WikiLeaks facts for kids

Quick facts for kids
WikiLeaks

The logo of WikiLeaks, an hourglass with a globe leaking from top to bottom
Screenshot  Screenshot of WikiLeaks' main page as of 19 November 2023
Type of site	Document archive and disclosure
Available in	English, but the source documents are in their original language
Owner	Sunshine Press
Founder(s)	Julian Assange
Key people	Julian Assange (director) Kristinn Hrafnsson (editor-in-chief) Sarah Harrison (journalist)
Commercial	No
Registration	Optional
Launched	4 October 2006; 18 years ago (2006-10-04)

WikiLeaks (/ˈwɪkiliːks/) is a media organisation and publisher of leaked documents. It is a non-profit and is funded by donations and media partnerships. It has published classified documents and other media provided by anonymous sources. It was founded in 2006 by Julian Assange, an Australian editor, publisher, and activist, who is currently challenging extradition to the United States over his work with WikiLeaks. Since September 2018, Kristinn Hrafnsson has served as its editor-in-chief. Its website states that it has released more than ten million documents and associated analyses. WikiLeaks' most recent publication of original documents was in 2019 and its most recent publication was in 2021. From November 2022, numerous documents on the organisation's website became inaccessible. In 2023, Assange said that WikiLeaks is no longer able to publish due to his imprisonment and the effect that US government surveillance and WikiLeaks' funding restrictions were having on potential whistleblowers.

WikiLeaks has released document caches and media that exposed serious violations of human rights and civil liberties by various governments. It released footage of the 12 July 2007 Baghdad airstrike, titling it Collateral Murder, in which Iraqi Reuters journalists and several civilians were killed by a U.S. helicopter crew. It published thousands of US military field logs from the war in Aghanistan and Iraq war, diplomatic cables from the United States and Saudi Arabia, and emails from the governments of Syria and Turkey. WikiLeaks has also published documents exposing corruption in Kenya and at Samherji, cyber warfare and surveillance tools created by the CIA, and surveillance of the French president by the National Security Agency. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, WikiLeaks released emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and from Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, showing that the party's national committee had effectively acted as an arm of the Clinton campaign during the primaries, seeking to undercut the campaign of Bernie Sanders. These releases resulted in the resignation of the chairwoman of the DNC and caused significant harm to the Clinton campaign. During the campaign, WikiLeaks promoted false conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party and the murder of Seth Rich.

WikiLeaks has won awards and 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 record of publishing authentic documents. The organisation has been the target of campaigns to discredit it, including aborted ones by Palantir and HBGary. WikiLeaks has also had its donation systems interrupted by payment processors. As a result, the Wau Holland Foundation helps process WikiLeaks' donations.

The organisation has been criticised for inadequately curating content and violating personal privacy. WikiLeaks has, for instance, revealed Social Security numbers, medical information and credit card numbers. News organisations, activists, journalists and former members have also criticised WikiLeaks over allegations of anti-Clinton and pro-Trump bias, various associations with the Russian government, buying and selling of leaks, and a lack of internal transparency. Journalists have also criticised the organisation for promotion of conspiracy theories, and what they describe as exaggerated and misleading descriptions of the contents of leaks. The US CIA and United States Congress defined the organisation as a "non-state hostile intelligence service" after the release of Vault 7.

History

Founding

Julian Assange is a founding member of the WikiLeaks staff.

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 with the help of Daniel Mathews and its servers were soon moved to Sweden and other countries that provided greater legal protection for the media. Assange described WikiLeaks as an activist organisation and said that "The method is transparency, the goal is justice". The motto was displayed on the WikiLeaks website when it first came online.

The wikileaks.org domain name was registered on 4 October 2006. The website was established and published its first document in December 2006. It has described its founders as a mixture of Asian dissidents, journalists, mathematicians, and start-up company technologists from the United States, Taiwan, Europe, Australia, and South Africa. In January 2007, WikiLeaks organizer James Chen told TIME that "We are serious people working on a serious project... three advisors have been detained by Asian government, one of us for over six years." WikiLeaks said that its "primary interests are oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East" but it "also expects to be of assistance to those in the West who wish to reveal unethical behaviour in their own governments and corporations". WikiLeaks was usually represented in public by Julian Assange, who has described himself as "the heart and soul of this organisation".

Advisory board

Assange formed an informal advisory board in the early days of WikiLeaks, its membership comprising journalists, political activists and computer specialists. In 2007, WikiLeaks said the board was still forming but that it included representatives from expatriate Russian and Tibetan refugee communities, reporters, a former US intelligence analyst and cryptographers." Members of the advisory board included Phillip Adams, Julian Assange, Wang Dan, Suelette Dreyfus, CJ Hinke, Tashi Namgyal Khamsitsang, Ben Laurie, Xiao Qiang, Chico Whitaker, Wang Youcai, and John Young.

WikiLeaks' advisory board never met and most of the members said they had little involvement with WikiLeaks. Some said they didn't know they were mentioned on the site, nor 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".

When asked to join their initial advisory board, the promininent critic of secrecy Steven Aftergood declined; he said to Time that "they have a very idealistic view of the nature of leaking and its impact. They seem to think that most leakers are crusading do-gooders who are single-handedly battling one evil empire or another."

Early years

In January 2007, John Young was dropped from the WikiLeaks network after questioning plans for a multimillion-dollar fundraising goal. He accused the organisation of being a CIA conduit and published 150 pages of WikiLeaks emails. According to Wired, the emails show the beginnings of Wikileaks. They document the group's attempts to create a profile for themselves and arguments over how to do so. They also discuss political impact and positive reform and include calls for transparency around the world.

In January 2010, WikiLeaks shut down its website while management appealed for donations. Previously published material was no longer available, although some could still be accessed on unofficial mirror websites. WikiLeaks stated that it would resume full operation once the operational costs were paid. WikiLeaks said the work stoppage was "to ensure that everyone who is involved stops normal work and actually spends time raising revenue". The organisation planned for funds to be secured by 6 January 2010, and on 3 February that WikiLeaks announced that its fundraising goal had been achieved.

In February 2010, WikiLeaks helped propose the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative legislation to establish a "journalism safe haven" in Iceland. In June, the parliament voted unanimously for the resolution.

WikiLeaks originally used a wiki format website, and was changed when it relaunched in May 2010. The blogger Ryan Singel claimed that after the website relaunched, its cryptographic security had degraded.

In October 2010, the server WikiLeaks used to host its encrypted communications was compromised by hackers that a WikiLeaks spokesperson described as "very skilled". The spokesperson said that "the server got attacked, hacked, and the private keys got out"; they said it was the first breach in WikiLeaks' history. In November 2010, WikiLeaks said that its website was compromised hours before releasing US diplomatic cables. In December 2010, Spamhaus reported issued a malware warning for "WikiLeaks.info", a "very loosely" affiliated website that "WikiLeaks.org" redirected to. The website said they could "guarantee that there is no malware on it".

2010 internal dissent

A series of resignations of key members of WikiLeaks began in September 2010, started by Assange's decision to release the Iraq War logs the next month and internal conflicts with other members. According to Herbert Snorrason, "We found out that the level of redactions performed on the Afghanistan documents was not sufficient. I announced that if the next batch did not receive full attention, I would not be willing to cooperate." Some members of WikiLeaks called for Assange to step aside as WikiLeaks’ spokesman and give up his management responsibilities for the good of the organisation.

On 25 September 2010, after being suspended by Assange for "disloyalty, insubordination and destabilisation", Daniel Domscheit-Berg, the German spokesman for WikiLeaks, told Der Spiegel that he was resigning. He said "WikiLeaks has a structural problem. I no longer want to take responsibility for it, and that's why I am leaving the project." Assange accused Domscheit-Berg of leaking information to Newsweek, with Domscheit-Berg saying that the WikiLeaks team was unhappy with Assange's management and handling of the Afghan war document releases. Domscheit-Berg said he wanted greater transparency in WikiLeaks finances and the leaks released to the public.

According to various sources, Domscheit-Berg had copied and then deleted over 3,500 unpublished whistleblower communications. Some communications contained hundreds of documents, including the US government's No Fly List, 5 GB of Bank of America leaks, insider information from 20 neo-Nazi organisations, documents sent by Renata Avila about torture and government abuse of a Latin American country and US intercept information for "over a hundred Internet companies". Assange stated that Domscheit-Berg had deleted video files of the Granai massacre by a US Bomber. WikiLeaks had scheduled the video for publication before its deletion. According to Andy Müller-Maguhn, it was an eighteen-gigabyte collection.

Domscheit-Berg said he took the files from WikiLeaks because he didn't trust its security. In Domscheit-Berg's book he wrote he was "waiting for Julian to restore security, so that we can return the material to him". The Architect and Domscheit-Berg encrypted the files and gave them to a third party who didn’t have the key. In August 2011, Domscheit-Berg said he permanently deleted the files "in order to ensure that the sources are not compromised." He said that WikiLeaks' claims about the Bank of America files were "false and misleading" and they were lost because of an IT problem when one of WikiLeaks storage drives crashed.

The Architect left with Domscheit-Berg, taking the code behind the submission system with him. WikiLeaks submissions stayed offline until 2015. Herbert Snorrason resigned after he challenged Assange on his decision to suspend Domscheit-Berg and was bluntly rebuked. Iceland MP Birgitta Jónsdóttir also left WikiLeaks, citing lack of transparency, lack of structure, and poor communication flow in the organisation. James Ball left WikiLeaks over disputes about Assange's handling of finances, and Assange's relationship to Israel Shamir, an individual who has promoted antisemitism and holocaust denial. According to the British newspaper, The Independent, at least a dozen key supporters of WikiLeaks left the website during 2010. Several staffers who broke with Assange joined with Domscheit-Berg to start OpenLeaks, a new leak organisation and website with a different management and distribution philosophy.

Sarah Harrison, who stayed with WikiLeaks, later told Andrew O'Hagan she didn't agree with the way he did it, but Domscheit-Berg had a basic point. She added that "you can tell he was probably just trying to say something true and got hated for it. That's the way it is with Julian: he can't listen. He doesn't get it."

Actions against WikiLeaks

In early 2010, Assange said that he obtained documents showing that two State Department agents tailed him on a flight from Iceland to Norway. Icelandic journalists were unable to verify Assange's allegations, which were denied by the State Department. Assange did not release the alleged documents. Assange also said that a volunteer was arrested in March and questioned about WikiLeaks. According to Assange, police said that authorities had spied on and photographed a private WikiLeaks meeting. WikiLeaks later admitted that the interrogation did not happen as originally suggested. According to the deputy head of news for RUV, the arrest was unrelated to WikiLeaks but the volunteer mentioned WikiLeaks to the police and said the laptop he had with him was owned by WikiLeaks. Daniel Domscheit-Berg wrote that

The rumors that he was being followed originated in part from his overactive imagination. But they also had the advantage of giving him the aura of someone in dire peril, increasing the collective anticipation of every new leak. Julian didn't need a marketing department. Marketing was something he himself knew best.

After Julian Assange was granted asylum and entered the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012, new CCTV cameras were installed and security personnel working for UC Global and Promsecurity recorded his activities and interactions with staff and visitors, including his legal team. In a 2017 email, the surveillance was justified with suspicions that Assange was "working for the Russian intelligence services." New cameras and microphones were installed in December 2017, and Morales arranged for the United States to have immediate access to the recordings.

Campaigns to discredit WikiLeaks

Writing for The Guardian in 2010, Nick Davies said there was "some evidence of low-level attempts to smear Wikileaks", including false online accusations involving Assange and money. In 2010, Wikileaks published a 2008 US military report that said leaks to WikiLeaks "could result in increased threats to DoD personnel, equipment, facilities, or installations". The report suggested a plan to identify and expose WikiLeaks' sources to "deter others from using WikiLeaks" and "destroy the center of gravity" of Wikileaks by attacking its trustworthiness. According to Clint Hendler writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, many reactions to the document were "overwrought" and "the spin" by WikiLeaks was "a step too far".

In 2010 the Bank of America employed the services of a collection of information security firms, known as Team Themis, when the bank became concerned about information that WikiLeaks was planning to release about it. Team Themis included private intelligence and security firms HBGary Federal, Palantir Technologies and Berico Technologies. In 2011 hacktivist group Anonymous released emails from HBGary Federal showing that Team Themis proposed a plan which suggested "[spreading] disinformation" and "disrupting" Glenn Greenwald's support for WikiLeaks. Team Themis planned to expose the workings of WikiLeaks using disinformation and cyberattacks. The plans were not implemented and, after the emails were published, Palantir CEO Alex Karp issued a public apology to "progressive organizations ... and Greenwald" for his company's role.

Other

In December 2010, PayPal suspended the WikiLeaks account after they received a letter from the US State Department that characterised WikiLeaks' activities as illegal in the US. Mastercard and Visa Europe also stopped accepting payments to WikiLeaks after pressure from the US. Bank of America, Amazon and Swiss bank PostFinance had previously stopped dealing with WikiLeaks. Datacell, the IT company that enabled WikiLeaks to accept credit and debit card donations, said Visa's action was the result of political pressure. WikiLeaks referred to these actions as a banking blockade. In response to the companies' actions, the hacker group Anonymous launched a series of cyberattacks against the companies, and against the Swedish Prosecution Authority for its attempted extradition of Assange. WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson said, "[Anonymous] is not affiliated with Wikileaks. There has been no contact between any Wikileaks staffer and anyone at Anonymous. Wikileaks has not received any prior notice of any of Anonymous’ actions. We neither condemn nor applaud these attacks. We believe they are a reflection of public opinion on the actions of the targets". Cyber-attacks and legal restrictions have forced WikiLeaks to change hosts several times.

2011–2015

In December 2011, WikiLeaks launched Friends of WikiLeaks, a social network for supporters and founders of the website. Friends of WikiLeaks was designed for users to never have more than 12 friends, half local and half international. The site was in beta status, and its German version was translated incorrectly and only partially available.

In July 2012, WikiLeaks took credit for a fake New York Times website and article falsely attributed to Bill Keller. The hoax prompted criticism from commenters and the public, who said it hurt WikiLeaks' credibility. Glenn Greenwald wrote in Salon that it might have been satire but "it doesn't strike me as a good idea for a group that relies on its credibility when it comes to the authenticity of what they publish – and which thus far has had a stellar record in that regard – to be making boastful claims that they published forged documents. I understand and appreciate the satire, but in this case, it directly conflicts with, and undermines, the primary value of WikiLeaks." WikiLeaks said it wanted to bring attention to the banking blockade.

In January 2013 shortly after Aaron Swartz died, WikiLeaks said that Swartz had helped WikiLeaks and had talked to Julian Assange in 2010 and 2011. WikiLeaks also said it had "strong reasons to believe, but cannot prove", he may have been a source, breaking WikiLeaks' rules about source anonymity. Journalists suggested that Wikileaks may have made the statements to imply that Swartz was targeted by the US Attorney's Office and Secret Service in order to get at WikiLeaks.

In 2013, the organisation assisted Edward Snowden leave Hong Kong. Sarah Harrison, a WikiLeaks activist, accompanied Snowden on the flight. According to US investigators, WikiLeaks played an active role in assisting Snowden to disclose a cache of NSA documents. Scott Shane of The New York Times stated that the involvement "shows that despite its shoestring staff, limited fund-raising from a boycott by major financial firms, and defections prompted by Mr. Assange's personal troubles and abrasive style, it remains a force to be reckoned with on the global stage."

In September 2013, Julian Assange announced the creation of the WikiLeaks counterintelligence unit. The project surveilled 19 surveillance contractors to understand their business dealings. According to Assange, they were "tracking the trackers" to "counter threats against investigative journalism and the public's right to know."

The WikiLeaks Party was created in 2013 in part to support Julian Assange's failed bid for a Senate seat in Australia in the 2013 election, where it won 0.62% of the national vote. Assange said the party would advance WikiLeaks' objectives of promoting openness in government and politics and that it would combat intrusions on individual privacy. In December 2013, a delegation from the party, including its chairman John Shipton, visited Syria and met with President Bashar al-Assad. Shipton said the goal of the meeting was demonstrating "solidarity with the Syrian people and their nation", improving the party's understanding of the country's civil war and told a Syrian TV station that WikiLeaks would be opening an office in Damascus in 2014. The meeting with Assad was criticized by the Australian Prime Minister, Foreign Minister and many WikiLeaks supporters. Shipton stated that the meeting with al-Assad was "just a matter of good manners" and that the delegation had also met with members of the Syrian opposition. However, these meetings with the opposition have not been verified. The WikiLeaks Party was deregistered by the Australian Electoral Commission on 23 July 2015 for lack of members under s.137(4) of the Electoral Act.

In 2015, WikiLeaks began issuing "bounties" of up to $100,000 for leaks. Assange had said in 2010 that WikiLeaks didn't but "would have no problem giving sources cash" and that there were systems in Belgium to let them. WikiLeaks has issued crowd-sourced rewards for the TTIP chapters, the TPP and information on the Kunduz massacre. WikiLeaks has issued other bounties for LabourLeaks, 2016 U.S. Presidential election-related information, and information to get a reporter at The Intercept fired over the Reality Winner case. WikiLeaks has defended the practice with their vetting record, saying "police rewards produce results. So do journalistic rewards."

Its website stated in 2015 that it had released 10 million documents online.

2016 U.S. presidential election

Assange wrote on WikiLeaks in February 2016: "I have had years of experience in dealing with Hillary Clinton and have read thousands of her cables. Hillary lacks judgement and will push the United States into endless, stupid wars which spread terrorism. ... she certainly should not become president of the United States." WikiLeaks editor Sarah Harrison stated that the site was not choosing which damaging publications to release, rather releasing information available to them. In conversations that were leaked in February 2018, Assange expressed a preference for a Republican victory in the 2016 election.

Having released information about a broad range of organisations and politicians, WikiLeaks started by 2016 to focus almost exclusively on Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. In the 2016 U.S. presidential election, WikiLeaks only exposed material damaging to the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton. According to The New York Times, WikiLeaks timed one of its large leaks so that it would happen on the eve of the Democratic Convention. The Sunlight Foundation, an organisation that advocates for open government, said that such actions meant that WikiLeaks was no longer striving to be transparent but rather sought to achieve political goals.

Secret correspondence between WikiLeaks and Donald Trump Jr.

In November 2017, it was revealed that the WikiLeaks Twitter account secretly corresponded with Donald Trump Jr. during the 2016 presidential election. The correspondence shows how WikiLeaks actively solicited the co-operation of Trump Jr., a campaign surrogate and advisor in the campaign of his father. WikiLeaks urged the Trump campaign to reject the results of the 2016 presidential election at a time when it looked as if the Trump campaign would lose. WikiLeaks suggested the Trump campaign leak Trump's taxes to them. WikiLeaks asked Trump Jr. to share a WikiLeaks tweet with the made-up quote "Can't we just drone this guy?" which True Pundit said Hillary Clinton made about Assange. WikiLeaks also shared a link to a site that would help people to search through WikiLeaks documents. Trump Jr. shared both. After the election, WikiLeaks also requested that the president-elect push Australia to appoint Assange as ambassador to the US. Trump Jr. provided this correspondence to congressional investigators looking into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Assange repeated his offer of being ambassador to the US after the messages became public, publicly tweeting to Donald Trump Jr. that "I could open a hotel style embassy in DC with luxury immunity suites for whistleblowers. The public will get a turbo-charged flow of intel about the latest CIA plots to undermine democracy. DM me".

The secretive exchanges led to criticism of WikiLeaks by some former supporters. WikiLeaks tweeted that the Clinton campaign was "constantly slandering" it as "a 'pro-Trump' 'pro-Russia' source". Journalist Barrett Brown, a long-time defender of WikiLeaks, was exasperated that Assange was "complaining about 'slander' of being pro-Trump IN THE ACTUAL COURSE OF COLLABORATING WITH TRUMP". He also wrote: "Was "Wikileaks staff" lying on Nov 10, 2016, when they claimed, "The allegations that we have colluded with Trump, or any other candidate for that matter, or with Russia, are just groundless and false", or did Assange lie to them?"

Brown said Assange had acted "as a covert political operative", thus betraying WikiLeaks' focus on exposing "corporate and government wrongdoing". He considered the latter to be "an appropriate thing to do", but that "working with an authoritarian would-be leader to deceive the public is indefensible and disgusting".

Promotion of false conspiracy theories

In 2016 and 2017, WikiLeaks promoted several false conspiracy theories. Most of them were related to the 2016 United States presidential election.

Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton

WikiLeaks popularised conspiracy theories about the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton, such as tweeting articles which suggested Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta engaged in satanic rituals, implying that the Democratic Party had Seth Rich killed, claiming that Hillary Clinton wanted to drone strike Assange, suggesting that Clinton wore earpieces to debates and interviews, promoting thinly sourced theories about Clinton's health and according to Bloomberg creating "anti-Clinton theories out of whole cloth".

Promotion of false flag theories

On the day the Vault 7 documents were first released, WikiLeaks described UMBRAGE as "a substantial library of attack techniques 'stolen' from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation," and tweeted, "CIA steals other groups virus and malware facilitating false flag attacks." A conspiracy theory soon emerged alleging that the CIA framed the Russian government for interfering in the 2016 U.S. elections. Conservative commentators such as Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter speculated about this possibility on Twitter, and Rush Limbaugh discussed it on his radio show. Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said that Vault 7 showed that "the CIA could get access to such 'fingerprints' and then use them."

In The Washington Post the cybersecurity researcher Ben Buchanan writes that he is sceptical of those theories and that he believes Russia to have initially obtained the DNC emails.

In April 2017, the WikiLeaks Twitter account suggested that the Khan Shaykhun chemical attack, which international human rights organisations and governments of the United States, United Kingdom, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, France, and Israel attributed to the Syrian government, was a false flag attack. WikiLeaks stated that "while western establishment media beat the drum for more war in Syria the matter is far from clear", and shared a video by a Syrian activist who said that Islamist extremists were probably behind the chemical attack, not the Syrian government.

Later years

In 2016, the WikiLeaks Twitter account was criticised for tweets that were seen as antisemitic.

On 17 October 2016, WikiLeaks announced that a "state party" had severed the Internet connection of Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy. WikiLeaks blamed United States Secretary of State John Kerry of pressuring the Ecuadorian government in severing Assange's Internet, an accusation which the United States State Department denied. The Ecuadorian government stated that it had "temporarily" severed Assange's Internet connection because of WikiLeaks' release of documents "impacting on the U.S. election campaign," although it also stated that this was not meant to prevent WikiLeaks from operating. The United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded that in 2016, "WikiLeaks actively sought, and played, a key role in the Russian influence campaign and very likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence influence effort."

In April 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said that the US Government had prioritised its attempts to arrest Assange: "We have professionals that have been in the security business of the United States for many years that are shocked by the number of leaks and some of them are quite serious. So yes, it is a priority. We've already begun to step up our efforts and whenever a case can be made, we will seek to put some people in jail." In 2017, traffic to the WikiLeaks website was diverted by DNS hijacking. In 2018, 11,000 messages from a private chat with WikiLeaks and key supporters from May 2015 through November 2017 leaked. The messages showed WikiLeaks plotting against critics with online attack campaigns and false identities, and contain political bias, sexism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism. The messages were leaked by a former associate of Assange who had created the group at WikiLeaks' request. Later that year, "tens of thousands" of files from WikiLeaks laptops leaked to the Associated Press.

In January 2019, WikiLeaks sent journalists a "confidential legal communication not for publication" with a list of 140 things not to say about Julian Assange that WikiLeaks said were "false and defamatory". Soon after the list leaked online, WikiLeaks posted a heavily edited version of it. The group was criticised and mocked for the list and their handling of it.

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.

Administration

WikiLeaks describes itself as "an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking" with its goal being "to bring important news and information to the public". It is "a project of the Sunshine Press", a non-profit organisation based in Iceland. In 2010, Julian Assange and Kristinn Hrafnsson registered Sunshine Press Productions ehf as a business without a headquarters in Iceland.

Assange serves as the Director of Sunshine Press Productions ehf and is on the board of directors with Hrafnsson and Ingi Ragnar Ingason. Gavin MacFadyen was a deputy board member. In 2010, the WikiLeaks team then consisted of five people working full-time and about 800 people who worked occasionally, none of whom were compensated. Former WikiLeaks journalist James Ball said in 2011 that "WikiLeaks is not a conventional organisation. It has no board, no governance, and no effective rules."

Editorial policy

The scholar and internet activist Ethan Zuckerman suggested that WikiLeaks' editorial policy changes can be viewed as different stages. In the first stage, Zuckerman says WikiLeaks did very little redacting and almost all leaks were accepted, and the main focus was on leakers protecting their identities. In response to early criticism that having no editorial policy would drive out good material with spam and promote "automated or indiscriminate publication of confidential records", WikiLeaks established a policy that only accepted only documents "of political, diplomatic, historical or ethical interest" (and excluded "material that is already publicly available"). Under the new policy, submissions 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.

According to Zuckerman, the second stage was "an advocacy journalism phase". Zuckerman gave the April 2010 release of Collateral Murder as an example, which MIT Technology Review described as a "highly curated, produced and packaged political statement ... meant to illustrate a political point of view, not merely to inform". Zuckerman said the third stage involved WikiLeaks working with outside media outlets to curate cables for release. In December 2010, Zuckerman speculated that the next stage would be for WikiLeaks to release documents all at once or without redacting them. In 2016, Assange said that "often it’s the case that we have to do a lot of exploration and marketing of the material we publish ourselves to get a big political impact for it".

An embargo agreement WikiLeaks made for the Stratfor leak aimed to ensure that media organisations in smaller countries with less resources that are collaborating with WikiLeaks got a fair shot at covering the stories that involve their country. The Atlantic suggested that the complexity of the embargo had been a source of confusion amongst media partners. In 2017, WikiLeaks told Foreign Policy that it sometimes scheduled releases around high-profile events.

In response to a question in 2010 about whether WikiLeaks would release information that he knew might get someone killed, Assange said that he had instituted a "harm-minimization policy." This meant that people named in some documents might be contacted before publication, but that there were also times were members of WikiLeaks might have "blood on our hands." One member of WikiLeaks told The New Yorker they were initially uncomfortable with Assange's editorial policy but changed her mind because she thought no one had been unjustly harmed.

Financing

WikiLeaks is a not-for-profit organisation and is funded by private donations, exclusivity contracts and concessions from their media partners. Assange has said that in some cases legal aid has been donated by media organisations such as the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, and the National Newspaper Publishers Association. Assange said in early 2010 that WikiLeaks' only revenue consists of donations, but it has considered other options including auctioning early access to documents. In September 2010, Assange said that WikiLeaks received millions of dollars in media partnerships, stating it "win[s] concessions in relation to the number of journalists that will be put on it and how big they'll run with it."

In 2010, Assange said the organisation was registered as a library in Australia, a foundation in France, and a newspaper in Sweden, and that it also used two United States-based non-profit 501c3 organisations for funding purposes. According to Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Assange registered Wikileaks ICT in Australia and would not tell anyone how much money was in the Australian fund or what it was being spent on.

2010–2013

The Wau Holland Foundation, one of the WikiLeaks' main funding channels, stated that it received more than €900,000 in public donations between October 2009 and December 2010, of which €370,000 has been passed on to WikiLeaks. Hendrik Fulda, vice-president of the Wau Holland Foundation, said that every new WikiLeaks publication brought "a wave of support", and that donations were strongest in the weeks after WikiLeaks started publishing leaked diplomatic cables. According to Assange, WikiLeaks' media partnerships for the cables earned them almost $2 million three months after it started publishing. WikiLeaks was paid £150,000 by Al Jazeera and Channel 4 for two five-minute video clips about the Iraq War Logs. In December 2010, Assange said that WikiLeaks received €100,000 a day at its peak and the Wau Holland Foundation stated that Julian Assange and three other permanent employees had begun to receive salaries.

During 2010, WikiLeaks received over $1.9 million in donations. In 2011, donations dropped sharply and WikiLeaks received only around $180,000 in donations, while their expenses increased from $519,000 to $850,000. In 2011, Al Jazeera offered WikiLeaks $1.3 million for access to data. During September 2011, WikiLeaks began auctioning items on eBay to raise funds. Wikileaks started accepting bitcoin in 2011 as a currency which could not be blocked by financial intuitions or a government. In 2012, WikiLeaks raised $68,000 through the Wau Holland Foundation and had expenses more than $507,000. In 2013, WikiLeaks and Wau Holland Foundation agreed that Wau Holland Foundation would only cover direct costs such as server, ISP, project coordination and translation costs. Between January and May, Wau Holland Foundation was only able to cover $47,000 in essential infrastructure for WikiLeaks, but not an additional $400,000 that was submitted "to cover publishing campaigns and logistics in 2012".

David Allen Green wrote in The New Statesman in 2011 that there was "no other sensible way of interpreting" leaked non-disclosure agreements other than WikliLeaks seeing itself "as a commercial organisation in the business of owning and selling leaked information" and "that WikiLeaks is nothing other a highly commercially charged enterprise, seeking to protect and maximise its earnings from selling information that has been leaked to it." Becky Hogge, who had signed the agreement, wrote that "the NDA certainly is poorly drafted, and it may be terrible PR. But remember that WikiLeaks is an organisation conceived and run by computer hackers" and suggested that WikiLeaks was attempting to "engage with the commercial media on its own terms".

Financial blockade

On 22 January 2010, the Internet payment intermediary PayPal suspended WikiLeaks' account and froze its assets. WikiLeaks said that this had happened before, and was done for "no obvious reason". In August 2010, the internet payment company Moneybookers closed WikiLeaks' account and sent Assange letters saying the account was closed following an audit "to comply with money laundering or other investigations conducted by government authorities." According to Moneybookers, initially the "account was suspended due to being accessed from a blacklisted IP address. However, following recent publicity and the subsequently addition of the WikiLeaks entity to blacklists in Australia and watchlists in the USA, we have terminated the business relationship." The blacklisting came a few days after the Pentagon expressed anger at WikiLeaks for publishing the Afghan War logs.

In December 2010, PayPal suspended WikiLeaks' account. PayPal said it had taken action after the US State Department sent a letter to Wikileaks stating that Wikileaks' activities were illegal in the US. Hendrik Fulda, vice-president of the Wau Holland Foundation, said that the Foundation had been receiving twice as many donations through PayPal as through normal banks before PayPal's decision to suspend WikiLeaks' account. In this time, Mastercard, Visa Europe, Bank of America, Amazon, Western Union and Swiss bank PostFinance stopped dealing with WikiLeaks. Datacell, the IT company that enabled WikiLeaks to accept credit and debit card donations, threatened Mastercard and Visa with legal action to enforce the resumption of payments to WikiLeaks. Datacell said Visa's action was the result of political pressure.

In October 2011, Assange said that the financial blockade had cost WikiLeaks ninety-five per cent of its revenue. In 2012, an Icelandic district court ruled that Valitor, the Icelandic partner of Visa and MasterCard, was violating the law when it stopped accepting donations to WikiLeaks and that donations to WikiLeaks must resume within 14 days or Valitor would be fined US$6,000 a day. In November 2012, the European Union's European Commission said it wouldn't open a formal investigation into Mastercard and Visa for blocking donations because they were unlikely to have violated EU anti-trust rules. In 2013, Assange said the blockade also effected the WikiLeaks Party.

In response to the financial blockade of Wikileaks, Glenn Greenwald and others created the Freedom of the Press Foundation in order "to block the US government from ever again being able to attack and suffocate an independent journalistic enterprise the way it did with WikiLeaks". Anonymous also launched a series of cyberattacks against companies that cut ties with WikiLeaks.

2014–2018

In 2014, Sunshine Press Productions ehf began receiving funds from Wau Holland Foundation for WikiLeaks. From 2014 to 2017 WikiLeaks was reimbursed for project coordination, technical preparation, removing metadata, reviewing information, communicating with media partners costs and a new submission platform and document search. The DNC emails and Podesta emails were not funded by the Wau Holland Foundation. In October 2017, Julian Assange said WikiLeaks had made a 50,000% return on Bitcoin. By that December, it had raised at least $25 million in Bitcoin.

In 2018, the Wau Holland Foundation reimbursed Sunshine Press Productions for WikiLeaks' publications, as well as public relations and $50,000 for legal expenses in the Democratic National Committee v. Russian Federation lawsuit.

Hosting

In 2010, the website was available on multiple servers, different domain names and had an official dark web version as a result of a number of denial-of-service attacks and its removal from different Domain Name System (DNS) providers.

Until August 2010, WikiLeaks was hosted by PRQ, a Swedish company providing "highly secure, no-questions-asked hosting services". PRQ was reported by The Register to have "almost no information about its clientele and maintains few if any of its own logs". That month, WikiLeaks reached an agreement with the Swedish Pirate Party to host several of their servers. Later, WikiLeaks was hosted mainly by the Swedish Internet service provider Bahnhof in the Pionen facility, a former nuclear bunker in Sweden. Other servers were spread around the world with the main server located in Sweden.

After the site became the target of a denial-of-service attack, WikiLeaks moved its website to Amazon's servers. Amazon later removed the website from its servers. Assange said that WikiLeaks chose Amazon and other hosts knowing it would probably be kicked off the service "in order to separate rhetoric from reality". In a public statement, Amazon said 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 then moved to servers at French provider OVH. After criticism from the French government, a judge in Paris ruled that there was no need for OVH to cease hosting WikiLeaks without more information.

WikiLeaks was dropped by EveryDNS 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.

Insurance files

WikiLeaks has used heavily encrypted files to protect their publications against censorship, to pre-release publications, and as protection against arrest. The files have been described as "insurance", a "dead man's switch", "a kind of doomsday option", and a "poison pill". The insurance files sometimes come with pre-commitment hashes.

WikiLeaks staff have said that "insurance files are encrypted copies of unpublished documents submitted to us. We do this periodically, and especially at moments of high pressure on us, to ensure the documents can not be lost and history preserved. You will not be able to see the contents of any of our insurance files, until and unless the we are in a position where we must release the key. But you can download them and help spread them to ensure their safe keeping."

On 29 July 2010 WikiLeaks added an AES encrypted "Insurance file" to the Afghan War Diary page. There has been speculation that it was intended to serve as insurance in case the WikiLeaks website or its spokesman Julian Assange are incapacitated, upon which the passphrase could be published. After the release of the US diplomatic cables, CBS predicted that "If anything happens to Assange or the website, a key will go out to unlock the files. There would then be no way to stop the information from spreading like wildfire because so many people already have copies." Assange's lawyer, Mark Stephens, called the files "a thermo-nuclear device in the information age" and said they included information on Guantanamo Bay, aerial video of a U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan that allegedly killed civilians, BP reports and Bank of America documents. After the release of the insurance file, the US government urgently tried to track down Afghan informants and was examining "on a case-by-case basis" how to help them informants by giving them security or moving them.

In August 2013, WikiLeaks posted three insurance files as torrents, totalling 400 gigabytes. WikiLeaks said it "encrypted versions of upcoming publication data ("insurance") from time to time to nullify attempts at prior restraint."

In June 2016, WikiLeaks posted an 88-gigabyte insurance file. On 16 October 2016, WikiLeaks tweeted an insurance file about Ecuador. In November, it posted insurance files for the US, the UK and Ecuador, and an unlabelled 90 gigabyte insurance file was posted.

On 7 March 2017, WikiLeaks posted an encrypted file containing the Vault 7 Year Zero release. The password, SplinterItIntoAThousandPiecesAndScatterItIntoTheWinds, was a reference to a quote by US President John F. Kennedy first published by the New York Times in April 1966.

Staff

In July 2010, it was reported the website had 800 occasional helpers. According to Daniel Domscheit-Berg, WikiLeaks exaggerated the number of volunteers and Assange used many pseudonyms. Domscheit-Berg suggested that Assange may have been "Jay Lim", who identified online as an occasional WikiLeaks spokesperson and as its legal advisor.

Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Sarah Harrison, Kristinn Hrafnsson and Joseph Farrell are notable people 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. Jacob Appelbaum is the only known American member of WikiLeaks, acting as a senior editor and spokesman. Gottfrid Svartholm had worked with WikiLeaks as a technical consultant and managed infrastructure critical to the organization. He was also listed as part of the "decryption and transmission team" on Collateral Murder and credited for "networking" and helped with several other endeavors. Rop Gonggrijp, Birgitta Jónsdóttir, Smári McCarthy and Herbert Snorrason are WikiLeaks volunteers and members who the US government has tried to surveil with court orders. WikiLeaks was represented in Russia by Israel Shamir and in Sweden by his son Johannes Wahlström.

The WikiLeaks dropbox architecture was rebuilt by a WikiLeaks programmer known to most insiders as "The Architect". He also instructed another WikiLeaks technician, and some of colleagues thought he was a computer genius. According to Andy Greenberg, insiders told him "when The Architect joined WikiLeaks it was a mess. It was two creaking servers without all the flashy security that Assange had promised in interviews with the media. The Architect rebuilt it from scratch." According to Wired, "WikiLeaks had been running on a single server with sensitive backend components like the submission and e-mail archives connected to the public-facing Wiki page. The Architect separated the platforms and set up a number of servers in various countries."

In August 2011, WikiLeaks volunteer Sigurdur Thordarson, working in his home country Iceland, contacted the FBI and became the first FBI informant to work from inside WikiLeaks, and gave the FBI several hard drives he had copied from Assange and core WikiLeaks members. In November 2011, WikiLeaks dismissed Thordarson due to his embezzlement of $50,000, to which charge (along with several other offences) he later pleaded guilty in an Icelandic court. According to Thordarson, a few months after his dismissal by WikiLeaks the FBI agreed to pay him $5,000 as compensation for work missed while meeting with agents.

Alexa O'Brien briefly worked for WikiLeaks in 2014, later saying the organization was not a good fit. 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.

Submissions

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". Before this, the Wikileaks FAQ, under "How will Wikileaks operate?", read as of February 2007:

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.

WikiLeaks stopped using a "wiki" communal publication method by May 2010. After the arrest of Chelsea Manning in May 2010, WikiLeaks distanced itself from the idea it actively encouraged people to send classified information, and changed the description of its submission page to say "WikiLeaks accepts a range of material, but we do not solicit it". WikiLeaks removed "classified" from a description of material it accepts and changed the assertion that "submitting confidential material to WikiLeaks is safe, easy and protected by law" to it "is protected by law in better democracies". WikiLeaks also began taking steps to position itself as a news organisation, and portrayed their work as filtering and analyzing documents, not just posting them raw.

In 2010 Assange said WikiLeaks received some submissions through the postal mail. That year, Julian Assange said that the servers were located in Sweden and the other countries "specifically because those nations offer legal protection to the disclosures made on the site". He said the Swedish constitution gives the information–providers total legal protection and that it is forbidden for any administrative authority to make inquiries about the sources of any type of newspaper. This could make it difficult for any authority to target WikiLeaks by placing a burden of proof upon any complainant. According to the Columbia Journalism Review, "a variety of Swedish media law experts made it clear that Assange and WikiLeaks had repeatedly misrepresented not only the strength of the law, but its application to WikiLeaks."

According to Andy Greenberg and Wired, The Architect was the engineer who rebuilt the WikiLeaks submission system and instructed another WikiLeaks technician. When The Architect joined WikiLeaks, it was running on one or two servers "without all the flashy security that Assange had promised in interviews with the media". The Architect rebuilt it and separated the sensitive platforms from the public-facing Wiki and set up servers in various countries. During the 2010 reorganisation, The Architect left with Domscheit-Berg, taking the code behind the submission system with him. Assange said that the submission system was temporarily down because its backlog was too big. WikiLeaks later said it was down because of Domscheit-Berg's "acts of sabotage" when he left the organisation, which had forced WikiLeaks to "overhaul the entire submission system", and the staff lacked time to do so.

WikiLeaks submissions stayed offline for four and a half years, until May 2015. While it was offline, WikiLeaks announced it was building a state-of-the-art secure submission system. The launch of the new system was delayed by security concerns about SSL certificates in 2011. During this time, WikiLeaks continued to publish documents. These publications originated from material which had been directly shared with WikiLeaks by hackers, or were the result of Wikileaks organising and republishing already-public leaks. In a October 2011 press conference, Assange said that because the submission system didn't work, sources "had to establish contacts with the organisation and transmit us the material through other mechanisms". In 2011, Frobes suggested that Andy Müller-Maguhn and Bugged Planet might be WikiLeaks' source for the Spy Files and in 2018 a former WikiLeaks associate said that Müller-Maguhn and a colleague administered the submission server in 2016, though Müller-Maguhn denies this. That October, WikiLeaks suggested "lawyer to lawyer" as an alternate submission method, naming Margaret Ratner Kunstler.

Assange told writer Charles Glass in 2023 that WikiLeaks was no longer able to publish due to his imprisonment and the effect that US government surveillance and WikiLeaks' funding restrictions were having on potential whistleblowers. Assange said that other media outlets were not filling the void.

Spin-offs

Release of United States diplomatic cables was followed by the creation of a number of other organisations based on the WikiLeaks model. WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson responded to the idea positively, saying that having more organisations like WikiLeaks was good. In 2012, Andy Greenberg said there were more than 50 spin-offs including BaltiLeaks, BritiLeaks, BrusselsLeaks, Corporate Leaks, CrowdLeaks, EnviroLeaks, FrenchLeaks, GlobaLeaks, Indoleaks, IrishLeaks, IsraeliLeaks, Jumbo Leaks, KHLeaks, LeakyMails, Localeaks, MapleLeaks, MurdochLeaks, Office Leaks, PinoyLeaks, PirateLeaks, QuebecLeaks, RuLeaks, ScienceLeaks, TradeLeaks, and UniLeaks.

• BalkanLeaks was created in December 2010 and published transcripts of wiretaps in a bribery case against Bulgarian officials, and criminal complaints and trial transcripts of Bulgarian prosecutors.
• RuLeaks was launched in December 2010 to translate and mirror publications by WikiLeaks. In January 2011, it started to publish its own content as well.
• OpenLeaks was created by a former WikiLeaks spokesperson. Daniel Domscheit-Berg said the intention was to be more transparent than WikiLeaks. OpenLeaks was supposed to start public operations in early 2011 but despite much media coverage, as of April 2013^[update] it is not operating.
• Leakymails is a project designed to obtain and publish relevant documents exposing corruption of the political class and the powerful in Argentina.
• On 9 September 2013 a number of major Dutch media outlets supported the launch of Publeaks, which provides a secure website for people to leak documents to the media using the GlobaLeaks whistleblowing software.
• Distributed Denial of Secrets is a whistleblower site founded in 2018. Sometimes referred to as an alternative to WikiLeaks, it's best known for its publication of a large collection of internal police documents, known as BlueLeaks. The site has also published data on Russian oligarchs, fascist groups, shell companies, tax havens, banking in the Caymans and the Parler leak.

See also

In Spanish: WikiLeaks para niños