Who are Wikileaks?

On 25 July, over 92,000 intelligence reports covering the war in Afghanistan (dubbed the ‘Afghan War Diary 2004-2010’) were released to the public by the online whistle-blowing website Wikileaks.

Wikileaks has now released more classified intelligence documents to the public than the rest of the world combined. They have won awards and been heavily criticised; faced many legal pressures and have been blocked in many countries.

Yet they continue to publish this information, and it looks like it will be difficult to make them stop.

According to the website, Wikileaks first appeared on the internet in January 2007, founded by Chinese activists and Australian Julian Assange, as well as journalists, mathematicians and start-up company technologists from the U.S, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa.

The stated goals of the website are to expose unethical practices, illegal behaviour and wrongdoing.

In an invitation to potential sources in 2006, Assange wrote “Our primary targets are those highly oppressive regimes in China, Russia and Central Eurasia, but we also expect to be of assistance to those in the West who wish to reveal illegal or immoral behaviour in their own governments and corporations.”

He believes that a “social movement” to expose secrets could “bring down many administrations that rely on concealing reality.”

They aim to provide a secure place where anyone can leak sensitive information to Wikileaks through one of their many secured networks.

Once these documents are received, staff examine them and label any possibility of lies based on analysis, means, motives and the cost of forgery, among other things.

Wikileaks claims to be a world leader in this and “as far as can be determined, have yet to make a mistake.”

All documents published on the site claim to be “first published by Wikileaks, were classified, confidential, censored or otherwise withheld from the public before release, and are of political, diplomatic, ethical or historical significance.”

The site publishes their content on more than 20 servers and hundreds of domain names around the world but primarily uses Swedish provider PRQ.

PRQ also hosts the BitTorrent (file sharing) download site The Pirate Bay and was created to withstand both legal pressure and cyber/computer attacks. They are known for fiercely defending the anonymity of their clients.

Wikileaks has many sceptics around the world, with the Pentagon (US Defence Department) recently saying that the publishing of the Afghan War Diary has put the lives of their informants at risk and threatens to undermine intelligence in war-torn Afghanistan.

US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates has been reported as saying that the founders may have “blood on their hands” and that the way they acted was “morally wrong.”

The website has been blocked in China, Israel, North Korea, Russia, Thailand, and Zimbabwe and has been added to a proposed mandatory black list in Australia.

So far in their short publishing history Wikileaks has faced many legal pressures but are yet to lose a case.

They have been victorious over legal attacks from the Pentagon, the Chinese Public Security Bureau, the former President of Kenya, the Premier of Bermuda, the Catholic and Mormon Churches, various Russian companies, and Switzerland’s largest private bank.

They have also won many awards such as the Economist magazine’s 2008 new media award and Amnesty International UK’s new media award in 2009. In May 2010 they were rated number 1 in “websites that could totally change the news.”

Wikileaks seem to have found themselves in the middle of an important argument of which there are two distinct sides.

On one hand there is the belief of Wikileaks and many others who claim that the press should be free and unrestrained.

They say the disclosure of sensitive or classified information that exposes wrongdoing by governments and corporations will eventually result in the increased accountability of all governments to their citizens.

On the other hand, some believe that these leaks are a threat to public and defence security and are in direct violation of privacy rights.

The answer to this question is a matter of individual preference. However, for good or for bad, it appears that Wikileaks is here to stay.

As Assange puts it “if a government or company wanted to remove content from Wikileaks they would have to practically dismantle the internet itself.”

By James Kayel

Photo – Wikileaks founder Julian Assange