Slogan We open governments.
What is WikiLeaks ?
WikiLeaks is an international new media non-profit organisation that publishes submissions of otherwise unavailable documents from anonymous news sources and news leaks. Its website, launched in 2006, is run by The Sunshine Press.
Who is founder of WikiLeaks ?
Julian Assange
Assange was reportedly born in 1971 in the city of Townsville, northeastern Australia. He was mostly homeschooled as a child, thanks in large part to his already peripatetic existence: by the time he was 14, he and his mother had reportedly moved 37 times.
•After his mother's relationship with a musician turned violent, Assange lived on the run between the ages of 11 and 16.
•When Assange turned 16, he began hacking computers, reportedly assuming the name Mendax — from the Latin splendide mendax, or "nobly untruthful."
•In 1991, at the age of 20, Assange and some fellow hackers broke into the master terminal of Nortel, the Canadian telecom company. He was caught and pleaded guilty to 25 charges; six other charges were dropped. Citing Assange's "intelligent inquisitiveness," the judge sentenced him only to pay the Australian state a small sum in damages.
•Assange studied math and physics at the University of Melbourne, though he dropped out when he became convinced that work by others in the department was being applied by defense contractors and militaries.
•In 2006, Assange decided to found WikiLeaks in the belief that the free exchange of information would put an end to illegitimate governance. The website publishes material from sources, and houses its main server in Sweden, which has strong laws protecting whistle-blowers. Assange and others at WikiLeaks also occasionally hack into secure systems to find documents to expose. In December 2006, the website published its first document: a decision by the Somali Islamic Courts Union that called for the execution of government officials. WikiLeaks published a disclaimer that the document may not be authentic but "a clever smear by U.S. intelligence."
•The website went on to get several prominent scoops, including the release in April 2010 of a secret video taken in 2007 of a U.S. helicopter attack in Iraq that killed a dozen civilians, including two unarmed Reuters journalists. Assange helped post the video from a safe house in Iceland that he and the other WikiLeaks administrators called "the bunker."
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Financing
WikiLeaks is dependent on public donations since it is a non-profit organisation. Its main financing methods include conventional bank transfers and online payment systems. Wau Holland Foundation, one of the WikiLeaks' main funding channels, stated that they have received more than €900,000 (US$1.2 million) in public donations between October 2009 and December 2010, out of which €370,000 has been passed on to WikiLeaks
WikiLeaks claimed in April 2010 that Facebook deleted their fan page, which had 30,000 fans.[124][125][126] However, as of 7 December 2010 the group's Facebook fan page was available and had grown by 100,000 fans daily since 1 December,[127] to more than 1,300,000 fans. It is also the largest growth of the week.
Awards received
In 2008, Index on Censorship presented WikiLeaks with their inaugural Economist New Media Award.
In 2009, Amnesty International awarded WikiLeaks their Media Award for exposing "extra judicial killings and disappearances" in Kenya
Most of the governments and organisations whose files have been leaked by WikiLeaks have been critical of the organisation.
IN 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.[252][253]
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.[254] 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.[255] In June 2010, A 22-year-old US Army intelligence analyst, PFC (formerly SPC) Bradley Manning, 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.[256]
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.[257] 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.[101] 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 recieve assistance.[258] Following the Love Parade stampede in Duisburg, Germany on 24 July 2010, a local published internal documents of the city administration regarding the planning of Love Parade. The city government reacted by acquiring a court order on 16 August forcing the blog to remove the documents from its blog.[259] On 20 August WikiLeaks released a publication titled Loveparade 2010 Duisburg planning documents, 2007–2010, which comprised 43 internal documents regarding the Love Parade 2010.[260][261] Following on from the leak of information from the Afghan War, in October 2010, around 400,000 documents relating to the Iraq War where released in October.
---------From Wikipedia