WikiLeaks

Julian Assange

What is WikiLeaks?

WikiLeaks is an international website that publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive governmental, corporate, organizational or religious documents.  This website WikiLeaks.org was launched on 4th October 2006.  The website was unveiled and published its first document in December 2006, claiming a database of more than 1.2 million documents within a year o fits launch.  WikiLeaks founders are a mix of journalists, mathematicians, and start-up company technologists from the United States, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa.  Julian Assange an Australian internet activist is generally described as its director.  The site was originally launched as a user-editable wiki, but has progressively moved towards a more traditional publication model and no longer accepts either user comments or edits.  WikiLeaks also develops and adapts technologies to support these activities.

Where is WikiLeaks located?

The WikiLeaks Headquarters has surprised everybody with its extraordinary location and conditions.  The Turkey based WikiLeaks office was constructed during the cold war, and reconstructed by the Pionen Company in 2008.  This could be the most strong and ‘wonderful’ office that’s established in the past ten years.  Though the offices of social networking service Facebook and Search engine giant Google were already in hot discussions – the WikiLeaks Bunker pictures shows how powerful and unique an office can be.

Some ashonishing facts about Bahnhof AB office interior where WikiLeaks data is safely stored:

• Originally built in cold war years to survive nuclear attack
• It is buried deep under a granite mountain
• There is only one entry and exit
• Generators of German U-Boat submarines work as backup power
• Fish tanks, fountains and plants are beautifying the ambience

 

Who are the people behind WikiLeaks?

WikiLeaks claim it has a volunteer group of about 1,400 people, but these numbers have expanded.  The group basically includes journalists, software programmers, network engineers, mathematicians and others.

How does WikiLeaks function?

WikiLeaks has combined highend security technologies with journalism.  Like other media outlets conducting investigative journalism, WikiLeaks accepts (but does not solicit) anonymous sources of information.  When information comes in, journalists analyse the material, verify it and write a news piece about it describing its significance to society.  WikiLeaks then publishes both the news story and the original material in order to enable readers to analyse the story in the context of the original source material themselves.  If the main site wikileaks.org is not functional then WikiLeaks also currently has 1426 up-to-date sites.

What is the status of WikiLeaks?

The legal status of WikiLeaks is complex.  Assange considers WikiLeaks a whistleblower protection intermediary.  Rather than leaking directly to the press, and fearing exposure and retribution, whistleblowers can leak to WikiLeaks, which then leaks to the press for them.  Its servers are located throughout Europe and are accessible from any uncensored web connection.  The group has located its headquarters in Sweden because it has one of the world’s strongest shield laws to protect confidential source-journalist relationships.  WikiLeaks has stated that they “do not solicit any information”.  However, Assange used his speech during the Hack In The Box conference in Malaysia to ask the crowd of hackers and security researchers to help find documents on its “Most Wanted Leakers of 2009” list.