WikiLeaks is an international non-profit media organisation that publishes submissions of otherwise unavailable documents from anonymous sources and leaks. Its website, launched in 2006, is run by The Sunshine Press.[1] Within a year of its launch, the site claimed a database that had grown to more than 1.2 million documents.[3]
The organization has described itself as having been founded by Chinese dissidents, as well as journalists, mathematicians, and start-up company technologists from the United States, Taiwan, Europe, Australia, and South Africa.[1] Newspaper articles and The New Yorker magazine (7 June 2010) describe Julian Assange, an Australian Internet activist, as its director.[4]
WikiLeaks has won a number of awards, including the 2008 Economist magazine New Media Award.[5] In June 2009, WikiLeaks and Julian Assange won Amnesty International's UK Media Award (in the category "New Media") for the 2008 publication of "Kenya: The Cry of Blood – Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances",[6] a report by the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights about police killings in Kenya.[7] In May 2010, the New York Daily News listed WikiLeaks first in a ranking of "websites that could totally change the news".[8]
In April 2010, WikiLeaks posted video from a 2007 incident in which Iraqi civilians were killed by U.S. forces, on a website called Collateral Murder. 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 for public review.[9] In October, the group released a package of almost 400,000 documents called the Iraq War Logs in coordination with major commercial media organisations.
WikiLeaks was launched as a user-editable site, but has progressively moved towards a more traditional publication model, and no longer accepts either user comments or edits.
Administration
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.[33] WikiLeaks has no official headquarters. The expenses per year are about €200,000, mainly for servers and bureaucracy, but would reach €600,000 if work currently done by volunteers were paid for.[33] 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.[33] Its only revenue stream is donations, but WikiLeaks is planning to add an auction model to sell early access to documents.[33] According to the Wau Holland Foundation, WikiLeaks receives no money for personnel costs, only for hardware, travelling and bandwidth.[48] An article in TechEYE.net wroteAs 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. The foundation does not pay any sort of salary nor give any renumeration [sic] to Wikileaks' personnel, corroborating the statement of the site's German representative Daniel Schmitt (real name Daniel Domscheit-Berg)[49] on national television that all personnel works voluntarily, even its speakers.[48]
Site management issues
Hosting
WikiLeaks describes itself as “an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking”. WikiLeaks is 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.” The servers are spread around the world with the central server located in Sweden.[54] 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.[54] It is forbidden according to Swedish law for any administrative authority to make inquiries about the sources of any type of newspaper.[55] These laws, and the hosting by PRQ, make it difficult to take WikiLeaks offline. 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."[56][57]On 17 August 2010, it was announced that the Swedish Pirate Party will be hosting and managing many of WikiLeaks' new servers. The party donates servers and bandwidth to WikiLeaks without charge. Technicians of the party will make sure that the servers are maintained and working.[58][59] Some servers are hosted in the converted former NATO nuclear bunker CyberBunker.[60]
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.[61 Later, however, the website was "ousted"[61] from the Amazon servers, without a public statement from the company. WikiLeaks then decided to install itself on the servers of OVH in France.[62]
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