Wikileaks

WikiLeaks () is an international non-profit organisation that published news leaks and classified media provided by anonymous sources. Julian Assange, an Australian Internet activist, is generally described as its founder and director and is currently fighting extradition to the United States over his work with WikiLeaks. Since September 2018, Kristinn Hrafnsson has served as its editor-in-chief. Its website stated in 2015 that it had released online 10 million documents since beginning in 2006 in Iceland. In 2019, WikiLeaks posted its last collection of original documents. Beginning in November 2022, only around 3,000 documents could be accessed.

The group has released a number of prominent document caches that exposed serious violations of human rights and civil liberties to the US and international public, including the ''Collateral Murder'' footage from the 12 July 2007 Baghdad airstrike in which Iraqi Reuters journalists were among several civilians killed. WikiLeaks is known for publishing leaks such as diplomatic cables from the United States and Saudi Arabia, emails from the governments of Syria and Turkey, corruption in Kenya and at Samherji, a multinational fishing company based in Iceland. WikiLeaks has also published documents exposing surveillance by the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency and private corporations. During the 2016 U.S. 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 favoured Clinton over her rival Bernie Sanders in the primaries. These releases resulted in the resignation of Debbie Wasserman Schultz as chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and caused significant harm to the Clinton campaign. They have been cited as a possible contributing factor in Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in the presidential election. During the campaign, WikiLeaks promoted conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party and the murder of Seth Rich.

WikiLeaks has won a number of awards and has been commended for exposing state and corporate secrets, increasing transparency, assisting freedom of the press, and enhancing democratic discourse while challenging powerful institutions. WikiLeaks and some of its supporters say the organisation's publications have a perfect authenticity record. The group has been the target of campaigns to discredit it, including aborted ones by Palantir and HBGary. WikiLeaks has also had its donation systems disrupted by problems with its payment processors. As a result, the Wau Holland Foundation helps process WikiLeaks' donations.

The organisation has been criticised for inadequately curating its content and violating the personal privacy of individuals. WikiLeaks has, for instance, revealed Social Security numbers, medical information, credit card numbers and details of suicide attempts. Various news organisations, activists, journalists and former members have also criticised the organisation over allegations of anti-semitism, an anti-Clinton and pro-Trump bias, various associations with the Russian government, a history of buying and selling leaks, and a lack of internal transparency. Journalists have also criticised the group for promoting false flag conspiracy theories, and its exaggerated and misleading descriptions of the contents of leaks. The CIA defined the group as a "non-state hostile intelligence service" after the release of Vault 7.

History

Staff, name and 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 but its servers were soon moved to Sweden and other countries that provided more legal protection for the media.

The ''wikileaks.org'' domain name was registered on 4 October 2006. The website was established and published its first document in December 2006. Before his arrest, WikiLeaks was usually represented in public by Julian Assange, who has been described as "the heart and soul of this organisation, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organiser, financier, and all the rest". Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Sarah Harrison, Kristinn Hrafnsson and Joseph Farrell are other notable associates of Assange who have been involved in the project. Harrison is also a member of Sunshine Press Productions along with Assange and Ingi Ragnar Ingason. Gavin MacFadyen was acknowledged by Assange as a ″beloved director of WikiLeaks″ shortly after his death in 2016.

Assange formed an advisory board in the early days of WikiLeaks, filling it with journalists, political activists and computer specialists. Most of the members told Wired that they hadn't done much advising and had little involvement with WikiLeaks. Several members said they didn't know they were mentioned on the site, or how they got there. Computer security expert Ben Laurie said he had been a member of the board "since before the beginning", but he wasn't "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".

The initial tranche of WikiLeaks' documents came from a WikiLeaks' activist who owned a server that was a node in the Tor network. After they noticed that Chinese hackers used the network to gather information from foreign governments, the activist began recording the information. This let Assange show potential contributors that WikiLeaks was viable and say they had "received over one million documents from thirteen countries".

WikiLeaks originally used a " wiki" communal publication method, which ended by May 2010. Its founders and early volunteers were once described as a mixture of Asian dissidents, journalists, mathematicians, and start-up company technologists from the United States, Taiwan, Europe, Australia, and South Africa. , the website had more than 1,200 registered volunteers.

Despite some public confusion, related to the fact both sites use the "wiki" name and website design template, WikiLeaks and Wikipedia are not affiliated. Wikia, a for-profit corporation affiliated loosely with the Wikimedia Foundation, purchased several WikiLeaks-related domain names as a "protective brand measure" in 2007.

On 26 September 2018, it was announced that Julian Assange had appointed Kristinn Hrafnsson as editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks with Assange continuing as its publisher. His access to the internet was cut off by Ecuador in March 2018 after he tweeted that Britain was about to conduct a propaganda war against Russia relating to the Poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal. Ecuador said he had broken a commitment "not to issue messages that might interfere with other states" and Assange said he was "exercising his right to free speech".

Purpose

According to WikiLeaks, the goal of the organisation is "to bring important news and information to the public … One of our most important activities is to publish original source material alongside our news stories so readers and historians alike can see evidence of the truth." It also seeks to ensure that journalists and whistleblowers are not prosecuted for emailing sensitive or classified documents. The online "drop box" is described by the WikiLeaks website as "an innovative, secure and anonymous way for sources to leak information to ikiLeaksjournalists".

In a 2013 resolution, the International Federation of Journalists, a trade union of journalists, called WikiLeaks a "new breed of media organisation" that "offers important opportunities for media organisations". Harvard professor Yochai Benkler praised WikiLeaks as a new form of journalistic enterprise, testifying at the court-martial of Chelsea Manning that "WikiLeaks did serve a particular journalistic function," and that the "range of the journalist's privilege" is "a hard line to draw".

Others do not consider WikiLeaks to be journalistic in nature. Media ethicist Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies wrote in 2011: "WikiLeaks might grow into a journalist endeavor. But it's not there yet."Kelly McBride, "What Is WikiLeaks? That's the Wrong Question" in ''Page One: Inside the New York Times and the Future of Journalism'' (documentary film, ed. David Folkenflik: PublicAffairs, 2011). Bill Keller of ''The New York Times'' considers WikiLeaks to be a "complicated source" rather than a journalistic partner. Prominent First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams writes that WikiLeaks is not a journalistic group, but instead "an organization of political activists; … a source for journalists; and … a conduit of leaked information to the press and the public". Floyd Abrams, ''Friend of the Court: On the Front Lines with the First Amendment'' (Yale University Press, 2013), p. 390. In support of his opinion, referring to Assange's statements that WikiLeaks reads only a small fraction of information before deciding to publish it, Abrams wrote: "No journalistic entity I have ever heard of—none—simply releases to the world an elephantine amount of material it has not read."

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. WikiLeaks does not have any official headquarters.

WikiLeaks describes itself as "an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking". In 2010, the website was available on multiple servers, different domain names and had an official dark web version (available on the Tor Network) as a result of a number of denial-of-service attacks and its elimination from different Domain Name System (DNS) providers.

Until August 2010, WikiLeaks was hosted by PRQ, a company based in Sweden providing "highly secure, no-questions-asked hosting services". PRQ was reported by ''The Register'' website to have "almost no information about its clientele and maintains few if any of its own logs". Later, WikiLeaks was hosted mainly by the Swedish Internet service provider Bahnhof in the Pionen facility, a former nuclear bunker in Sweden. Other servers are spread around the world with the main server located in Sweden. 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. It is forbidden, according to Swedish law, for any administrative authority to make inquiries about the sources of any type of newspaper. These laws, and the hosting by PRQ, make it difficult for any authority to eliminate WikiLeaks; they place a burden of proof upon any complainant whose suit would circumscribe WikiLeaks' liberty. 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".

After the site became the target of a denial-of-service attack on its old servers, WikiLeaks moved its website to Amazon's servers. Amazon later removed the website from its servers. In a public statement, Amazon said that WikiLeaks was not following its terms of service. The company stated: "There were several parts they were violating. For example, our terms of service state that 'you represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content ... that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity.' It's clear that WikiLeaks doesn't own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content." WikiLeaks was then moved to servers at OVH, a private web-hosting service in France. After criticism from the French government, a judge ruled that there was no need for OVH to cease hosting WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks used EveryDNS, but was dropped by the company after distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against WikiLeaks hurt the quality of service for its other customers. Supporters of WikiLeaks waged verbal and DDoS attacks on EveryDNS. Because of a typographical error in blogs mistaking EveryDNS for competitor ''EasyDNS'', the sizeable Internet backlash hit EasyDNS. Despite that, EasyDNS began providing WikiLeaks with DNS service on "two 'battle hardened' servers" to protect the quality of service for its other customers.

WikiLeaks restructured its process for contributions after its first document leaks did not gain much attention. Assange stated this was part of an attempt to take the voluntary effort typically seen in Wiki projects and "redirect it to ... material that has real potential for change". As of February 2007 the Wikileaks FAQ, under "How will Wikileaks operate?", read:

WikiLeaks established an editorial policy that accepted only documents that were "of political, diplomatic, historical or ethical interest" (and excluded "material that is already publicly available"). This coincided with early criticism that having no editorial policy would drive out good material with spam and promote "automated or indiscriminate publication of confidential records". The original FAQ is no longer in effect, and no one can post or edit documents on WikiLeaks. Now, submissions to WikiLeaks are reviewed by anonymous WikiLeaks reviewers, and documents that do not meet the editorial criteria are rejected. By 2008, the revised FAQ stated: "Anybody can post comments to it. ... Users can publicly discuss documents and analyse their credibility and veracity." After the 2010 reorganisation, posting new comments on leaks was no longer possible.

In 2010 Assange said WikiLeaks received some submissions through the postal mail. During the 2010 reorganisation, the site's submission system went offline. While it was offline, WikiLeaks announced they were building a state-of-the-art secure submission system. The launch of the new system was delayed by security concerns in 2011. The new submission system did not launch until four and a half years later, in May 2015. According to ''The Washington Post'', Andy Müller-Maguhn and a colleague administered the submission server in 2016, though Müller-Maguhn denies this. By October 2021, WikiLeaks' secure chat stopped working and by February 2022, WikiLeaks' submission system and email server were offline. In July 2022, a broken version of the submission system briefly relaunched with expired PGP keys and went offline after it was reported on by ''The Daily Dot''.

In November 2022, many of WikiLeaks releases disappeared from the website, bringing the number of documents from around 10 million to around 3,000. Other reported issues with the site included the websites search ability not working and a broken submission page.

Legal status

The legal status of WikiLeaks is complex. In 2010, WikiLeaks set up a private limited company in Iceland for administrative purposes, according to a long-time spokesman and later editor-in-chief. The organisation was also creating legal entities in France and Sweden, and operated in Australia.

Assange considers WikiLeaks a 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.

Criminal investigations

The US Justice Department began a criminal investigation of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange soon after the leak of diplomatic cables in 2010 began. ''The Washington Post'' reported that the department was considering charges under the Espionage Act of 1917, an action which former prosecutors characterised as "difficult" because of First Amendment protections for the press. Several Supreme Court cases (e.g. ''Bartnicki v. Vopper'') have established previously that the American Constitution protects the re-publication of illegally gained information provided the publishers did not themselves violate any laws in acquiring it.

Regarding legal threats against WikiLeaks and Assange, legal expert Ben Saul said that Assange is the target of a global smear campaign to demonise him as a criminal or as a terrorist, without any legal basis. The US Center for Constitutional Rights