WikiLeaks is an international new media non-profit organisation that publishes submissions of otherwise unavailable documents from anonymous news sources and news leaks. Its website, launched in 2006, is run by The Sunshine Press.[2] Within a year of its launch, the site claimed a database that had grown to more than 1.2 million documents.[6] The organisation has described itself as having been founded by Chinese dissidents, as well as journalists, mathematicians, and start-up company technologists from the United States, Taiwan, Europe, Australia, and South Africa.[2] Julian Assange, an Australian Internet activist, is generally described as its director.[7]
WikiLeaks has won a number of awards, including the 2008 Economist magazine New Media Award.[8] In June 2009, WikiLeaks and Julian Assange won Amnesty International's UK Media Award (in the category "New Media") for the 2008 publication of "Kenya: The Cry of Blood – Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances",[9] a report by the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights about police killings in Kenya.[10] In May 2010, the New York Daily News listed WikiLeaks first in a ranking of "websites that could totally change the news".[11] Russia extended its support to WikiLeaks and its founder Julian AssangeNobel Peace Prize, in the aftermath of the United States diplomatic cables leak.[12] by issuing a statement which suggested that Assange should be awarded the
In April 2010, WikiLeaks posted video from a 2007 incident in which Iraqi civilians and journalists were killed by U.S. 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 the War in Afghanistan not previously available for public review.[13] In October, the group released a package of almost 400,000 documents called the Iraq War Logs in coordination with major commercial media organisations. In November 2010, WikiLeaks began releasing U.S. State department diplomatic cables.
WikiLeaks was originally launched as a user-editable wiki site, but has progressively moved towards a more traditional publication model, and no longer accepts either user comments or edits. The site is available on multiple servers and different domain names following a number of denial-of-service attacks and its severance from different Domain Name System (DNS) providers.[14][15]
History
The wikileaks.org domain name was registered on 4 October 2006.[3] The website was unveiled, and published its first document in December 2006.[16][17] 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".[2]The creators of WikiLeaks have not been formally identified.[18] It has been represented in public since January 2007 by Julian Assange and others. Assange describes himself as a member of WikiLeaks' advisory board.[19] News reports in The Australian have called Assange the "founder of WikiLeaks".[20] 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".[21] As of June 2009, the site had over 1,200 registered volunteers[2] and listed an advisory board comprising Assange, Phillip Adams, Wang Dan, C. J. Hinke, Ben Laurie, Tashi Namgyal Khamsitsang, Xiao Qiang, Chico Whitaker and Wang Youcai.[22] Despite appearing on the list, when contacted by Mother Jones magazine in 2010, Khamsitsang said that while he received an e-mail from WikiLeaks, he had never agreed to be an advisor.[23][update]
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."[2][24]
In January 2007, the website stated that it had over 1.2 million leaked documents that it was preparing to publish.[25] 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."[26][27]Assange responded to the suggestion that eavesdropping on Chinese hackers played a crucial part in the early days of WikiLeaks by saying "the imputation is incorrect. The facts concern a 2006 investigation into Chinese espionage one of our contacts were involved in. Somewhere between none and handful of those documents were ever released on WikiLeaks. Non-government targets of the Chinese espionage, such as Tibetan associations were informed (by us)".[28] The group has subsequently released a number of other significant documents which have become front-page news items, ranging from documentation of equipment expenditures and holdings in the Afghanistan war to corruption in Kenya.[29]
The organisation's stated goal is to ensure that whistleblowers and journalists are not jailed for emailing sensitive or classified documents, as happened to Chinese journalist Shi Tao, who was sentenced to 10 years in 2005 after publicising an email from Chinese officials about the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.[30]
The project has drawn comparisons to Daniel Ellsberg's leaking of the Pentagon Papers in 1971.[31] 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.[31] 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."[32]
On 24 December 2009, WikiLeaks announced that it was experiencing a shortage of funds[33] and suspended all access to its website except for a form to submit new material.[34] Material that was previously published was no longer available, although some could still be accessed on unofficial mirrors.[35][36][37][38] WikiLeaks saw this as a kind of strike "to ensure that everyone who is involved stops normal work and actually spends time raising revenue".[39] While the organisation initially planned for funds to be secured by 6 January 2010,[40] it was not until 3 February 2010 that WikiLeaks announced that its minimum fundraising goal had been achieved.[41] WikiLeaks stated on its website that it would resume full operation once the operational costs were covered.
On 22 January 2010, PayPal suspended WikiLeaks' donation account and froze its assets. WikiLeaks said that this had happened before, and was done for "no obvious reason".[42] The account was restored on 25 January 2010.[43] On 18 May 2010, WikiLeaks announced that its website and archive were back up.[44]
As of June 2010, WikiLeaks was a finalist for a grant of more than half a million dollars from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation,[45] but did not make the cut.[46] WikiLeaks commented, "WikiLeaks was highest rated project in the Knight challenge, strongly recommended to the board but gets no funding. Go figure”. WikiLeaks said that the Knight foundation announced the award to "'12 Grantees who will impact future of news' – but not WikiLeaks" and questioned whether Knight foundation was "really looking for impact".[46] A spokesman of the Knight Foundation disputed parts of WikiLeaks' statement, saying "WikiLeaks was not recommended by Knight staff to the board."[47] However, he declined to say whether WikiLeaks was the project rated highest by the Knight advisory panel, which consists of non-staffers, among them journalist Jennifer 8. Lee, who has done PR work for WikiLeaks with the press and on social networking sites.[47]
On 17 July Jacob Appelbaum spoke on behalf of WikiLeaks at the 2010 Hackers on Planet Earth[48][49] He announced that the WikiLeaks submission system was again up and running, after it had been temporarily suspended.[48][50] Assange was a surprise speaker at a TED conference on 19 July 2010 in Oxford, and confirmed that WikiLeaks was now accepting submissions again.[51][52] conference in New York City, replacing Assange because of the presence of federal agents at the conference.
Upon returning to the U.S. from the Netherlands, on 29 July, Appelbaum was detained for three hours at the airport by U.S. agents, according to anonymous sources.[53] The sources told Cnet that Appelbaum's bag was searched, receipts from his bag were photocopied, his laptop was inspected, although in what manner was unclear.[53] Appelbaum reportedly refused to answer questions without a lawyer present, and was not allowed to make a phone call. His three mobile phones were reportedly taken and not returned.[53] On 31 July, he spoke at a Defcon conference and mentioned his phone being "seized". After speaking, he was approached by two FBI agents and questioned.[53]
Assange is quoted as acknowledging that his practice of posting largely unfiltered classified information online could one day lead the Web site to have "Blood On Our Hands."[54]
In 2010, at least a dozen key supporters of WikiLeaks have left the website.[55]
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.[39] 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.[39] 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.[39] Its only revenue stream is donations, but WikiLeaks is planning to add an auction model to sell early access to documents.[39] According to the Wau Holland Foundation, WikiLeaks receives no money for personnel costs, only for hardware, travelling and bandwidth.[56] An article in TechEYE.net wroteAs a charity accountable under German law, donations for WikiLeaks can be made to the foundation. Funds are held in escrow and are given to WikiLeaks after the whistleblower website files an application containing a statement with proof of payment. The foundation does not pay any sort of salary nor give any renumeration [sic] to WikiLeaks' personnel, corroborating the statement of the site's former German representative Daniel Schmitt (real name Daniel Domscheit-Berg)[57] on national television that all personnel works voluntarily, even its speakers.[56]
Site management issues
Within WikiLeaks, there has been public disagreement between founder and spokesperson Julian AssangeDomscheit-Berg, the site's former German representative who was suspended by Assange. Domscheit-Berg announced on 28 September 2010 that he was leaving the organisation due to internal conflicts over management of the site.[58][59][60] andHosting
WikiLeaks describes itself as "an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking".[61]PRQ, a Sweden-based company providing "highly secure, no-questions-asked hosting services". PRQ is said to have "almost no information about its clientele and maintains few if any of its own logs".[62] The servers are spread around the world with the central server located in Sweden.[63] Julian Assange has said that the servers are located in Sweden (and the other countries) "specifically because those nations offer legal protection to the disclosures made on the site". He talks about the Swedish constitution, which gives the information providers total legal protection.[63] It is forbidden according to Swedish law for any administrative authority to make inquiries about the sources of any type of newspaper.[64] These laws, and the hosting by PRQ, make it difficult to take WikiLeaks offline. Furthermore, "Wikileaks maintains its own servers at undisclosed locations, keeps no logs and uses military-grade encryption to protect sources and other confidential information." Such arrangements have been called "bulletproof hosting."[65][66] WikiLeaks is hosted byOn 17 August 2010, it was announced that the Swedish Pirate Party will be hosting and managing many of WikiLeaks' new servers. The party donates servers and bandwidth to WikiLeaks without charge. Technicians of the party will make sure that the servers are maintained and working.[67][68]
Some servers are hosted in an underground nuclear bunker in Stockholm.[69][70]
After the site became the target of a denial-of-service attack from a hacker on its old servers, WikiLeaks moved its site to Amazon's servers.[71] Later, however, the website was "ousted"[71] from the Amazon servers, without a public statement from the company.[citation needed] WikiLeaks then decided to install itself on the servers of OVH in France.[72] After criticism from the French government, the company sought two court rulings about the legality of hosting WikiLeaks. While the court in Lille immediately declined to force OVH to shut down the WikiLeaks site, the court in Paris stated it would need more time to examine the highly technical issue.
Name servers
WikiLeaks had been using EveryDNS's services, which led to DDoS attacks on the host. The attacks affected the quality of service at EveryDNS, so the company withdrew their service from WikiLeaks. Pro-WikiLeaks supporters retaliated by launching a DDoS attack against EveryDNS. Due to mistakes in the blogosphere, some supporters accidentally mistook EasyDNS for EveryDNS and attacked it. The attacks caused both EveryDNS and EasyDNS to experience outages. Afterwards EasyDNS decided to provide WikiLeaks its name server service.[80]Name and policies
Despite using the name "WikiLeaks", the website is no longer wiki-based as of December 2010. Also, despite some popular confusion[81] due to both having the term "wiki" in their names, WikiLeaks and Wikipedia have no affiliation with each other;[82][83] i.e. "wiki" is not a brand name.[update]The "about" page originally read:[84]
To the user, WikiLeaks will look very much like Wikipedia. Anybody can post to it, anybody can edit it. No technical knowledge is required. Leakers can post documents anonymously and untraceably. Users can publicly discuss documents and analyze their credibility and veracity. Users can discuss interpretations and context and collaboratively formulate collective publications. Users can read and write explanatory articles on leaks along with background material and context. The political relevance of documents and their verisimilitude will be revealed by a cast of thousands.However, WikiLeaks established an editorial policy that accepted only documents that were "of political, diplomatic, historical or ethical interest" (and excluded "material that is already publicly available").[85] This coincided with early criticism that having no editorial policy would drive out good material with spam and promote "automated or indiscriminate publication of confidential records."[86] It is no longer possible for anybody to post to it or edit it, as the original FAQ promised. Instead, submissions are regulated by an internal review process and some are published, while documents not fitting the editorial criteria are rejected by anonymous WikiLeaks reviewers. By 2008, the revised FAQ stated that "Anybody can post comments to it. [...] Users can publicly discuss documents and analyse their credibility and veracity."[87] After the 2010 relaunch, posting new comments to leaks was no longer possible.[88]
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."[89] 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."[90]According to statements by Assange in 2010, submitted documents are vetted by a group of five reviewers, with expertise in different fields such as language or programming, who also investigate the background of the leaker if his or her identity is known.[91] In that group, Assange has the final decision about the assessment of a document.[91]
Legal status
Legal background
The legal status of WikiLeaks is complex. Assange considers WikiLeaks a whistleblower protection intermediary. Rather than leaking directly to the press, and fearing exposure and retribution, whistleblowers can leak to WikiLeaks, which then leaks to the press for them.[92] Its servers are located throughout Europe and are accessible from any uncensored web connection. The group located its headquarters in Sweden because it has one of the world’s strongest shield laws to protect confidential source-journalist relationships.[93][94] WikiLeaks has stated that they "do not solicit any information".[93] However, Assange used his speech during the Hack In The Box conference in Malaysia to ask the crowd of hackers and security researchers to help find documents on its "Most Wanted Leaks of 2009" list.[95]Potential criminal prosecution
The U.S. Justice Department opened a criminal probe of Wikileaks and founder Julian Assange shortly after the leak of diplomatic cables began.[96][97] Attorney General Eric Holder affirmed the probe was “not saber-rattling”, but was "an active, ongoing criminal investigation."[97] The The Washington Post reported that the department was considering charges under the Espionage Act, a move which former prosecutors characterised as "difficult" because of First Amendment protections for the press.[96][98] Several Supreme Court cases have previously established that the American constitution protects the re-publication of illegally gained information provided the publishers did not themselves break any laws in acquiring it.[99] Federal prosecutors have also considered prosecuting Assange for trafficking in stolen government property, but since the diplomatic cables are intellectual rather than physical property, that approach also faces hurdles.[100] Any prosecution of Assange would require extraditing him to the United States, a step made more complicated and potentially delayed by any preceding extradition to Sweden.[101]In Australia, the government and the Australian Federal Police have not stated which Australian law may have been broken by WikiLeaks, but Julia Gillard has stated that the foundation of Wikileaks and the stealing of classified documents from the US administration is illegal in foreign countries.[102] Spencer Zifcak, President of Liberty Victoria, an Australian civil liberties group, notes that with no charge, and no trial completed, it is inappropriate to state that WikiLeaks is guilty of illegality.[103]
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.[104]
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