender of WikiLeaks. Following the
November 2010 release of U.S. diplomatic cables, Ellsberg rejected criticism that the site was endangering the lives of U.S.
military personnel and intelligence assets stating "not one single soldier or informant has been in danger from any of the
WikiLeaks releases. That risk has been largely overblown." [250] Ellsberg went on to note that government claims to the contrary
were "a script that they roll out every time there's a leak of any sort."[251] Following the US diplomatic cable release, which a
number of media reports sought to differentiate from Ellsberg's whistleblowing,[254] Ellsberg claimed, "EVERY attack now made
on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time."[255]
Praise by governments
Brazil: President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva expressed his "solidarity" with Julian Assange following Assange's 2010 arrest in the
United Kingdom. Ecuador: In late November 2010 a representative of the government of Ecuador made what was, apparently, an
unsolicited public offer to Julian Assange, Russia: In December 2010 the office of Russian president Dmitry Medvedev issued a
statement calling on non-governmental organisations to consider "nominating [Julian] Assange as a Nobel Prize
laureate. Venezuela: Hugo Chávez, president of Venezuela, stated his support for WikiLeaks following the release of US
diplomatic cables in November 2010 that showed the United States had tried to rally support from regional governments to
isolate Venezuela. "I have to congratulate the people of WikiLeaks for their bravery and courage. United Nations: In December
2010 United Nations Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Opinion and Expression Frank LaRue stated he agreed with the idea that
Julian Assange was a "martyr for free speech." LaRue went on to say Assange or other WikiLeaks staff should not face legal
accountability for any information they disseminated, noting .
Awards
In 2008, Index on Censorship presented WikiLeaks with their inaugural Economist New Media Award.[292]
In 2009, Amnesty International awarded WikiLeaks their Media Award for exposing "extra judicial killings and disappearances"
in Kenya.[293]
Criticism
Criticism by governments
Most of the governments and organisations whose files have been leaked by WikiLeaks have been critical of the organisation.

Australia: On 2 December 2010 Prime Minister Julia Gillard made a statement that she 'absolutely condemns' WikiLeaks'
actions and that the release of information on the site was 'grossly irresponsible' and 'illegal.' France: The French Industry
Minister Éric Besson said in a letter to the CGIET technology agency, WikiLeaks "violates the secret of diplomatic relations
and puts people protected by diplomatic secret in danger.". Iran: The President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, also
criticised WikiLeaks following the release of United States diplomatic cables. Ahmadinejad claimed that the release of
cables purporting to show concern with Iran by Arab states was a planned leak by the United States to discredit his
government, . Philippines: President Benigno Aquino III condemned WikiLeaks and leaked documents related to the
country, saying that it can lead to massive cases of miscommunication.[312]United States: Following the November 2010
release of United States diplomatic cables, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clintondenounced the group saying, "this
disclosure is not just an attack on America's foreign policy interests, it is an attack on the international community."[313]