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Wikileaks is an amorphous, international organization, originally based in Sweden, that publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive documents from governments and other organizations, while preserving the anonymity of their sources. The creators of Wikileaks were unidentified as of January 2007, although it has been represented in public since January 2007 by non-anonymous speakers such as Julian Assange, who had described himself as a member of Wikileaks' advisory board and was later referred to as the "founder of Wikileaks". 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 behavior in their governments and corporations." Only a small fraction has ever been posted on WikiLeaks, but the initial tranche served as the sites foundation, and Assange was able to say, We have received over one million documents from thirteen countries." Assange responded to such statements by saying "the imputation is incorrect. Somewhere between none and handful of those documents were ever released on WikiLeaks. 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. The site has won a number of awards, including the 2008 Economist magazine New Media Award, and in June 2009, Wikileaks and Julian Assange won Amnesty International UK's Media Award 2009 (in the category "New Media") for the 2008 publication of "Kenya: The Cry of Blood - Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances", a report by the Kenyan National Commission on Human Rights about police killings in Kenya. Suspension of activity, fundraising On 24 December 2009, Wikileaks announced that it was experiencing a shortage of funds and suspended all access to its website except for a form to submit new material. While it was initially hoped that funds could be secured by 6 January 2010, it was only on 3 February 2010 that WikiLeaks announced that its minimum fundraising goal had been achieved. Wikileaks commented, "Wikileaks was highest rated project in the Knight challenge, strongly recommended to the board but gets no funding. 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". A spokesman of the Knight Foundation disputed parts of WikiLeaks' statement, saying "WikiLeaks was not recommended by Knight staff to the board." On July 17, Jacob Appelbaum spoke on behalf of WikiLeaks at the 2010 Hackers on Planet Earth conference in New York City on July 17, replacing Assange due to the presence of federal agents at the conference. Assange was a surprise speaker at a TED conference on 19 July 2010 in Oxford, and confirmed that WikiLeaks was now accepting submissions again. Staff and funding 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. 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, The Los Angeles Times, and the National Newspaper Publishers Association. Wired reported in July 2010 that is currently not possible to make submissions to the Wikileaks website. However, WikiLeaks established an editorial policy that accepted only documents that were "of political, diplomatic, historical or ethical interest". 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. Police raid on German Wikileaks domain holder's home 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. Chinese censorship The Chinese government currently attempts to censor every web site with "wikileaks" in the URL, including the primary .org site and the regional variations .cn and .uk. The alternate sites change frequently, and Wikileaks encourages users to search "wikileaks cover names" outside mainland China for the latest alternative names. Potential future Australian censorship
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. Harassment and surveillance According to The Times, Wikileaks and its members have complained about continuing harassment and surveillance by law enforcement and intelligence organizations, including extended detention, seizure of computers, veiled threats, covert following and hidden photography. After the release of the 2007 airstrikes video and as they prepared to release film of the Granai massacre, Julian Assange has said that his group of volunteers came under intense surveillance. Verification of submissions
WikiLeaks states that it has never released a misattributed document. 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. This information had been leaked by a whistleblower to Wikileaks and remained available on the Wikileaks site. Therefore, Wikileaks has been credited with inspiring the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, a bill meant to reclaim Iceland's 2007 Reporters Sans Frontieres ranking as first in the world for free speech. The newspaper stated that their source of the information was Wikileaks. Bank Julius Baer lawsuit
In February 2008, the Wikileaks.org domain name was taken offline after the Swiss Bank Julius Baer sued Wikileaks and the wikileaks.org domain registrar, Dynadot, in a court in California, United States, and obtained a permanent injunction ordering the shutdown. The coalition requested to be heard as a friend of the court to call attention to relevant points of law that it believed the court had overlooked (on the grounds that Wikileaks had not appeared in court to defend itself, and that no First Amendment issues had yet been raised before the court). Amongst other things, the coalition argued that: "Wikileaks provides a forum for dissidents and whistleblowers across the globe to post documents, but the Dynadot injunction imposes a prior restraint that drastically curtails access to Wikileaks from the Internet based on a limited number of postings challenged by Plaintiffs. Guantnamo Bay procedures A copy of Standard Operating Procedures for Camp Delta the protocol of the U.S. Army at the Guantnamo Bay detention camp dated March 2003 was released on the Wikileaks website on 7 November 2007. On 3 December 2007, Wikileaks released a copy of the 2004 edition of the manual, together with a detailed analysis of the changes. Scientology On 7 April 2008, Wikileaks reported receiving a letter (dated 27 March) from the Religious Technology Centre claiming ownership of several recently leaked documents pertaining to OT Levels within the Church of Scientology. Wikileaks responded with a statement released on Wikinews stating: "in response to the attempted suppression, Wikileaks will release several thousand additional pages of Scientology material next week", and did so. Sarah Palin's Yahoo email account contents
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. BNP membership list After briefly appearing on a blog, the membership list of the far-right British National Party was posted to Wikileaks on 18 November 2008. On 7 February 2009, Wikileaks released 6,780 Congressional Research Service reports. In March 2009, Wikileaks published a list of contributors to the Norm Coleman senatorial campaign and a set of documents belonging to Barclays Bank that had been ordered removed from the website of The Guardian. Internet censorship lists Wikileaks has published the lists of forbidden or illegal web addresses for several countries. On 19 March 2009, Wikileaks published what was alleged to be the Australian Communications and Media Authority's blacklist of sites to be banned under Australia's proposed laws on Internet censorship. while the Internet censorship scheme submitted by the Australian Labor Party in 2008 was proposed with the stated intention of preventing access to child pornography and sites related to terrorism, the list leaked on Wikileaks contains a number of sites unrelated to sex crimes involving minors. On 20 March 2009, Wikileaks published an updated list, dated 18 March 2009; Wikileaks also contains details of Internet censorship in Thailand, including lists of censored sites dating back to May 2006. The plaintiff is a whistleblower (a victim of Active-Profiling who was drugged by The West Australian Police Force) who attempted to leak the details to Wikileaks. Bilderberg Group meeting reports Since May 2009, Wikileaks has made available reports of several meetings of the Bilderberg Group. 2008 Peru oil scandal On 28 January 2009, Wikileaks released 86 telephone intercept recordings of Peruvian politicians and businessmen involved in the "Petrogate" oil scandal. On 14 September 2009, Wikileaks posted the report. Kaupthing Bank Wikileaks has made available an internal document from Kaupthing Bank from just prior to the collapse of Iceland's banking sector, which led to the 20082009 Icelandic financial crisis. 9/11 pager messages On 25 November 2009, Wikileaks released 570,000 intercepts of pager messages from the day of the September 11 attacks. 2010 U.S. Intelligence report on Wikileaks On 15 March 2010, Wikileaks released a secret 32-page U.S. Department of Defense Counterintelligence Analysis Report from March 2008. Wikileaks editor Julian Assange said that some details in the Army report were inaccurate and its recommendations flawed, and also that the concerns of the US Army raised by the report were hypothetical. Baghdad airstrike video
On 5 April 2010, Wikileaks released classified U.S. military footage from a series of attacks on 12 July 2007 in Baghdad by a U.S. helicopter that killed 12, including two Reuters news staff, Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen, on a website called "Collateral Murder". 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. 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. Wikileaks have said that they are unable as yet to confirm whether or not Manning was actually the source of the video, stating "we never collect personal information on our sources", but that they have nonetheless "taken steps to arrange for his protection and legal defence." On June 21, Julian Assange told The Guardian that WikiLeaks had hired three US criminal lawyers to defend Manning but that they had not been given access to him. Afghanistan War Logs
In July 2010, Wikileaks released to The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel over 92,000 documents related to the war in Afghanistan between 2004 and 2009. Upcoming Wikileaks have said they have video footage of a massacre of civilians in Afghanistan by the US military, perhaps the Granai massacre, which they are preparing to release shortly. In an interview with Chris Anderson on July 19, Assange said that Wikileaks were "getting an enormous quantity of whistle-blower disclosures of high caliber" including much material relating to the 2010 BP oil spill, but that they have not been able to verify and release the material because they do not have enough volunteer journalists.
As 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.
Representative for ACLU tells Wikinews their opinion on lifting of Wikileaks court injunction
Wikileaks claims abuse of process in court case that resulted in wikileaks.org being take offline
Rights groups: Forcing Wikileaks.org offline raises 'serious First Amendment concerns'
(Julian) Assange and the others were uncertain of its authenticity, but they thought that readers, using Wikipedia-like features of the site, would help analyze it. The documents authenticity was never determined, and news about WikiLeaks quickly superseded the leak itself. -- Moxon and Kobrin
Wikileaks vs. Presentation by Wikileaks representatives Julian Assange and Daniel Schmitt at the 25th Chaos Communication Congress, Berlin, December 2008. Retrieved 14 December 2007.
WikiLeak.org Independent blog "about the ethical and technical issues of the WikiLeaks.org project"
Video of Julian Assange on a panel at the 2010 Logan Symposium in Investigative Reporting at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism (April 18, 2010)
Leak-o-nomy: The Economy of Wikileaks Interview with Julian Assange, spokesperson of Wikileaks.