WIKI LEAKS

Wiki Leaks is an international non-profit organization that publishes submissions of private, secret, and classified media from anonymousness, news leaks, and whistleblowers. Its website, launched in 2006 under The Sunshine Press organization, claimed a database of more than 1.2 million documents within a year of its launch. Wiki Leaks describes its founders as a mix of Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians, and start-up company technologists from the United States, Taiwan, Europe, Australia, and South Africa.^[Julian Assignee, an Australian Internet activist, is generally described as its director. The site was originally launched as a user-editable wiki (hence its name), but has progressively moved towards a more traditional publication model and no longer accepts either user comments or edits.

In April 2010, Wiki Leaks published gun sight footage from the 12 July 2007 Baghdad airstrike in which Iraqi journalists were among those killed by an Apache helicopter, as the Collateral Murder video. In July of the same year, WikiLeaks released Afghan War Diary, a compilation of more than 76,900 documents about the War in Afghanistan not previously available to the public. In October 2010, the group released a package of almost 400,000 documents called the Iraq War Logs in coordination with major commercial media organizations. This allowed every death in Iraq, and across the border in Iran, to be mapped. In November 2010, Wiki Leaks began releasing U.S. State department diplomatic cables.

                

Leaks

2010

In March 2010, WikiLeaks released a secret 32-page U.S. Department of Defense Counterintelligence Analysis Report written in March 2008 discussing the leaking of material by WikiLeaks and how it could be deterred. In April, a classified video of the 12 July 2007 Baghdad airstrike was released, showing two Reuters employees being fired at, after the pilots mistakenly thought the men were carrying weapons, which were in fact cameras.In the week following the release, "wikileaks" was the search term with the most significant growth worldwide in the last seven days as measured by Google Insights. In January 2010, WikiLeaks received the first test cable. A 22-year-old US Army intelligence analyst,PFC (formerly SPC) Bradley Manning, leaked a US embassy cable relating to IceSave, thereafter referred as "Reykjavik 13"^{[citation needed]}. In June 2010, he was arrested after alleged chat logs were turned in to the authorities by former hacker Adrian Lamo, in whom he had confided. Manning reportedly told Lamo he had leaked the "Collateral Murder" video, in addition to a video of the Granai airstrike and around 260,000 diplomatic cables, to WikiLeaks. In July, WikiLeaks released 92,000 documents related to the war in Afghanistan between 2004 and the end of 2009 to The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel. The documents detail individual incidents including friendly fire and civilian casualties.At the end of July, a 1.4 GB "insurance file" was added to the Afghan War Diary page, whose decryption details would be released if WikiLeaks or Assange were harmed. About 15,000 of the 92,000 documents have not yet been released on WikiLeaks, as the group is currently reviewing the documents to remove some of the sources of the information. WikiLeaks asked the Pentagon and human-rights groups to help remove names from the documents to reduce the potential harm caused by their release, but did not receive assistance. Following theLove Parade stampede in Duisburg, Germany, on 24 July 2010, a local resident published internal documents of the city administration regarding the planning of Love Parade. The city government reacted by securing a court order on 16 August forcing the removal of the documents from the site on which it was hosted. On 20 August 2010, WikiLeaks released a publication entitled Loveparade 2010 Duisburg planning documents, 2007–2010, which comprised 43 internal documents regarding the Love Parade 2010. Following on from the leak of information from the Afghan War, in October 2010, around 400,000 documents relating to the Iraq War were released in October. The BBC quoted The Pentagon referring to the Iraq War Logs as "the largest leak of classified documents in its history." Media coverage of the leaked documents focused on claims that the U.S. government had ignored reports oftorture by the Iraqi authorities during the period after the 2003 war.

Diplomatic cables release

Main articles: United States diplomatic cables leak, contents, and reaction

On 28 November 2010, WikiLeaks and five major newspapers from Spain (El País), France (Le Monde), Germany (Der Spiegel), the United Kingdom (The Guardian), and the United States (The New York Times) started to simultaneously publish the first 220 of 251,287 leaked confidential — but not top-secret — diplomatic cables from 274 US embassies around the world, dated from 28 December 1966 to 28 February 2010. WikiLeaks plans to release the entirety of the cables in phases over several months.

The contents of the diplomatic cables include numerous unguarded comments and revelations regarding: critiques and praises about the host countries of various US embassies; political manoeuvring regarding climate change; discussion and resolutions towards ending ongoing tension in the Middle East; efforts and resistance towards nuclear disarmament; actions in theWar on Terror; assessments of other threats around the world; dealings between various countries; US intelligence and counterintelligence efforts; and other diplomatic actions.Reactions to the United States diplomatic cables leak include stark criticism, anticipation, commendation, and quiescence. Consequent reactions to the US government include ridicule, sympathy, bewilderment and dismay. On 14 December 2010 the United States Department of Justice issued a subpoena directing Twitter to provide information for accounts registered to or associated with WikiLeaks. Twitter decided to notify its users. The overthrow of the presidency in Tunisia has been attributed in part to reaction against the corruption revealed by leaked cables.

2011

Guantanamo files :

In late April 2011, files related to the Guantanamo prison were released.

Upcoming leaks:

In May 2010, WikiLeaks said it had video footage of a massacre of civilians in Afghanistan by the US military which they were preparing to release.

In an interview with Chris Anderson on 19 July 2010, Assange showed a document WikiLeaks had on an Albanian oil-well blowout, and said they also had material from inside BP, and that they were "getting enormous quantity of whistle-blower disclosures of a very high calibre" but added that they had not been able to verify and release the material because they did not have enough volunteer journalists.

In October 2010, Assange told a leading Moscow newspaper that "The Kremlin had better brace itself for a coming wave of WikiLeaks disclosures about Russia". Assange later clarified: "we have material on many businesses and governments, including in Russia. It's not right to say there's going to be a particular focus on Russia".

In a 2009 Computer World interview, Assange claimed to be in possession of "5GB from Bank of America". In 2010 he told Forbes magazine that WikiLeaks was planning another "megaleak" early in 2011, from inside the private sector, involving "a big U.S. bank" and revealing an "ecosystem of corruption". Bank of America's stock price fell by 3% as a result of this announcement Assange commented on the possible impact of the release that "it could take down a bank or two."

In December 2010, Assange's lawyer, Mark Stephens, told The Andrew Marr Show on BBC Television that WikiLeaks had information it considered to be a "thermo-nuclear device" which it would release if the organization needs to defend itself.

In January 2011, Rudolf Elmer, a former Swiss banker, passed on data containing account details of 2,000 prominent people to Assange, who stated that the information will be vetted before being made publicly available at a later date.