Classified documents appear on WikiLeaks.org, revealing that the American government is spying on its allies.  American officials rush to deal with a sudden diplomatic crisis while publicly refusing to comment on leaked materials.  And WikiLeaks proclaims that it's just getting started. 

You could be forgiven for thinking you'd woken up in the fall of 2010, at the height of Cablegate, when Wikileaks released a massive dump of the State Department's classified communications.  But no—it's 2015, Julian Assange has a beard, and WikiLeaks is back in the business of leaking top-secret documents that even world leaders can't ignore. 

On Tuesday night WikiLeaks released a collection of documents it's called Espionnage Élysée, a collection of classified NSA files that show that the US intelligence agency has been spying on French heads of state going back three administrations.  The documents even include evidence that the NSA listened in on the French presidents' phone calls.  On Wednesday the French foreign ministry summoned the American ambassador to a meeting to explain that snooping, and president Francois Hollande issued a statement that "France will not tolerate actions that threaten its security and the protection of its interests." 

Aside from the leak's revelation that France, like Germany, falls under the NSA's virtually limitless spying on foreigners, it also represents a milestone for WikiLeaks: the first top-secret document it's published in years.  Taken along with an accelerating series of other recent WikiLeaks releases and the re-launch of its submission system for anonymous leaks, it seems to show that WikiLeaks may be returning to form, as a combative champion of whistleblowers and the bane of every government agency that works in secret. 

"Since the submission system finally became operational, there's been a significant change," says Birgitta Jonsdottir, a member of the Icelandic parliament who worked as a member of WikiLeaks until close to the prolific peak of its publications in late 2010.  Jonsdottir left the group following disagreements with its founder Julian Assange, and has since become an occasional critic of its activities. " It seems like they're gaining traction again... The leaks are coming.  It seems like it’s back to how WikiLeaks used to be." 

The strongest sign of new life from WikiLeaks is its effort to enable leakers to give it fresh material. 

In late 2014 and the first half of this year, WikiLeaks' leaks have indeed been accelerating.  It published drafts of the secret Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement.  It leaked secret EU documents outlining a plan for military intervention against boats of refugees traveling across the Mediterranean from Libya to Italy.  It published the account of a whistleblower concerned over safety problems in the UK's Trident nuclear program.  It revealed a CIA document detailing how the agency makes decisions about who to assassinate and when.  And just last week it released the first of a half million secret documents from within the Saudi Arabian government, which it plans to trickle out through Middle Eastern media partners over the coming months. 

Those sorts of bombshells mark a gradual but significant shift out of a five-year period when WikiLeaks seemed to have diminished in activity—or at points practically gone into hibernation.  In 2013, for instance, WikiLeaks mostly published already-public files, like the court documents of WikiLeaks ally and Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg as well as a collection of unclassified US State Department Cables from the 1970s.  At the time, the group almost seemed to have transformed from the world's most radical journalists into its most controversial librarians. 

But the strongest sign of new life from WikiLeaks is its efforts to enable and even incentivize leakers to give it fresh material.  In early May, it relaunched its submission system, a Tor-based dark web site designed to guarantee anonymity to any submitter.  That leak portal had once represented the core of the WikiLeaks idea: A no-questions-asked drop box for the world's secrets that any whistleblower could access with the least possible risk.  But it went offline in late 2010, the result of a mutiny of several WikiLeakers who had bristled under Assange's leadership.  For nearly five years, the system remained offline, leaving leakers to search out Assange or his associates through other, potentially riskier means of communication. 

Now that leak portal is back.  And WikiLeaks isn't just accepting leaks, but for the first time, trying to get leakers paid for them.  In a new "competition," which it calls the Prize for Understanding Good Government or PUGG, WikiLeaks is crowdsourcing donations from visitors and offering the resulting cash them to anyone who leaks a certain document.  The project has already issued a call for a $100,000 bounty for the 26 chapters of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, and raised nearly $75,000 from about 1,500 donors. 

When WIRED contacted WikiLeaks' Icelandic spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson to ask about its new momentum, he resisted the notion that WikiLeaks is making a comeback. " You're assuming we went away," says Hrafnsson. " It has been a natural phenomenon since 2010 to proclaim that WikiLeaks is dead.  The news of our death has been greatly exaggerated." 

But Hrafnsson admits that WikiLeaks was hamstrung for much of the last half decade by legal and financial attacks on the group, including a refusal by Visa, MasterCard, Paypal, and Bank of America to process its donations. " We were without significant funds for a period of almost three years," says Hrafnsson. " We had to scale down, to abandon plans to expand.  We didn’t grow in the way we wanted to, and a lot of our resources in manpower and finances had to be used on all these legal challenges, some of which are still ongoing." 

Those "challenges" include Sweden's demand that Assange come to Stockholm to face questioning for alleged sex crimes against two women.  The Australian just marked his third year of life in London's Ecuadorean embassy, where he's sought asylum to avoid extradition.  A grand jury investigation in the United States appears to be continuing in secret.  Just last week Google revealed that it had been sent a warrant for more of the private data of Jacob Appelbaum, an American security researcher and journalist associated with the group. 

None of that seems to have deterred WikiLeaks from continuing its new spate of leaks.  It's promised to follow up on its French NSA leak with "further evidence as to US true goals in its mass espionage of France."  And Hrafnsson claims the group is in some ways in better shape than it was at its peak in 2010. " We’ve strengthened our infrastructure, our ability to process huge databases has grown, we’ve expanded our network of media alliances," he says. " We are in a much stronger position in many ways than we were five years ago." 

"Of course we depend on the materials that whistleblowers and sources want to contribute to our website for publication," Hrafnsson adds. " But we're ready to take off."