WikiLeaks
WikiLeaks is a non-profit media organisation and publisher of leaked documents. It is funded by donations and media partnerships. It has published classified documents and other media provided by anonymous sources. It was founded in 2006 by Julian Assange. Kristinn Hrafnsson is its editor-in-chief. Its website states that it has released more than ten million documents and associated analyses. WikiLeaks' most recent publication of original documents was in 2019 and its most recent publication was in 2021. From November 2022, numerous documents on the organisation's website became inaccessible. In 2023, Assange said that WikiLeaks is no longer able to publish due to his imprisonment and the effect that US government surveillance and WikiLeaks' funding restrictions were having on potential whistleblowers.
WikiLeaks has released document caches and media that exposed serious violations of human rights and civil liberties by various governments. It released footage of the 12July 2007 Baghdad airstrike, titling it Collateral Murder, in which Iraqi Reuters journalists and several other civilians were killed by a US helicopter crew. It published thousands of US military field logs from the war in Afghanistan and Iraq war, diplomatic cables from the United States and Saudi Arabia, and emails from the governments of Syria and Turkey. WikiLeaks has also published documents exposing corruption in Kenya and at Samherji, cyber warfare and surveillance tools created by the CIA, and surveillance of the French president by the National Security Agency. During the 2016 US presidential election campaign, WikiLeaks released emails from the Democratic National Committee and from Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, showing that the party's national committee had effectively acted as an arm of the Clinton campaign during the primaries, seeking to undercut the campaign of Bernie Sanders. These releases resulted in the resignation of the chairwoman of the DNC and caused significant harm to the Clinton campaign.
WikiLeaks has won numerous awards and been commended by media organisations, civil society organisations, and world leaders for exposing state and corporate secrets, increasing transparency, assisting freedom of the press, and enhancing democratic discourse while challenging powerful institutions. The organisation has been the target of campaigns to discredit it, including aborted ones by Palantir and HBGary. WikiLeaks has also had its donation systems interrupted by payment processors. As a result, the Wau Holland Foundation helps process WikiLeaks' donations.
The organisation has been criticised for inadequately curating content and violating personal privacy. WikiLeaks has, for instance, revealed Social Security numbers, medical information, credit card numbers and details of suicide attempts. News organisations, activists, journalists and former members have also criticised WikiLeaks over allegations of anti-Clinton and pro-Trump bias and a lack of internal transparency. Some journalists have alleged it had associations with the Russian government. Journalists have also criticised the organisation for promotion of conspiracy theories, and what they describe as exaggerated and misleading descriptions of the contents of leaks. The CIA and United States Congress characterised the organisation as a "non-state hostile intelligence service" after the release of CIA tools for hacking consumer electronics in Vault 7.
History
Founding
The inspiration for WikiLeaks was Daniel Ellsberg's release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Assange built WikiLeaks to shorten the time between a leak and its coverage by the media. WikiLeaks was established in Australia with the help of Daniel Mathews and its servers were soon moved to Sweden and other countries that provided greater legal protection for the media. Assange described WikiLeaks as an activist organisation and said that "The method is transparency, the goal is justice".The wikileaks.org domain name was registered on 4 October 2006. The website was established and published its first document in December 2006. It described its founders as a mixture of Asian dissidents, journalists, mathematicians, and start-up company technologists from the United States, Taiwan, Europe, Australia, and South Africa. In January 2007 WikiLeaks organiser James Chen told TIME that "We are serious people working on a serious project... three advisors have been detained by Asian government, one of us for over six years." WikiLeaks said that its "primary interests are oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East" but it "also expects to be of assistance to those in the West who wish to reveal unethical behaviour in their own governments and corporations". WikiLeaks was usually represented in public by Julian Assange, who has described himself as "the heart and soul of this organisation".
Advisory board
Assange formed an informal advisory board in the early days of WikiLeaks, with journalists, political activists and computer specialists as members. In 2007 WikiLeaks said the board was still forming but that it included representatives from expatriate Russian and Tibetan refugee communities, reporters, a former US intelligence analyst and cryptographers." Members of the advisory board included Phillip Adams, Julian Assange, Wang Dan, Suelette Dreyfus, CJ Hinke, Tashi Namgyal Khamsitsang, Ben Laurie, Xiao Qiang, Chico Whitaker, Wang Youcai, and John Young.WikiLeaks' advisory board did not meet. According to Wired UK, most of the board members to whom they spoke said they had little involvement with WikiLeaks. Some said they did not know they were mentioned on the site, nor how they got there. Computer security expert Ben Laurie said he had been a member of the board "since before the beginning", but he was not "really sure what the advisory board means." Former board member Phillip Adams criticised the board, saying that Assange "has never asked for advice. The advisory board was pretty clearly window dressing, so he went for people identified with progressive policies around the place." Assange responded by calling the advisory board "pretty informal".
When asked to join their initial advisory board, the promininent critic of secrecy Steven Aftergood declined; he said to Time that "they have a very idealistic view of the nature of leaking and its impact. They seem to think that most leakers are crusading do-gooders who are single-handedly battling one evil empire or another."
Early years
In January 2007 John Young was dropped from the WikiLeaks network after questioning plans for a multimillion-dollar fundraising goal. He accused the organisation of being a CIA conduit and published 150 pages of WikiLeaks emails. According to Wired, the emails document the group's attempts to create a profile for themselves and arguments over how to do so. They also discuss political impact and positive reform and include calls for transparency around the world.In January 2010 WikiLeaks shut down its website while management appealed for donations. Previously published material was no longer available, although some could still be accessed on unofficial mirror websites. WikiLeaks stated that it would resume full operation once the operational costs were paid. WikiLeaks said the work stoppage was "to ensure that everyone who is involved stops normal work and actually spends time raising revenue". The organisation planned for funds to be secured by 6 January 2010, and on 3 February that WikiLeaks announced that its fundraising goal had been achieved.
In February 2010 WikiLeaks helped propose the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative legislation to establish a "journalism safe haven" in Iceland. In June, the parliament voted unanimously for the resolution.
WikiLeaks originally used a wiki format website, and was changed when it relaunched in May 2010. The blogger Ryan Singel claimed that after the website relaunched, its cryptographic security had degraded.
In October 2010 the server WikiLeaks used to host its encrypted communications was compromised by hackers that a WikiLeaks spokesperson described as "very skilled". The spokesperson said that "the server got attacked, hacked, and the private keys got out"; they said it was the first breach in WikiLeaks' history. In November 2010, WikiLeaks said that its website was compromised hours before releasing US diplomatic cables. In December 2010 Spamhaus reported issued a malware warning for "WikiLeaks.info", a "very loosely" affiliated website that "WikiLeaks.org" redirected to. The website said they could "guarantee that there is no malware on it".
2010 internal dissent
A series of resignations of key members of WikiLeaks began in September 2010, started by Assange's decision to release the Iraq War logs the next month, internal conflicts with other members and his response to sexual assault allegations. According to Herbert Snorrason, "We found out that the level of redactions performed on the Afghanistan documents was not sufficient. I announced that if the next batch did not receive full attention, I would not be willing to cooperate." Some members of WikiLeaks called for Assange to step aside.On 25 September 2010 after being suspended by Assange for "disloyalty, insubordination and destabilisation", Daniel Domscheit-Berg, the German spokesman for WikiLeaks, told Der Spiegel that he was resigning. He said "WikiLeaks has a structural problem. I no longer want to take responsibility for it, and that's why I am leaving the project." Assange accused Domscheit-Berg of leaking information to Newsweek, with Domscheit-Berg saying that the WikiLeaks team was unhappy with Assange's management and handling of the Afghan war document releases. Domscheit-Berg said he wanted greater transparency in WikiLeaks finances and the leaks released to the public.
According to various sources, Domscheit-Berg had copied and then deleted over 3,500 unpublished whistleblower communications. Some communications contained hundreds of documents, including the US government's No Fly List, Bank of America leaks, insider information from 20 neo-Nazi organisations, documents sent by Renata Avila about torture and government abuse of a Latin American country and US intercept information for "over a hundred Internet companies". Assange stated that Domscheit-Berg had deleted video files of the Granai massacre by a US Bomber. WikiLeaks had scheduled the video for publication before its deletion. According to Andy Müller-Maguhn, it was an eighteen-gigabyte collection.
Domscheit-Berg said he took the files from WikiLeaks because he did not trust its security. In Domscheit-Berg's book he wrote he was "waiting for Julian to restore security, so that we can return the material to him". The Architect and Domscheit-Berg encrypted the files and gave them to a third party who did not have the key. In August 2011 Domscheit-Berg said he permanently deleted the files "to ensure that the sources are not compromised." He said that WikiLeaks' claims about the Bank of America files were "false and misleading" and they were lost because of an IT problem.
The Architect left with Domscheit-Berg, taking the code behind the submission system with him. WikiLeaks submissions stayed offline until 2015. Herbert Snorrason resigned after he challenged Assange on his decision to suspend Domscheit-Berg and was bluntly rebuked. Iceland MP Birgitta Jónsdóttir also left WikiLeaks, citing lack of transparency, lack of structure, and poor communication flow. James Ball left WikiLeaks over disputes about Assange's handling of finances, and Assange's relationship to Israel Shamir, an individual who has promoted antisemitism and holocaust denial. According to the British newspaper, The Independent, at least a dozen key supporters of WikiLeaks left the website during 2010. Several staffers who broke with Assange joined with Domscheit-Berg to start OpenLeaks, a new leak organisation and website with a different management and distribution philosophy.
Sarah Harrison, who stayed with WikiLeaks, later told Andrew O'Hagan she did not agree with the way he did it, but Domscheit-Berg had a basic point. She added that "you can tell he was probably just trying to say something true and got hated for it. That's the way it is with Julian: he can't listen. He doesn't get it."