WIKILEAKS?

Julian Assange

Created by : Julian Assange

Owner : The sunshine press

Launched : 4 october 2006

URL  :  www.wikileaks.org

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] Julian Assange, an AustralianInternet activist, is generally described as its founder, editor-in-chief and director.^[7]

The group has released a number of significant documents which have become front-page news items. Early releases included documentation of equipment expenditures and holdings in theAfghanistan war and corruption in Kenya.^[8] In April 2010, WikiLeaks published gunsight footage from the 12 July 2007 Baghdad airstrike in which Iraqi journalists were among those killed by anApache helicopter, as the Collateral Murder video. In July of the same year, WikiLeaks releasedAfghan War Diary, a compilation of more than 76,900 documents about the War in Afghanistannot previously available to the public.^[9] In October 2010, the group released a package of almost 400,000 documents called the Iraq War Logs in coordination with major commercial media organisations. This allowed every death in Iraq, and across the border in Iran, to be mapped.^[10]In April 2011, WikiLeaks began publishing 779 secret files relating to prisoners detained in theGuantanamo Bay detention camp.^[11]

In November 2010, WikiLeaks collaborated with major global media organisations to releaseU.S. State department diplomatic cables in redacted format. The release was nicknamed CableGate. 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 look. WikiLeaks blamed the breach on its former partner, The Guardian, and that newspaper's journalist David Leigh, who revealed the key in a book published in February 2011;^[12] The Guardian argued that WikiLeaks was to blame since they gave the impression that the decryption key was temporal (something not possible for a file decryption key).^[13] Der Spiegel reported a more complex story ^[14] involving errors on both sides. Widely expressed fears that the CableGate release could endanger innocent lives have proved unfounded.

(Source from Wiki)