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[4] organisation,[5] 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.[7] Julian Assange, an Australian Internet activist, is generally described as its director.[8] 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.
In January 2007, the website stated that it had over 1.2 million leaked documents that it was preparing to publish.[24] 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."[18][25]
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 was involved in. Somewhere between none and handful of those documents were ever released on WikiLeaks
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.[19]
The "about" page originally read:[97]
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.
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.[17][18] 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".[7]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."[7][20]In January 2007, the website stated that it had over 1.2 million leaked documents that it was preparing to publish.[24] 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."[18][25]
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 was involved in. Somewhere between none and handful of those documents were ever released on WikiLeaks
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.[19]
Site management issues
Within WikiLeaks, there has been public disagreement between founder and spokesperson Julian Assange and Daniel Domscheit-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.[60][62][63]
Hosting
WikiLeaks describes itself as "an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking".[64] 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.[65][66]
Until August 2010, WikiLeaks was hosted by 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".[67] Currently, WikiLeaks is mainly hosted by Bahnhof in a facility that used to be a nuclear bunker.[68][69] Other servers are spread around the world with the central server located in Sweden.[70] 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.[70] It is forbidden according to Swedish law for any administrative authority to make inquiries about the sources of any type of newspaper.[71] These laws, and the hosting by PRQ, make it difficult for any authorities to take WikiLeaks offline; they place an onus of proof upon any complainant whose suit would circumscribe WikiLeaks' liberty, e.g. its rights to exercise free speech online. 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."[67][72]
On 17 August 2010, it was announced that the Swedish Pirate Party would be hosting and managing many of WikiLeaks' new servers. The party donates servers and bandwidth to WikiLeaks without charge. Technicians of the party would make sure that the servers are maintained and working.[73][74]
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.[75] Later, however, the website was "ousted" from the Amazon servers.[75] In a public statement, Amazon said that WikiLeaks was not following its terms of service. The company further explained, "There were several parts they were violating. For example, our terms of service state that 'you represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content... that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity.' It's clear that WikiLeaks doesn't own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content."[76] WikiLeaks then decided to install itself on the servers of OVH in France.[77] 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
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WikiLeaks is based on several software packages, including MediaWiki, Freenet, Tor, and PGP.[80] WikiLeaks strongly encouraged postings via Tor because of the strong privacy needs of its users.[81]
On 4 November 2010, Julian Assange told Swiss public television TSR that he is seriously considering seeking political asylum in neutral Switzerland and setting up a WikiLeaks foundation to move the operation there.[82][83] According to Assange, Switzerland and Iceland are the only countries where WikiLeaks would feel safe to operate.
Name servers
WikiLeaks had been using EveryDNS's services, which led to DDoS attacks on the host.[clarification needed] The attacks affected the quality of service at EveryDNS, so the company withdrew its service from WikiLeaks. Pro-WikiLeaks supporters retaliated by launching a DDoS attack against EveryDNS. Because of mistakes in the blogosphere, some supporters accidentally mistook EasyDNS for EveryDNS. These mistaken attacks caused EasyDNS to experience outages, instead of the intended EveryDNS. Afterwards EasyDNS decided to provide WikiLeaks its name server service.[91]Name and policies
Despite using the name "WikiLeaks", the website is no longer wiki-based as of May 2010.[92] Also, despite some popular confusion[93] 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);[94][95] 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.[96]The "about" page originally read:[97]
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.
Because of the nature of the work of Wikileaks following Organisations and companies stopped providing services to Wikileaks:
FacebookWikiLeaks claimed in April 2010 that Facebook deleted its fan page, which had 30,000 fans.[205][206][207] However, as of 7 December 2010 the group's Facebook fan page was available and had grown by 100,000 fans daily since 1 December,[208] to more than 1.5 million fans. It was also the largest growth of the week.[
MoneybookersIn October 2010, it was reported that Moneybookers, which collected donations for WikiLeaks, had ended its relationship with the site. Moneybookers stated that its decision had been made "to comply with money laundering or other investigations conducted by government authorities, agencies or commissions."[211]
After providing 24-hour notification, American-owned EveryDNS dropped WikiLeaks from its entries on 2 December 2010, citing DDoS attacks that "threatened the stability of its infrastructure".
On the same day, Amazon.com severed its ties with WikiLeaks, to which it was providing infrastructure services
On 3 December, PayPal, the payment processor owned by eBay, permanently cut off the account of the Wau Holland Foundation that had been redirecting donations to WikiLeaks. PayPal alleged that the account violated its "Acceptable Use Policy",
On 6 December, the Swiss bank PostFinance announced that it had frozen the assets of Assange that it holds, totalling €31,000. In a statement on its website, it stated that this was because Assange "provided false information regarding his place of residence" when opening the account.[229] WikiLeaks released a statement saying this was because Assange, "as a homeless refugee attempting to gain residency in Switzerland, had used his lawyer's address in Geneva for the bank's correspondence".[
On the same day, MasterCard announced that it was "taking action to ensure that WikiLeaks can no longer accept MasterCard-branded products", adding "MasterCard rules prohibit customers from directly or indirectly engaging in or facilitating any action that is illegal."[231] The next day, Visa Inc. announced it was suspending payments to WikiLeaks, pending "further investigations".[232] In a move of support for WikiLeaks, XIPWIRE established a way to donate to WikiLeaks, and waived their fees.[233] Datacell, the Swiss-based IT company that enabled WikiLeaks to accept credit card donations, announced that it would take legal action against Visa Europe and Mastercard, in order to resume allowing payments to the website.[234]
On 21 December, media reported that Apple had removed an application from its App Store, which provided access to the embassy cable leaks.[237]
Reception of WikiLeaks
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 at the Index on Censorship Awards[242] and Amnesty International's UK Media Award in 2009.[243][244] In 2010, the New York Daily News listed WikiLeaks first among websites "that could totally change the news",[245] and Julian Assange received the Sam Adams Award[246] and was named the Readers' Choice for TIME's Person of the Year in 2010.[247] The UK Information Commissioner has stated that "WikiLeaks is part of the phenomenon of the online, empowered citizen".[248] In its first days, an Internet petition calling for the cessation of extra-judicial intimidation of WikiLeaks attracted over six hundred thousand signatures.[249] 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.[250][251][252][253][254][255][256]
At the same time, several U.S. government officials have criticized WikiLeaks for exposing classified information and claimed that the leaks harm national security and compromise international diplomacy.[257][258][259][260][261] 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.[262] Some journalists have likewise criticised a perceived lack of editorial discretion when releasing thousands of documents at once and without sufficient analysis.[263] 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,[264] 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.[265]
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