Wikileaks is a website that publishes anonymous submissions and
leaksAn Internet leak occurs when a party's confidential intellectual property is released to the public on the Internet. Various types of information and data can be, and have been, "leaked" to the Internet, the most common being personal information, computer software and source code, and artistic...
of sensitive
governmentA government is the body within a community, political entity or organization which has the authority to make and enforce rules, laws and regulations.....
al, 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.
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. The site states that it was "founded by Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and startup company technologists, from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa". The creators of Wikileaks were unidentified , although it has been represented in public since January 2007 by non-anonymous speakers such as Julian Assange, who had described himself as a member of Wikileaks' advisory board and was later referred to as the "founder of Wikileaks". , the site had over 1,200 registered volunteers and the advisory board consisted of Assange,
Phillip AdamsPhillip Andrew Hedley Adams AO is an Australian broadcaster, film producer, writer, humanist, social commentator, satirist, left-wing pundit and atheist. He currently hosts a radio program, Late Night Live, four nights a week on the ABC, and he also writes a weekly column for the News...
,
Wang DanWang Dan , a leader of the Chinese democracy movement, was one of the most visible of the student leaders in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Wang holds a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University...
, CJ Hinke,
Ben LaurieBen Laurie is a founding director of The Apache Software Foundation, a core team member of OpenSSL, a member of the Shmoo Group, a director of the Open Rights Group, Director of Security at The Bunker Secure Hosting, Trustee and Founder-member of FreeBMD, a committer at FreeBSD and Advisory Board...
, Tashi Namgyal Khamsitsang,
Xiao QiangXiao Qiang is the Director of China Internet Project and an adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley...
,
Chico WhitakerFrancisco "Chico" Whitaker Ferreira, b. 1931, is a Brazilian social-justice advocate. A Catholic activist, Whitaker is inspired by liberation theology and closely allied with the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace...
, and
Wang YoucaiWang Youcai , an active dissident of the Chinese democracy movement, was one of the student leaders in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Then a graduate student at the Peking University, he was arrested in 1989 and sentenced in 1991 for "conspiring to overthrow the Government of China"...
..
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."
In January 2007, the website stated that they already had over 1.2 million leaked documents that they were preparing to publish. 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 warThe War in Afghanistan is an ongoing coalition conflict which began on October 7, 2001, as the British military participated in the US military's Operation Enduring Freedom that was launched in response to the September 11 attacks...
to corruption in Kenya.
Wikileaks aims to be "an uncensorable version of
WikipediaWikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its name is a portmanteau of the words wiki and encyclopedia...
for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis", referring to the open online encyclopedia as sharing "the same radically democratic philosophy that allows anyone to be an author or editor". There are no ties between Wikileaks and the
Wikimedia FoundationThe Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a non-profit charitable organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States, and organized under the laws of the state of Florida, where it was initially based...
. Wikileaks developers have stated that there would 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. 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 TaoShi Tao is a mainland Chinese journalist, writer and poet, who in 2005 was sentenced to imprisonment for 10 years for releasing a document of the Communist Party to an overseas Chinese democracy site after Yahoo! China provided his personal details to the Chinese government.-Brief history: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.
The project has drawn comparisons to
Daniel EllsbergDaniel Ellsberg is a former US military analyst employed by the RAND Corporation who precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Pentagon study of US government decision-making about the Vietnam War, to The New York Times and other...
's leaking of the
Pentagon PapersThe Pentagon Papers, officially titled United States–Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense, were a top-secret United States Department of Defense history of the United States' political-military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. Commissioned by United...
in 1971. In the United States, the leaking of some documents may be legally protected. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the
ConstitutionThe Constitution of the United States of America is the supreme law of the United States. It is the foundation and source of the legal authority underlying the existence of the United States of America and the federal government of the United States...
guarantees anonymity, at least in the area of political discourse. Author and journalist
Whitley StrieberLouis Whitley Strieber is an American writer best known for his horror novels The Wolfen and The Hunger and for Communion, a non-fiction account of his perceived experiences with non-human entities...
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."
In June 2009, Wikileaks and Julian Assange won
Amnesty InternationalAmnesty International is an international secular non-governmental organisation which defines its mission as "to conduct research and generate action to prevent and end grave abuses of human rights and to demand justice for those whose rights have been violated." Founded in London in 1961, AI...
UK's Media Award 2009 (in the category "New Media") for the 2008 publication of "Kenya: The Cry of Blood - Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances", a report by the Kenyan National Commission on Human Rights about police killings in
KenyaThe Republic of Kenya is a country in East Africa. Lying along the Indian Ocean, at the equator, Kenya is bordered by Ethiopia , Somalia , Tanzania , Uganda plus Lake Victoria , and Sudan . The capital city is Nairobi. Kenya spans an area about 85% the size of France or Texas...
.
Technology
The FAQ originally read: "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."
However, Wikileaks abandoned the wiki model following early criticism that it promoted "automated or indiscriminate publication of confidential records." 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 rejected by anonymous Wikileaks reviewers. The revised FAQ now states that "Anybody can post comments to it."
Wikileaks is based on several software packages, including
MediaWikiMediaWiki is a web-based wiki software application used by all projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, and many other wikis. Originally developed to serve the needs of the free content Wikipedia encyclopedia, today it has also been deployed by companies for internal knowledge management, and as a...
,
FreenetFreenet is a decentralized, censorship-resistant distributed data store originally designed by Ian Clarke. Freenet aims to provide freedom of speech through a peer-to-peer network with strong protection of anonymity; as part of supporting its users' freedom, Freenet is free and open source software...
,
TorThe Onion Router is a free software implementation of second-generation onion routing – a system which claims to enable its users to communicate anonymously on the Internet...
, and
PGPPretty Good Privacy is a computer program that provides cryptographic privacy and authentication. PGP is often used for signing, encrypting and decrypting e-mails to increase the security of e-mail communications...
.
Hosting, access and security
Wikileaks describes itself as "an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking". Wikileaks is hosted by
PRQPeRiQuito AB is a Swedish Internet service provider and web hosting company which became famous for hosting the BitTorrent website The Pirate Bay. PRQ is owned by Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm....
, 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 SvartholmPer Gottfrid Svartholm Warg , alias anakata, is a Swedish computer specialist, known as the co-owner of the web hosting company PRQ and co-founder of the BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay together with Fredrik Neij...
and
Fredrik NeijHans Fredrik Lennart Neij , a.k.a. TiAMO, is a co-founder of The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent index site and tracker. He also owns the web host PRQ, which previously hosted The Pirate Bay....
who, through their involvement in
The Pirate BayThe Pirate Bay is a Swedish website that indexes and tracks BitTorrent files. It bills itself as "the world's largest BitTorrent tracker" and is ranked as the 104th most popular website by Alexa Internet. The website is primarily funded with advertisements shown next to torrent listings...
, 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
encryptionIn cryptography, encryption is the process of transforming information using an algorithm to make it unreadable to anyone except those possessing special knowledge, usually referred to as a key. The result of the process is encrypted information...
to protect sources and other confidential information." Such arrangements have been called "
bulletproof hostingBulletproof hosting is a service provided by some domain hosting or web hosting firms that allows their customer considerable leniency in the kinds of material they may upload and distribute...
".
Chinese censorship
The Chinese government currently attempts to censor every web site with "wikileaks" in the
URLIn computing, a Uniform Resource Locator is a subset of the Uniform Resource Identifier that specifies where an identified resource is available and the mechanism for retrieving it. In popular usage and in many technical documents and verbal discussions it is often incorrectly used as a synonym...
, including the primary
.orgorg is a generic top-level domain of the Domain Name System used in the Internet.
org is sometimes pronounced in word form as 'org', 'dot-org', or 'dot-oh-are-gee '. It is derived from the word organization....
site and the regional variations
.cn.cn is the country code top-level domain for the People's Republic of China.The domain name administration in People's Republic of China is done through a branch of the Ministry of Information Industry. This ministry oversees everything from telecommunications to broadcasting similar to the...
and
.uk.uk is the Internet country code top-level domain for the United Kingdom. As of July 2008, it is the fifth most popular top-level domain worldwide , with over 7 million registrations....
. 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".
Potential future Australian censorship
On 16 March 2009, the
Australian Communications and Media AuthorityAustralian Communications and Media Authority is an Australian government agency whose main roles are to regulate broadcasting, radiocommunications and telecommunications, and to represent Australian interests in international communications matters...
added URLs to particular pages on Wikileaks to their blacklist, after blacklists from other countries were uploaded. These pages will be blocked for all Australians if the mandatory internet filtering censorship scheme is implemented as planned.
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." 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."
Daniel arap Moi family corruption
On 31 August 2007,
The GuardianThe Guardian is a British daily newspaper owned by the Guardian Media Group. Founded in 1821, it is unique among major British newspapers in being owned by a foundation .The Guardian Weekly, which circulates worldwide, provides a compact digest of four newspapers...
(Britain) featured on its front page a story about corruption by the family of the former Kenyan leader
Daniel arap MoiDaniel Toroitich arap Moi was the President of Kenya from 1978 until 2002.Daniel arap Moi is popularly known to Kenyans as 'Nyayo', a Swahili word for 'footsteps'...
. The newspaper stated that their source of the information was Wikileaks.
Bank Julius Baer lawsuit
In February 2008, the Wikileaks.org
domain nameA domain name is an identification label that defines a realm of administrative autonomy, authority, or control in the Internet, based on the Domain Name System ....
was taken offline after the Swiss Bank Julius Baer sued Wikileaks and the wikileaks.org domain registrar Dynadot in a court in
CaliforniaCalifornia is the most populous state in the United States, and the third largest by area. California is the second most populous sub-national entity in the Americas, behind only São Paulo, Brazil...
, United States, and obtained a permanent injunction ordering the shutdown. Wikileaks had hosted allegations of illegal activities at the bank's Cayman Island branch. 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.
The
American Civil Liberties UnionThe American Civil Liberties Union consists of two separate non-profit organizations: the ACLU Foundation, a 501 organization which focuses on litigation and communication efforts, and the American Civil Liberties Union, a 501 organization which focuses on legislative lobbying...
and the
Electronic Frontier FoundationThe Electronic Frontier Foundation is an international non-profit advocacy and legal organization based in the United States with the stated purpose of being dedicated to preserving the right to freedom of speech, such as protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, in the...
filed a motion protesting the censorship of Wikileaks. The
Reporters Committee for Freedom of the PressThe Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press is an American nonprofit organization, founded in 1970, which provides free legal assistance to journalists. A number of prominent journalists presently sit on the organization's steering committee, including Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, and Judy...
assembled a coalition of media and press that filed an
amicus curiaeAmicus curiae or amicus curiæ is a legal Latin phrase, literally translated as "friend of the court", that refers to someone, not a party to a case, who volunteers to offer information on a point of law or some other aspect of the case to assist the court in deciding a matter before it...
brief on Wikileaks' behalf. The coalition included major U.S. newspaper publishers and press organisations, such as: the
American Society of Newspaper EditorsASNE, in full, the American Society of News Editors, is a membership organization for editors and people who serve the editorial needs of these news organizations It changed its name from the American Society of News Editors on April 6, 2009.The organization was...
, The Associated Press, the Citizen Media Law Project, The E.W. Scripps Company, the
Gannett CompanyGannett Company, Inc. is a publicly-traded media holding company based in the United States. It is the largest U.S. newspaper publisher as measured by total daily circulation. Its assets include the national newspaper USA Today and the weekly USA Weekend. Its largest non-national newspaper is The...
, The Hearst Corporation, the
Los Angeles TimesThe Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California since 1881. It is distributed throughout the Western United States. It is the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in the United States and the fourth-most widely distributed newspaper in the United States...
, the National Newspaper Association, the
Newspaper Association of AmericaThe Newspaper Association of America is a trade association that represents that country's largest daily newspapers...
, 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:
"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."
The same judge, Judge Jeffrey White, who issued the injunction vacated it on 29 February 2008, citing
First AmendmentThe First Amendment to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights. The amendment prohibits the Congress from making laws "respecting an establishment of religion", prohibiting the free exercise of religion, infringing on the freedom of speech and infringing on the freedom of the...
concerns and questions about legal jurisdiction. Wikileaks was thus able to bring its site
onlineONLINE is a magazine for information systems first published in 1977. The publisher Online, Inc. was founded the year before. In May 2002, Information Today, Inc. acquired the assets of Online Inc....
again. The bank dropped the case on 5 March 2008. The judge also denied the bank's request for an order prohibiting the website's publication.
The Executive Director of the
Reporters Committee for Freedom of the PressThe Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press is an American nonprofit organization, founded in 1970, which provides free legal assistance to journalists. A number of prominent journalists presently sit on the organization's steering committee, including Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, and Judy...
, 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."
Guantánamo Bay procedures
A copy of
Standard Operating Procedures for Camp Delta – the protocol of the
U.S. ArmyThe United States Army is the branch of the United States Military responsible for land-based military operations. It is the largest and oldest established branch of the U.S. military and is one of seven uniformed services...
at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp – dated March 2003 was released on the Wikileaks website on 7 November 2007. The document, named "gitmo-sop.pdf", is also mirrored at
The GuardianThe Guardian is a British daily newspaper owned by the Guardian Media Group. Founded in 1821, it is unique among major British newspapers in being owned by a foundation .The Guardian Weekly, which circulates worldwide, provides a compact digest of four newspapers...
. 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 CrossThe International Committee of the Red Cross is a private humanitarian institution based in Geneva, Switzerland. States parties to the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols of 1977 and 2005, have given the ICRC a mandate to protect the victims of international and...
, something that the U.S. military had in the past repeatedly denied.
On 3 December 2007, Wikileaks released a copy of the 2004 edition of the manual, together with a detailed analysis of the changes.
Scientology
On 7 April 2008, Wikileaks reported receiving a letter (dated 27 March) from the Religious Technology Centre claiming ownership of several recently leaked documents pertaining to
OT LevelsIn Scientology, the state of Operating Thetan is a spiritual state above Clear. L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, defined it as "knowing and willing cause over life, thought, matter, energy, space and time ". According to religious scholar J...
within the
Church of ScientologyThe Church of Scientology is the largest organization devoted to the practice and the promotion of the Scientology belief system. The Church of Scientology International is the Church of Scientology's parent organization, and is responsible for the overall ecclesiastical management, dissemination...
. 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
WikinewsWikinews is a free-content news source wiki and a project of the Wikimedia Foundation. The site works through collaborative journalism. Jimmy Wales has distinguished Wikinews from Wikipedia by saying "on Wikinews, each story is to be written as a news story as opposed to an encyclopedia...
stating: "in response to the attempted suppression, Wikileaks will release several thousand additional pages of Scientology material next week", and did so.
Hack of Sarah Palin's Yahoo account
In September 2008, during the
2008 United States presidential election campaignsThe 56th quadrennial United States presidential election was held on November 4, 2008. Outgoing Republican President George W. Bush's policies and actions and the American public's desire for change were key issues throughout the campaign, and during the general election campaign, both major party...
, the contents of a Yahoo account belonging to
Sarah PalinSarah Louise Palin is an American politician who served as Governor of Alaska from 2006 until her resignation in 2009 and was the Republican candidate for Vice President of the United States in 2008....
(the running mate of Republican presidential nominee
John McCainJohn Sidney McCain III is the senior United States Senator from Arizona. He was the Republican nominee for president in the 2008 United States election....
) 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. The hacking of the account was widely reported in mainstream news outlets. Although Wikileaks was able to conceal the hacker's identity, the source of the Palin emails was eventually publicly identified in another way; 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. The hacker was revealed to be David Kernell, a 20-year-old economics student at the University of Tennessee and the son of Democratic Tennessee State Representative
Mike KernellMike Kernell is a member of the Tennessee House of Representatives. Kernell is married with two children....
from Memphis.
BNP membership list
After briefly appearing on a blog, the membership list of the far-right
British National PartyThe British National Party is a far-right, whites-only political party in the United Kingdom, formed as a splinter group of the British National Front by John Tyndall in 1982. The party's current chairman is Nick Griffin, himself a former national organiser of the National Front.The BNP is not...
was posted to Wikileaks on 18 November 2008. The name, address, age and occupation of many of the 13,500 members were given, including several 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, and at least one officer was dismissed for being a member. The BNP was known for going to considerable lengths to conceal the identities of members. On 19 November, BNP leader
Nick GriffinNicholas John Griffin is a British politician, chairman of the British National Party and Member of the European Parliament for North West England. He is married with four children, and lives in Wales....
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. On 20 October 2009, a list of BNP members from April 2009 was leaked. This list contained 11,811 members.
2009 leaks
In January 2009, over 600 internal
United NationsThe United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and the achieving of world peace...
reports (60 of them marked "strictly confidential") were leaked.
On 7 February 2009, Wikileaks released 6,780
Congressional Research ServiceThe Congressional Research Service , known as "Congress's think tank", is the public policy research arm of the United States Congress. As a legislative branch agency within the Library of Congress, CRS works exclusively and directly for Members of Congress, their Committees and staff on a...
reports.
In March 2009, Wikileaks published a list of contributors to the
Norm ColemanNorman Bertram "Norm" Coleman, Jr. , is an American attorney and politician. He was a United States senator from Minnesota from 2003 to 2009. Coleman was elected in 2002 and served in the 108th, 109th, and 110th Congresses. Before becoming a senator, he was mayor of Saint Paul, Minnesota, from 1994...
senatorial campaign and a set of documents belonging to Barclays Bank that had been ordered removed from the website of
The GuardianThe Guardian is a British daily newspaper owned by the Guardian Media Group. Founded in 1821, it is unique among major British newspapers in being owned by a foundation .The Guardian Weekly, which circulates worldwide, provides a compact digest of four newspapers...
.
On 19 March 2009, Wikileaks published what was alleged to be the
Australian Communications and Media AuthorityAustralian Communications and Media Authority is an Australian government agency whose main roles are to regulate broadcasting, radiocommunications and telecommunications, and to represent Australian interests in international communications matters...
's blacklist of sites to be banned under
Australia's proposed laws on Internet censorshipInternet censorship in Australia primarily refers to the proposed banning of certain Internet materials by the Australian Federal Government, through restriction of site access on all Australian Internet Service Providers....
. Reactions to the publication of the list by the Australian media and politicians were varied. Particular note was made by journalistic outlets of the type of websites on the list; while the Internet censorship scheme submitted by the
Australian Labor PartyThe Australian Labor Party is an Australian political party.Known as the ALP for short, the party is the current governing party of Australia, since the 2007 federal election...
in 2008 was proposed with the stated intention of preventing access to
child pornographyChild pornography refers to images or films depicting sexually explicit activities involving a child; as such, child pornography is a visual record of child sexual abuse...
and sites related to
terrorismTerrorism is the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion.At present, there is no internationally agreed definition of terrorism...
, the list leaked on Wikileaks contains a number of sites unrelated to sex crimes involving minors. When questioned about the leak,
Stephen ConroyStephen Michael Conroy is an Australian politician and the current Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy in the Rudd Labor Government...
, the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy in Australia's Rudd Labor Government, responded by claiming that the list was not the actual list, yet threatening to prosecute anyone involved in distributing it. On 20 March 2009, Wikileaks published an updated list, dated 18 March 2009; it more closely matches the claimed size of the ACMA blacklist, and contains two pages which have been independently confirmed to be blacklisted by ACMA.
Bilderberg Group meeting reports
Since May 2009, Wikileaks has made available reports of several meetings of the
Bilderberg GroupThe Bilderberg Group, Bilderberg conference, or Bilderberg Club is an unofficial, annual, invitation-only conference of around 130 guests, most of whom are persons of great influence in the fields of politics, business, banking, and media....
. It includes the group's history and meeting reports from the years 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1960, 1962, 1963, and 1980.
Kaupthing Bank
Wikileaks has made available an internal document from
Kaupthing BankKaupthing Bank is an Icelandic bank, headquartered in Reykjavík, Iceland. It was formed by the merger of Kaupthing and Búnaðarbanki Íslands in 2003 and is the largest bank in Iceland....
from just prior to the collapse of Iceland's banking sector, which led to the
2008–2009 Icelandic financial crisisThe 2008–2009 Icelandic financial crisis is a major ongoing economic crisis in Iceland that involves the collapse of all three of the country's major banks following their difficulties in refinancing their short-term debt and a run on deposits in the United Kingdom...
. The document shows that suspiciously large sums of money were loaned to various owners of the bank, and large debts written off. Kaupthing's lawyers have threatened Wikileaks with legal action, citing banking privacy laws. The leak has caused an uproar in Iceland and may result in criminal charges against the individuals involved.
Police raid on German Wikileaks domain owner's home
The home of Theodor Reppe, owner of the German Wikileaks domain name, Wikileaks.de, was raided on 24 March 2009 after WikiLeaks released the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) censorship blacklist. The site was not affected.
See also
- Chilling Effects
- Cryptome
Cryptome is a website hosted in the United States since 1996 by independent scholars and architects John Young and Deborah Natsios, that functions as a repository for information about freedom of speech, cryptography, spying, and surveillance. According to the site:Cryptome hosted documents,...
- Digital rights
The term digital rights describes the permissions of individuals legitimately to perform actions involving the use of a computer, any electronic device, or a communications network...
- Freedom of information
Freedom of information refers to the protection of the right to freedom of expression with regards to the Internet and information technology . Freedom of information may also concern censorship in an information technology context, i.e...
- irrepressible.info
irrepressible.info is an anti-Internet censorship campaign and website by Amnesty International and The Observer. It was developed by Soda Creative and is hosted by Darq Ltd. The site is based in the United Kingdom, but is open to participation from people around the world. allows users to...
- Streisand effect
The Streisand effect is an Internet phenomenon where an attempt to censor or remove a piece of information backfires, causing the information to be publicized widely and to a greater extent than would have occurred if no censorship had been attempted. Examples of such attempts include censoring a...
External links