Wikileaks.html



Wikileaks

URL	www.wikileaks.org
Type of site	Whistleblower wiki-site
Registration	Private
Launched	December 2006
Current status	Active

Wikileaks is a website that publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive governmental, corporate, or religious documents, while attempting to preserve the anonymity and untraceability of its contributors. Within one year of its December 2006 launch, its database had grown to more than 1.2 million documents.¹ Wikileaks runs on modified MediaWiki software.

History

The site and its project were secret until their existence was disclosed in a January 2007 article after Wikileaks invited the editor of Secrecy News to serve on their advisory board.² The site is being developed by Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and startup company technologists from the U.S, Taiwan, Europe, Australia, and South Africa.³ 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 behavior in their governments and corporations."³⁴ All current staff, developers, and employees of Wikileaks are unidentified as of January 2007^[update].⁵ Wikileaks advisory board member Julian Assange stated the site was to go live in March 2007 but was unprepared for the media attention that its ahead-of-schedule disclosure generated.^{citation needed}

There are no ties between Wikileaks and the Wikimedia Foundation.⁶ The website has stated that they already have over 1,200,000 leaked documents that they are preparing to publish.⁷ They also posted a 19 page analysis.⁸ The group has subsequently released a number of other significant documents which have become front-page news items, ranging from documentation of equipment expenditures and holdings in the Afghanistan war to corruption in Kenya.⁹

Wikileaks aims to be "an uncensorable version of Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis."¹⁰ Wikileaks developers have stated that there will be checks in place to keep the "completely anonymous" system from being flooded with false documents, pornography, and spam. All users will be able to comment on all documents, analyze them, and identify false material.⁵ Their stated goal is to ensure that whistle-blowers and journalists are not thrown into jail for emailing sensitive or classified documents, such as what happened to Chinese journalist Shi Tao, who was sentenced to 10 years in jail in 2005 after publicising an email from Chinese officials about the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.¹¹ Traffic following its disclosure increased from eight Google searches to over 1,000,000 in the first two weeks.¹²

The project has drawn comparisons to Daniel Ellsberg's leaking of the Pentagon Papers in 1971.¹³ In the United States, the leaking of some documents may be legally protected. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the Constitution guarantees anonymity, at least in the area of political discourse.¹³ Author and journalist Whitley Strieber has spoken about the benefits of the Wikileaks project, noting that "Leaking a government document can mean jail, but jail sentences for this can be fairly short. However, there are many places where it means long incarceration or even death, such as China and parts of Africa and the Middle East."¹⁴

Technology

According to the FAQ, "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."¹⁵

However, Wikileaks abandoned the wiki model following early criticism that it promoted "automated or indiscriminate publication of confidential records."¹⁶ It is no longer possible for "anybody [to] post to it", as the original FAQ promised. Instead, submissions are regulated by an internal review process and some are published, while others are censored by anonymous Wikileaks reviewers. The revised FAQ now states that "Anybody can post comments to it."¹⁷

Wikileaks is based on several software packages, including MediaWiki, Freenet, Tor, and PGP.¹⁸

Hosting, access and security

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". PRQ is owned by Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij who, through their involvement in The Pirate Bay, have significant experience in withstanding legal challenges from authorities. Being hosted by PRQ makes 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." An unidentified individual working for Wikileaks is quoted as saying "Wikileaks certainly trusts no hosting provider". Such arrangements have been called "bulletproof hosting".¹⁹

Chinese censorship

The Chinese government currently attempts to censor every web site with "wikileaks" in the URL, including the primary .org site and the regional variations .cn and .uk. However, the site is still accessible from behind the Chinese firewall through one of the many alternative names used by the project, such as "secure.ljsf.org" and "secure.sunshinepress.org". The alternate sites change frequently, and Wikileaks encourages users to search "wikileaks cover names" outside mainland China for the latest alternative names. Mainland search engines, including Baidu and Yahoo, also censor references to "wikileaks".²⁰

Wikinews has news on this topic:

• Huge interest takes Wikileaks offline
• Church of Scientology's 'Operating Thetan' documents leaked online
• Wikileaks spokesperson discusses recent court case with Wikinews
• Representative for ACLU tells Wikinews their opinion on lifting of Wikileaks court injunction
• Wikileaks.org restored as injunction is lifted
• Wikileaks claims ‘abuse of process’ in court case that resulted in wikileaks.org being take offline
• Rights groups: Forcing Wikileaks.org offline raises 'serious First Amendment concerns'
• 'Wikileaks.org' taken offline in many areas after fire, court injunction

Verification of submissions

In response to concerns about the possibility of misleading or fraudulent leaks, Wikileaks has stated that misleading leaks "are already well-placed in the mainstream media! [Wikileaks] is of no additional assistance."²¹ The FAQ states that: "The simplest and most effective countermeasure is a worldwide community of informed users and editors who can scrutinize and discuss leaked documents.²²

Notable leaks

On 31 August 2007, The Guardian (Britain) featured on its front page a story about corruption by the family of the former Kenyan leader Daniel arap Moi. They claimed that their source of the information was Wikileaks.²³

Bank Julius Baer lawsuit

It has been suggested that Bank Julius Baer vs. Wikileaks lawsuit be merged into this article or section. (Discuss)

Main article: Bank Julius Baer vs. Wikileaks lawsuit

In February 2008, the Wikileaks.org domain name was taken offline after the Swiss Bank Julius Baer sued Wikileaks and the wikileaks.org domain registrar Dynadot in a court in California, United States, and obtained a permanent injunction ordering the shutdown.²⁴²⁵ Wikileaks had hosted allegations of illegal activities at the bank's Cayman Island branch.²⁴ Wikileaks' U.S. ISP, Dynadot, complied with the order by removing its DNS entries. However, the website remained accessible via its numeric IP address, and online activists immediately mirrored Wikileaks at dozens of alternate websites worldwide.²⁶

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a motion protesting the censorship of Wikileaks. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press assembled a coalition of media and press that filed an amicus curiae brief on Wikileaks' behalf. The coalition included major U.S. newspaper publishers and press organisations, such as: the American Society of Newspaper Editors, The Associated Press, the Citizen Media Law Project, The E.W. Scripps Company, the Gannett Company, The Hearst Corporation, the Los Angeles Times, the National Newspaper Association, the Newspaper Association of America, The Radio-Television News Directors Association, and The Society of Professional Journalists. The coalition requested to be heard as a friend of the court to call attention to relevant points of law that it believed the court had overlooked (on the grounds that Wikileaks had not appeared in court to defend itself, and that no First Amendment issues had yet been raised before the court). Amongst others, the coalition argued that:²⁶

"Wikileaks provides a forum for dissidents and whistleblowers across the globe to post documents, but the Dynadot injunction imposes a prior restraint that drastically curtails access to Wikileaks from the Internet based on a limited number of postings challenged by Plaintiffs. The Dynadot injunction therefore violates the bedrock principle that an injunction cannot enjoin all communication by a publisher or other speaker."²⁶

The same judge, Judge Jeffrey White, who issued the injunction vacated it on February 29, 2008, citing First Amendment concerns and questions about legal jurisdiction.²⁷ Wikileaks was thus able to bring its site online again. The bank dropped the case on March 5, 2008.²⁸ The judge also denied the bank's request for an order prohibiting the website's publication.²⁶

The Executive Director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Lucy Dalglish, commented:

"It's not very often a federal judge does a 180 degree turn in a case and dissolves an order. But we're very pleased the judge recognized the constitutional implications in this prior restraint."²⁶

Guantánamo Bay procedures

A copy of Standard Operating Procedures for Camp Delta – the protocol of the U.S. Army at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp – dated March 2003 was released on the Wikileaks website on 7 November 2007.²⁹ The document, named "gitmo-sop.pdf", is also mirrored at The Guardian.³⁰ Its release revealed some of the restrictions placed over detainees at the camp, including the designation of some prisoners as off-limits to the International Committee of the Red Cross, something that the U.S. military had in the past repeatedly denied.³¹

On 3 December 2007, Wikileaks released a copy of the 2004 edition of the manual,³² together with a detailed analysis of the changes.³³

Scientology

On April 7, 2008, Wikileaks reported receiving a letter (dated March 27) from the Religious Technology Centre claiming ownership of several recently leaked documents pertaining to OT Levels within the Church of Scientology. These same documents were at the centre of a 1994 scandal. The email stated:

The letter continued on to request the release of the logs of the uploader, which would remove their anonymity. Wikileaks responded with a statement released on Wikinews stating: "in response to the attempted suppression, Wikileaks will release several thousand additional pages of Scientology material next week."³⁵

Osama Bin Laden

Wikileaks has republished 10 years of messages and interviews with Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al-Qaeda.³⁶ The documents were translated by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and were originally published by the Federation of American Scientists blog Secrecy News.³⁷

The nearly-300-page, "official use only" packet from 2004, translated by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (a division of the CIA), includes interviews with bin Laden from various news agencies and also includes messages that he sent directly to the U.S. between 1994 and 2004.³⁸

One message includes bin Laden's denial of involvement in the September 11 attacks, much as other messages also deny direct involvement besides inspiration in other terrorist attacks such as the African embassy bombings.

Hack of Sarah Palin's Yahoo account

In September 2008, during the 2008 United States presidential election campaigns, the contents of a Yahoo account belonging to Sarah Palin (the running mate of Republican presidential nominee John McCain) were posted on Wikileaks. The contents of the mailbox seemed to suggest that she used the private Yahoo account to send work-related messages in order to evade public record laws.³⁹ The hacking of the account was widely reported in mainstream news outlets.⁴⁰⁴¹⁴² Although Wikileaks was able to conceal the hacker's identity, the source of the Palin emails was eventually publicly identified in another way;⁴³ the hacker attempted to conceal his identity by using the anonymous proxy service ctunnel.com, but, because of the illegal nature of the access, ctunnel website administrator Gabriel Ramuglia assisted the FBI in tracking down the source of the hack.⁴⁴

BNP membership list

After being leaked on a blog the membership list of the British National Party was posted on Wikileaks on 18 November 2008. The list identifies around 13,500 supporters of the far right party, exposing some to the risk of dismissal from work and disciplinary action. Many of the members' occupations are listed, including a small number of police officers, two solicitors, four ministers of religion, at least one doctor and a number of primary and secondary school teachers. In Britain police officers are banned from joining or promoting the BNP. The BNP was known for going to considerable lengths to conceal the identities of members. The leaked list included names, addresses, and some phone numbers and email addresses of members up to September 2008. On 19 November BNP leader Nick Griffin stated that he knew the identity of the person who initially leaked the list on 17 November, describing him as a "hardliner" senior employee who left the party in 2007.⁴⁵⁴⁶⁴⁷

See also

Criminal justice portal

Internet portal

Law portal

References

External links

• Wikileaks home page
• Schmidt, Tracy Samantha (2007-01-22). "A Wiki for Whistle-Blowers", Time. Retrieved on 14 December 2007.