Web address WikiLeaks.org
Slogan We open governments.
Type of site Document
archive and disclosure
Available in English,
but the documents are written in various others
Owner Sunshine Press
Created by Julian
Assange.
Launched 4
October 2006; 8 years ago.
WikiLeaks /ˈwɪkiliːks/ is an international, non-profit,
journalistic organisation, which publishes secret information, news leaks, and
classified media from anonymous sources.Its website, initiated in 2006 in
Iceland by the organization Sunshine Press,claimed a database of more than 1.2
million documents within a year of its launch. Julian Assange, an Australian
Internet activist, is generally described as its founder, editor-in-chief, and
director. Kristinn Hrafnsson, Joseph Farrell, and Sarah Harrison are the only
other publicly known and acknowledged associates of Julian Assange. Hrafnsson
is also a member of Sunshine Press Productions along with Assange, Ingi Ragnar
Ingason, and Gavin MacFadyen.
The group has released a number of significant documents
that have become front-page news items. Early releases included documentation
of equipment expenditures and holdings in the Afghanistan war and a report
informing a corruption investigation in Kenya. In April 2010, WikiLeaks
published gunsight footage from the 12 July 2007 Baghdad airstrike in which
Iraqi journalists were among those killed by an AH-64 Apache helicopter, known
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. In October 2010, the group
released a set of almost 400,000 documents called the "Iraq War Logs"
in coordination with major commercial media organisations. This allowed the
mapping of 109,032 deaths in "significant" attacks by insurgents in
Iraq that had been reported to Multi-National Force – Iraq, including about 15,000
that had not been previously published. In April 2011, WikiLeaks began
publishing 779 secret files relating to prisoners detained in the Guantanamo
Bay detention camp.
In November 2010, WikiLeaks collaborated with major global
media organisations to release U.S. State department diplomatic
"cables" in redacted format. 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
find it. WikiLeaks blamed the breach on its former publication partner, the UK
newspaper The Guardian, and that newspaper's journalist David Leigh, who revealed
the key in a book published in February 2011; The Guardian argued that
WikiLeaks was to blame since they gave the impression that the decryption key
was temporary (something not possible for a file decryption key). The German
periodical Der Spiegel reported a more complex story involving errors on both
sides. The incident resulted in widely expressed fears that the information
released could endanger innocent lives.