WikiLeaks: An Editor-In-Chief Or Prolific Source? : NPR Enlarge this image Julian Assange, founder and editor of the WikiLeaks website, faces the media during a debate in London last week. On Sunday, the website released some 90,000 leaked U.S. Army and intelligence documents relating to the war in Afghanistan. Max Nash/AP hide caption toggle caption Max Nash/AP Julian Assange, founder and editor of the WikiLeaks website, faces the media during a debate in London last week. On Sunday, the website released some 90,000 leaked U.S. Army and intelligence documents relating to the war in Afghanistan. Max Nash/AP The shadowy website WikiLeaks proved this week it can obliterate the ability of the U.S. government and the military to smother the circulation of closely held secrets. Earlier this week, the site's posting of more than 90,000 classified documents about the war in Afghanistan prompted a criminal investigation and calls from some congressional Democrats to rethink American involvement there. But its decision to give The New York Times , The Guardian in the U.K.

and Der Spiegel in Germany an advance look — and thus inspire heavy coverage in three major Western powers — has sparked an intense debate inside the journalism profession. Defining The Terms Much of the debate centers on how to define what WikiLeaks actually is. "I've shied away from the term 'whistle-blower' because that has a kind of, you know, halo around the term," says New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller. "But they are an advocacy organization. They have a point of view, and an ideology and they have a modus operandi, which consists of getting information wherever they can, and making it public." Indeed, the people from WikiLeaks argue that most secrets should be revealed to the world. They use servers in countries scattered across the globe to evade detection and software to cloak leakers in utter anonymity. Article continues after sponsorship The group's Australian leader, Julian Assange, lives a life on the run, saying he has much to fear from governments he has angered. He has strongly suggested that some acts by American service members are "war crimes," and he opposes the U.S. presence in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Its earlier release of a video showing American helicopter troops in Baghdad shooting a Reuters photographer and other Iraqis was provocatively titled " Collateral Murder " and criticized by some as anti-war propaganda. Assange explicitly decided against giving Pentagon officials a chance to provide context. But Assange also calls himself WikiLeaks' editor-in-chief, a news executive's title, and in an interview with NPR , he seemed to suggest he considered himself part of a journalistic enterprise — saying "we" several times in describing what he thought journalists should and should not do. Steven Aftergood, director of the government transparency project for the Federation of American Scientists , has fought to pry open classified records for years. But he notes that WikiLeaks traffics in all manner of secrets, such as the private rites of college sororities and Masons and Mormons. Aftergood says WikiLeaks often fails to ask fundamental journalistic questions about the material it posts: Is it relevant to public policy, or to public accountability? Does it injure anyone? "It seems they have adopted a stance that secrecy is always wrong and that disclosure — even if it's compulsory, unwilling disclosure of private individuals' records — is always justified," Aftergood says.

"And to my mind, that's not just wrong, it's idiotic and dangerous." 'Learning From Experience' Yet Aftergood says WikiLeaks sometimes provides a public service and this is one of those times. WikiLeaks focused on a matter of true public interest; it took safety considerations into account, and it invited experienced journalists from authoritative publications to review the authenticity and import of the documents it intended to publish. "I think these are signs that WikiLeaks is learning from experience, as we all should," Aftergood says. Journalists for the Times authenticated documents, selected relevant ones for publication, and presented their findings to Pentagon officials. The paper withheld elements that editors felt might endanger American military personnel, Afghan civilians or the war effort more generally — and provided a back channel, through editors at The Guardian — for some concerns from Defense Department officials. WikiLeaks held back about 15,000 documents for further review. Journalist Shane Harris, author of the book The Watchers, about government surveillance since the Sept. 11 attacks, says WikiLeaks unnerves government officials because it appears to act utterly beyond their reach. But here, Harris says, Assange played a journalistic, or at least a journalistic-ish, role. "There's obviously no accreditation process for something like this.

But in this case, yeah, I think he is actually acting like an editor," says Harris, who covers intelligence issues for Washingtonian magazine. "I almost look at him, in this particular instance, as someone who got ahold of information from a source [and] decided he wanted to bring in other journalists to partner with him in the publication of that information. "It's like, you know, The New York Times pairing with Frontline," Harris says. A 'Source,' Not A Journalistic Partner Assange was frustrated by the lack of coverage about earlier postings by WikiLeaks. He says the sheer volume of leaked documents overwhelmed journalists. The exclusive arrangements with the Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel, Assange tells NPR, gave their reporters time to verify and write about the documents — and an incentive to do so. And Assange says the project represents a collaboration with those publications. Not so, says Keller of the Times. "First of all, I don't call it a collaboration or alliance," Keller says, "because that suggests some shared purpose, and it suggests they had some involvement in what we did with the material, which they did not.

They were a source." He says the documents were newsworthy because they provide texture and heft to earlier reporting about Afghan civilian deaths and ties between Pakistani intelligence and the Taliban. And Keller says WikiLeaks would have posted the documents no matter what his newspaper decided to do. "WikiLeaks doesn't need The New York Times or The Guardian," Keller says. "It has the ability to publish and circulate its stuff around the world ... instantaneously." That's the biggest change from the days of the Pentagon Papers, when a reporter for the Times spent weeks stealthily photocopying the secret official history of the Vietnam War. The game changers in the equation are the speed and the anonymity WikiLeaks now affords. The surprise is that the spectral new publisher showed it can find a new way to play by the rules — when it wants to. What is Wikileaks? - BBC News BBC News By Jonathan Fildes Technology reporter, BBC News 7 December 2010 Close share panel Image caption Wikileaks has established a reputation for publishing sensitive materials Whistle-blowing website Wikileaks has dominated the news, both because of its steady drip feed of secret documents, but also because of the dealings of its enigmatic front man Julian Assange.

The recent release of thousands of sensitive diplomatic cables is just the latest in a long list of "leaks" published by the secretive site, which has established a reputation for publishing sensitive material from governments and other high-profile organisations. In October the site released almost 400,000 secret US military logs detailing its operations in Iraq. They followed hot on the heels of nearly 90,000 classified military records, which gave an insight into the military strategy in Afghanistan. And in April 2010, for example, Wikileaks posted a video on its website that shows a US Apache helicopter killing at least 12 people - including two Reuters journalists - during an attack in Baghdad in 2007. A US military analyst is currently awaiting trial, on charges of leaking the material along with the cables and military documents. Legal wrangles However, the site's recent prominence is part of a longer and controversial history that started in December 2006, when it first hit the net. Since that time it has split opinion.

Game of cat-and-mouse 28 Nov: First cables released 29 Nov: US brands cable leaks an "attack on the international community" and says criminal investigation ongoing 29 Nov: Former US vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin calls for Mr Assange to be "pursued with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders" 3 Dec: Wikileaks forced to change web address after coming under cyber attack 3 Dec: Sweden issues new European arrest warrant for Mr Assange over sex crime allegations but wording is wrong 6 Dec: Sweden issues new warrant and passes it to police in UK 7 Dec: Mr Assange is arrested in London after voluntarily walking into a police station For some it is lauded as the future of investigative journalism; it has been described as the world's first stateless news organisation. For others - particularly the governments and corporations whose secrets it exposes - it is a risk. In October 2009, it posted a list of names and addresses of people it claimed belonged to the British National Party (BNP). The BNP said the list was a "malicious forgery".

And during the 2008 US elections, it published screenshots of the e-mail inbox, pictures and address book of vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Other controversial documents hosted on the site include a copy of the Standard Operating Procedures for Camp Delta, a document that detailed restrictions placed on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Many of these were uploaded to the website, which allows anyone to submit documents anonymously. However, a team of reviewers - volunteers from the mainstream press, journalists and Wikileaks staff - decides what is published. "We use advanced cryptographic techniques and legal techniques to protect sources," Mr Assange told the BBC in February. The site says that it accepts "classified, censored or otherwise restricted material of political, diplomatic or ethical significance" but does not take "rumour, opinion or other kinds of first hand reporting or material that is already publicly available". "We specialise in allowing whistle-blowers and journalists who have been censored to get material out to the public," said Mr Assange. It is operated by an organisation known as the Sunshine Press and claims to be "funded by human rights campaigners, investigative journalists, technologists and the general public". Since Wikileaks first appeared on the net, it has faced various legal challenges to take it offline.

Prior to the most recent leaks, it said it had fought off more than 100 legal challenges successfully. In 2008, for example, the Swiss bank Julius Baer won a court ruling to block the site after Wikileaks posted "several hundred" documents about its offshore activities. It was eventually overturned. Money matters But more recently, the site has faced new challenges. The private life of Mr Assange, its editor-in-chief, has been laid bare and it has lost key staff and supporters. "[To] keep our sources safe, we have had to spread assets, encrypt everything, and move telecommunications and people around the world to activate protective laws in different national jurisdictions Julian Assange The site has also been targeted in a series of cyber attacks. Various firms - including web giant Amazon - have also terminated agreements to host the site and provide services to it. In addition, companies - including Mastercard, Visa and PayPal - have withdrawn the ability that allows people to donate to the site. Its Swiss bank account has also been closed. But it is not the first time that the site has faced financial problems. In February 2010 it suspended operations as it could not afford its own running costs. Donations from individuals and organisations saved the site.

Only time will tell, if it can do it again with many sources of funding now cut off. Despite all of these setbacks, Wikileaks has largely remained defiantly online. It has moved its operations between various companies and countries. It has also encouraged volunteers to set up "mirrors" of the site - hosted on different servers around the world. "[To] keep our sources safe, we have had to spread assets, encrypt everything, and move telecommunications and people around the world to activate protective laws in different national jurisdictions," Mr Assange said earlier this year. Throughout its history, the site has been supported and hosted by the Swedish ISP PeRiQuito (PRQ), which became famous for hosting file-sharing website The Pirate Bay. "If it is legal in Sweden, we will host it, and will keep it up regardless of any pressure to take it down," the ISP's site says. The ISP continues to host its most recent - and most controversial - documents. The site also hosts documents in other jurisdictions, including France.

Its experience of different laws around the world meant that it was drafted to help Icelandic MPs draw up plans for its Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI) earlier this year The plan calls on the country's government to adopt laws protecting journalists and their sources. Expansion plan Its involvement in the IMMI gave the site a new credibility. At the same time, it has grown and gained more notoriety. The site's rapid expansion - and the amount of material it has recently received - has meant that it has had to change its tactics. In the past, it was able to verify and publish documents itself. But for its most recent leaks it has adopted a new tactic - partnering with news organisations such as the Guardian, Der Spiegel and the New York Times - to help check and distribute the material. "We take care of the source and act as a neutral intermediary and then we also take care of the publication of the material whilst the journalist that has been communicated with takes care of the verification," Mr Assange said earlier this year. "It provides a natural… connection between a journalist and a source with us in the middle performing the function that we perform best." Everything You Need to Know About Wikileaks Everything You Need to Know About Wikileaks Two experts lay out the facts surrounding the controversy.

December 9, 2010 What is Wikileaks? Wikileaks is a self-described “not-for-profit media organization,” launched in 2006 for the purposes of disseminating original documents from anonymous sources and leakers. Its website says: “Wikileaks will accept restricted or censored material of political, ethical, diplomatic or historical significance. We do not accept rumor, opinion, other kinds of first hand accounts or material that is publicly available elsewhere.” More-detailed information about the history of the organization can be found on Wikipedia (with all the caveats that apply to a rapidly changing Wiki topic). Wikipedia incidentally has nothing to do with Wikileaks—both share the word “Wiki” in the title, but they’re not affiliated. Who is Julian Assange, and what is his role in the Wikileaks organization? Julian Assange is an Australian citizen who is said to have served as the editor-in-chief and spokesperson for Wikileaks since its founding in 2006. Before that, he was described as an advisor. Sometimes he is cited as its founder. The media and popular imagination currently equate him with Wikileaks itself, with uncertain accuracy.

In 2006, Assange wrote a series of essays that have recently been tapped as an explanation of his political philosophy. A close reading of these essays shows that Assange’s personal philosophy is in opposition to what he calls secrecy-based, authoritarian conspiracy governments, in which category he includes the US government and many others not conventionally thought of as authoritarian. Thus, as opposed to espousing a philosophy of radical transparency, Assange is not “ about letting sunlight into the room so much as about throwing grit in the machine. ” For further analysis, check out Aaron Bady ’s original blog post. Why is Wikileaks so much in the public eye right now? At the end of November 2010, Wikileaks began to slowly release a trove of what it says are 251,287 diplomatic cables acquired from an anonymous source. These documents came on the heels of the release of the “Collateral Murder” video in April 2010, and Afghan and Iraq War logs in July 2010 and October 2010, which totaled 466,743 documents.

The combined 718,030 are said to originate from a single source, thought to be U.S. Army intelligence analyst Pfc. Bradley Manning , who was arrested in May 2010, but that’s not confirmed. Has Wikileaks released classified material in the past? Yes, under an evolving set of models. Berkman Fellow Ethan Zuckerman has some interesting thoughts on the development of Wikileaks and its practices over the years, which will be explained in greater detail when the Berkman Center podcast about Wikileaks is released later this week. In the meantime, here’s a capsule version. Wikileaks has moved through three phases since its founding in 2006. In its first phase, during which it released several substantial troves of documents related to Kenya in 2008, Wikileaks operated very much with a standard wiki model: the public readership could actively post and edit materials, and it had a say in the types of materials that were accepted and how such materials were vetted. The documents released in that first phase were more or less a straight dump to the Web: very little organized redacting occurred on the part of Wikileaks.

Wikileaks’s second phase was exemplified with the release of the “Collateral Murder” video in April 2010. The video was a highly curated, produced and packaged political statement. It was meant to illustrate a political point of view, not merely to inform. The third phase is the one we currently see with the release of the diplomatic cables: Wikileaks working in close conjunction with a select group of news organizations to analyze, redact and release the cables in a curated manner, rather than dumping them on the Internet or using them to illustrate a singular political point of view. What news organizations have access to the diplomatic cables and how did they get them? According to the Associated Press , Wikileaks gave four news organizations ( Le Monde , El Pais , The Guardian and Der Spiegel ) all 251,287 classified documents before anything was released to the public. The Guardian subsequently shared its trove with The New York Times . So have all 251,287 documents been released to the public? No. Each of the five news organizations is hosting the text of at least some of the documents in various forms with or without the relevant metadata (country of origin, classification level, reference ID).

The Guardian and Der Spiegel have performed analyses of the metadata of the entire trove, excluding the body text. The Guardian’s analysis is available for download from its website . Wikileaks itself has released (as of December 7, 2010) 960 documents out of the total 251,287. The Associated Press has reported that Wikileaks is only releasing cables in coordination with the actions of the five selected news organizations. Julian Assange made similar statements in an interview with Guardian readers on December 3, 2010. Cables are being released daily as the five news organizations publish articles related to the content. Is each of the five news organizations hosting all the documents that Wikileaks has released? No. Each of the five news organizations hosts a different selection of the released documents, in different forms, which may or may not overlap. It’s not clear how much they’re coordinating on releasing new documents, since each appears to have a full set and normally newspapers would be eager to scoop one another. How are the five news organizations releasing the cables? Le Monde has created an application, developed in conjunction with Linkfluence , that hosts the searchable text of several hundred cables.

The text can be searched by the sender (country of origin, office or official), date range, persons of interest cited in the docs, classification status, or any combination of the above. Only the untranslated, English text of the cables can be accessed and cut-and-paste is not available. El Pais offers access to more than 200 cables, available in the original English or in Spanish translation, searchable by country of origin and key terms and subjects (such as “Google and China”). These searches also return El Pais articles written on a given subject, often placed ahead of the cables in the search listings. The paper also offers a “ How to read a diplomatic cable ” feature, explaining what all the abbreviations and technical verbiage mean in plain speak, posted on November 28, 2010. The Guardian offers the cable data in several forms: It has performed an analysis of metadata of the entire 251,287-document trove, and made it available in several forms (spreadsheets hosted on Google Docs and in downloadable form) as well as infographics. The Guardian also hosts at least 422 cables on its website, searchable by subject, originating country, and countries referenced.

The New York Times hosts what it calls a “selection of the documents from a cache of a quarter-million confidential American diplomatic cables that WikiLeaks intends to make public starting on November 28. The webpage goes on to say “A small number of names and passages in some of the cables have been removed by The New York Times to protect diplomats’ confidential sources, to keep from compromising American intelligence efforts or to protect the privacy of ordinary citizens.” The documents are not searchable and are organized by general subject. Who is responsible for redacting the documents? What actions did Wikileaks take to ensure that individuals were not put in danger by publication of the documents? According to the Associated Press and statements released by Wikileaks and Julian Assange , Wikileaks is currently relying on the expertise of the five news organizations to redact the cables as they are released, and it is following their redactions as it releases the documents on its website. (This cannot be verified without examining the original documents, which we have not done—nor are we linking to them here.) According to the BBC , Julian Assange approached the U.S. State Department for guidance on redacting the documents prior to their release.

One can imagine the State Department’s dilemma there: assist and risk legitimating the enterprise; don’t assist and risk poor redaction. In a public letter , Harold Koh, legal adviser to the Department of State, declined to assist the organization and demanded the return of the documents. Are the documents hosted anywhere else on the Internet? What is the “insurance” file? In late July 2010, Wikileaks is said to have posted to its Afghan War Logs site, and to a torrent site an encrypted file with “insurance” in the name. The file, which apparently can still be found on various peer-to-peer networks, is 1.4 gigabytes and is encrypted with AES256 , a very strong encryption standard which would make it virtually impossible to open without the password. What is in the insurance file is not known. It has been speculated that it contains the unredacted cables provided by the original source(s), as well as other, previously unreleased information held by Wikileaks. There is further speculation, which has been indirectly boosted by Julian Assange, that the key to the file will be distributed in the event of either the death of Assange or the destruction of Wikileaks as a functioning organization.

However, none of these things is known. All that is known for sure is that it’s a really big file with heavy encryption that’s already in a number of people’s hands and floating around for others to get. What happens if Wikileaks gets shut down? Can it be shut down? It depends on what’s meant by “Wikileaks” and what’s meant by “shut down.” Julian Assange has made statements suggesting that if Wikileaks becomes nonfunctional as an organization, the key to the encrypted “insurance” file will be released (the key itself is not a big document and could presumably fit into Twitter messages). The actual machination of how such a “ dead man’s switch ” would release the key is not known. If the key were released, and if the encrypted insurance file contains unredacted and unreleased secret documents, then those decrypted files would be available to many people nearly instantaneously. Wikileaks claimed in August that the insurance file had been downloaded more than 100,000 times. Wikileaks apparently maintains a small paid staff—who and where is not exactly on a “people” page, though there used to be a physical P.O.

box in Australia where documents could be sent—and is additionally supported by volunteers, speculated to be at most a few thousand. So, would it be possible for a motivated organization to disrupt its real-world infrastructure? Yes, probably. However, at this point, it is not practical to recover the information the organization has already distributed (which includes the entire trove of diplomatic cables to the press as well as whatever is in the encrypted insurance file), as well as any other undistributed information the organization might seek to release. So in terms of the recovery of leaked information, the downfall of Wikileaks as an organization would matter little. Furthermore, there appear to be currently more than 1,000 sites mirroring Wikileaks and its content. Wikileaks has made available downloadable files containing its entire archive of released materials to date. Why did wikileaks.org stop working as a way to find the site? For a traditional website to work it needs a domain name like “website.com” so that people can find it easily with a Web browser. The domain name system (“DNS”) is hierarchical—information is spread from a zone containing several top-level (root) servers down to zones containing lower-level servers—but the top level servers do not determine everything held by servers lower down.

Domain names can stop working for any number of reasons. One common assumption is is that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which manages certain top-level protocol and parameter assignments for the Internet, intervened in the case of Wikileqaks. It did not. A little technical discussion to explain why: The root zone orchestrated by ICANN is a very small file — just a mapping between each top-level domain (“TLD”) like .org or .ch to the IP address(es) of servers designated to say more about that TLD (one server, not in ICANN’s hands, keeps track of names under .org, one for names under .ch, etc.). So the only thing ICANN could do is to all-or-nothing delete .org or .ch, making every domain name with that ending disappear temporarily. Note that wikileaks.org went down not because of anything done to its DNS entry within the list kept by the registry that manages.org domains (full disclosure: I’m on the board of Trustees for the non-profit Internet Society (ISOC) which is the parent to the Public Interest Registry , which keeps track of names in .org).

Instead, the name server to which its entry pointed (even lower down the DNS chain) was attacked with a flood of traffic by unknown parties and EveryDNS , the operator of that name server, chose to stop answering queries about Wikileaks in the hopes that the attack would stop. (Apparently it did.) A website also needs hosting, and Wikileaks has apparently had to shift its hosting at least once after being dropped by a chosen provider: Amazon’s commodity hosting service shut down the site for terms of service violations after being contacted by U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman. On a more technical level, the Wikileaks website can come under attack, and its means of collecting money can be made much more difficult. Jonathan Zittrain is a professor of law and professor of computer science at Harvard, and co-founder of its Berkman Center for Internet & Society; Molly Sauter is a research assistant at the Berkman Center. Further updates will appear at Tagged Why WikiLeaks Is Good for America | WIRED Why WikiLeaks Is Good for America subscribe 6 months for $5 - plus a FREE Portable Phone Charger. Author: Evan Hansen. Evan Hansen Security Date of Publication: 12.06.10.

Time of Publication: 7:49 pm. 7:49 pm Why WikiLeaks Is Good for America A truly free press — one unfettered by concerns of nationalism — is apparently a terrifying problem for elected governments and tyrannies alike. It shouldn’t be. In the past week, after publishing secret U.S. diplomatic cables, secret-spilling site WikiLeaks has been hit with denial-of-service attacks on its servers by unknown parties; its backup hosting provider, Amazon, booted WikiLeaks off its hosting service; and PayPal has suspended its donation-collecting account , damaging WikiLeaks’ ability to raise funds. MasterCard announced Monday it was blocking credit card payments to WikiLeaks, saying the site was engaged in illegal activities, despite the fact it has never been charged with a crime. Meanwhile, U.S. politicians have ramped up the rhetoric against the nonprofit, calling for the arrest and prosecution and even assassination of its most visible spokesman, Julian Assange. Questions about whether current laws are adequate to prosecute him have prompted lawmakers to propose amending the espionage statute to bring Assange to heel or even to declare WikiLeaks a terrorist organization. WikiLeaks is not perfect, and we have highlighted many of its shortcomings on this website.

Nevertheless, it’s time to make a clear statement about the value of the site and take sides: WikiLeaks stands to improve our democracy, not weaken it. The greatest threat we face right now from WikiLeaks is not the information it has spilled and may spill in the future, but the reactionary response to it that’s building in the United States that promises to repudiate the rule of law and our free speech traditions, if left unchecked. Secrecy is routinely posited as a critical component for effective governance, a premise that’s so widely accepted that even some journalists, whose job is to reveal the secret workings of governments, have declared WikiLeaks’ efforts to be out of bounds. We should embrace the site as an expression of the fundamental freedom that is at the core of our Bill of Rights. Transparency, and its value, look very different inside the corridors of power than outside. On the campaign trail, Barack Obama vowed to roll back the secrecy apparatus that had been dramatically expanded under his predecessor, but his administration has largely abandoned those promises and instead doubled-down on secrecy. One of the core complaints against WikiLeaks is a lack of accountability. It has set up shop in multiple countries with liberal press protections in an apparent bid to stand above the law.

It owes allegiance to no one government, and its interests do not align neatly with authorities’. Compare this, for example, to what happened when the U.S. government pressured The New York Times in 2004 to drop its story about warrantless wiretapping on grounds that it would harm national security. The paper withheld the story for a year-and-a-half. WikiLeaks’ role is not the same as the press’, since it does not always endeavor to vet information prior to publication. But it operates within what one might call the media ecosystem, feeding publications with original documents that are found nowhere else and insulating them against pressures from governments seeking to suppress information. Instead of encouraging online service providers to blacklist sites and writing new espionage laws that would further criminalize the publication of government secrets, we should regard WikiLeaks as subject to the same first amendment rights that protect The New York Times. And as a society, we should embrace the site as an expression of the fundamental freedom that is at the core of our Bill of Rights, not react like Chinese corporations that are happy to censor information on behalf of their government to curry favor. WikiLeaks does not automatically bring radical transparency in its wake.

Sites like WikiLeaks work because sources, more often than not pricked by conscience, come forward with information in the public interest. WikiLeaks is a distributor of this information, if an extraordinarily prolific one. It helps guarantee the information won’t be hidden by editors and publishers who are afraid of lawsuits or the government. WikiLeaks has beaten back the attacks against it with the help of hundreds of mirror sites that will keep its content available, despite the best efforts of opponents. Blocking WikiLeaks, even if it were possible, could never be effective. A government’s best and only defense against damaging spills is to act justly and fairly. By seeking to quell WikiLeaks, its U.S. political opponents are only priming the pump for more embarrassing revelations down the road. Evan Hansen is Editor-in-Chief of Wired.com. 'Manhunting Timeline' Further Suggests US Pressured Countries to Prosecute WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief - Shadowproof 0 0 Julian Assange (Photo by Antonio Marín Segovi via flickr) An entry in something the government calls a “Manhunting Timeline” suggests that the United States pressured officials of countries around the world to prosecute WikiLeaks editor-in-chief, Julian Assange, in 2010.

The file—marked unclassified, revealed by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden and published by The Intercept—is dated August 2010. Under the headline, “United States, Australia, Great Britain, Germany, Iceland” – it states: The United States on 10 August urged other nations with forces in Afghanistan, including Australia, United Kingdom and Germany, to consider filing criminal charges against Julian Assange, founder of the rogue WikiLeaks Internet website and responsible for the unauthorized publication of over 70,000 classified documents covering the war in Afghanistan. The documents may have been provided to WikiLeaks by Army Private First Class Bradley Manning. The appeal exemplifies the start of an international effort to focus the legal element of national power upon non-state actor Assange and the human network that supports WikiLeaks. Another document— a top-secret page from an internal wiki—indicates there has been discussion in the NSA with the Threat Operations Center Oversight and Compliance (NOC) and Office of General Counsel (OGC) on the legality of designating WikiLeaks a “malicious foreign actor” and whether this would make it permissible to conduct surveillance on Americans accessing the website.

“Can we treat a foreign server who stores or potentially disseminates leaked or stolen data on its server as a ‘malicious foreign actor’ for the purpose of targeting with no defeats?” Examples: WikiLeaks, thepiratebay.org). The NOC/OGC answered, “Let me get back to you.” (The page does not indicate if anyone ever got back to the NSA. And “defeats” essentially means protections.) GCHQ, the NSA’s counterpart in the UK, had a program called “ANTICRISIS GIRL,” which could engage in “targeted website monitoring.” This means data of hundreds of users accessing a website, like WikiLeaks, could be collected. The IP addresses of readers and supporters could be monitored. The agency could even target the publisher if it had a public dropbox or submission system. NSA and GCHQ could also target the foreign “branches” of the hacktivist group, Anonymous. An answer to another question from the wiki entry involves the question, “Is it okay to query against a foreign server known to be malicious even if there is a possibility that US persons could be using it as well?

Example: thepiratebay.org.” The NOC/OGC responded, “Okay to go after foreign servers which US people use also (with no defeats). But try to minimize to ‘post’ only for example to filter out non-pertinent information.” WikiLeaks is not an example in this question, however, if it was designated as a “malicious foreign actor,” then the NSA would do queries of American users. In fact, this is how the NOC/OGC would respond to allegations that Americans who visit WikiLeaks had been illegally or inappropriately targeted: Those living outside the US have no protections. Though there is no “terrorism” being investigated here, US intelligence agencies believe they would have the authority to collect data on any person who visits these websites, like WikiLeaks and The Pirate Bay. Of course, since the US partners with intelligence agencies (for example, the “Five Eyes Club”), that data could easily make it back to the government of the country where the targeted foreigners live and the government could use that data against those persons.

Assange, who was granted asylum from Ecuador and has been living in the country’s embassy in the UK for over 600 days, said on “Democracy Now!”, “Finally we have some proof we can present to the public for what we’ve long suspected.” He said this was espionage against a publisher, and he was surprised at how someone could be added to a “foreign malicious actor” list so the government could avoid checks and target a “human network” of people in the US. The NSA, when asked by the Intercept, explained the entry on prosecuting Assange as a “summary derived from a 2010 article” in the Daily Beast. This article quote anonymous US officials who said, “The Obama administration is pressing Britain, Germany, Australia, and other allied Western governments to consider opening criminal investigations of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and to severely limit his nomadic travels across international borders.” It does not use strong language like focus the “legal element of national power.” This is a convenient statement to obfuscate involvement in an act of targeting the editor-in-chief of a media organization, which was engaged in by numerous US government agencies in 2010.

After publication of the Afghanistan war logs (US military incident reports from Afghanistan), the US government wanted to shut WikiLeaks down. There is no real evidence that the US government has indicted or secretly charged Assange or any other staffers from WikiLeaks, however, that does not mean that Assange’s fear of prosecution has not been further validated by these documents. Michael Ratner, a lawyer from the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) who represents WikiLeaks, said on “Democracy Now!”, this shows he has every reason to fear what would happen if he set foot outside of the embassy. The files show some of the extent to which the US and UK have tried to destroy WikiLeaks. CCR added in a statement, “These NSA documents should make people understand why Julian Assange was granted diplomatic asylum, why he must be given safe passage to Ecuador, and why he must keep himself out of the hands of the United States and apparently other countries as well.

These revelations only corroborate the expectation that Julian Assange is on a US target list for prosecution under the archaic “Espionage Act,” for what is nothing more than publishing evidence of government misconduct.” “These documents demonstrate that the political persecution of WikiLeaks is very much alive,”Baltasar Garzón, the Spanish former judge who now represents the group, told The Intercept. “The paradox is that Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks organization are being treated as a threat instead of what they are: a journalist and a media organization that are exercising their fundamental right to receive and impart information in its original form, free from omission and censorship, free from partisan interests, free from economic or political pressure.” Government personnel in spy agencies in GCHQ and the NSA spent some of their time in at least 2010 monitoring the movements and activities of Assange as they would a terrorist or drug trafficker. He was subject to resources and personnel who commit themselves to “manhunts” in which people are located, prosecuted, captured or killed. (Alarmingly, Palestinian leaders are included in this “Manhunting Timeline” too, which Palestinians might like to know more about.) The government’s investigation into WikiLeaks has been ongoing and still continues.

Despite the claims of anonymous government officials, if the government does not intend to prosecute Assange or any other member of WikiLeaks, why is there a grand jury investigation still ongoing in Alexandria, Virginia? Why are people like Jesselyn Radack, one of Snowden’s lawyers, interrogated by Heathrow Airport Border Force agents about their meetings with Assange? The Obama administration has been content to maintain a cloud of fear over WikiLeaks. That the government believed WikiLeaks had committed crimes enabled companies like PayPal, Visa and MasterCard to enact a blockade that cut off donations to WikiLeaks. Individuals like Tor software developer Jacob Appelbaum have been stopped multiple times by Homeland Security agents while traveling because of his ties to Assange and WikiLeaks. Laptops have allegedly been stolen from Assange. The US government’s surveillance and harassment of these people has convinced various others to distance themselves from the organization. (More documents published yesterday by journalist Alexa O’Brien show aspects of this effort .) James Goodale, former New York Times legal counsel who argued the Pentagon Papers case, has argued Obama has tried to succeed where Richard Nixon failed by making the “news gathering entities in this country and reporters criminally liable for what they do when they gather the news.

This would mean that the government will define the terms in which reporters and publishers can gather and publish the news, and we will lose that ability to do that ourselves or publishers will lose the ability to do that under the First Amendment.” There is no appreciation in intelligence agencies of the fact that WikiLeaks is a publisher—deserving of the same protections as The New York Times or The Washington Post. Furthermore, one might ask if it was a crime for WikiLeaks to hold documents that are a product of unauthorized disclosures on a server, what is happening now with the Times or Post? Has the NSA and GCHQ targeted their servers to see if they could somehow unearth some of the documents from Snowden that might soon be published? As Ratner said, the “Manhunting Timeline” seems to implicate individuals in a manner reminiscent of the FBI’s COINTELPRO. They understood they had to prosecute leaders of the black civil rights movement in any way they could to neutralize it and maintain the status quo of Jim Crow laws and other policies of segregation.

Today, the NSA and other partnered intelligence agencies are working to neutralize (evidently, in addition to Palestinian leaders), key people involved in the information and Internet freedom movements—those who are willing to engage in varying acts of civil disobedience or nonviolent resistance to challenge gross secrecy concealing massive corruption—as well as publishers of this material. WikiLeaks has always known that in operating its media organization it would have to deal with powerful organizations like the NSA, which do not adhere to the rule of law. These files from Snowden simply affirm the posture of the organization as one very wary of what the US might do next to stifle its ability to operate. Julian Assange on “Democracy Now!” this morning: {!hitembed ID=”hitembed_1″ width=”400″ height=”225″ align=”none” !} 0 0 Julian Assange (Photo by Antonio Marín Segovi via flickr) An entry in something the government calls a “Manhunting Timeline” suggests that the United States pressured officials of countries around the world to prosecute WikiLeaks editor-in-chief, Julian Assange, in 2010.

The file—marked unclassified, revealed by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden and published by The Intercept—is dated August 2010. Under the headline, “United States, Australia, Great Britain, Germany, Iceland” – it states: The United States on 10 August urged other nations with forces in Afghanistan, including Australia, United Kingdom and Germany, to consider filing criminal charges against Julian Assange, founder of the rogue WikiLeaks Internet website and responsible for the unauthorized publication of over 70,000 classified documents covering the war in Afghanistan. The documents may have been provided to WikiLeaks by Army Private First Class Bradley Manning. The appeal exemplifies the start of an international effort to focus the legal element of national power upon non-state actor Assange and the human network that supports WikiLeaks. Another document— a top-secret page from an internal wiki—indicates there has been discussion in the NSA with the Threat Operations Center Oversight and Compliance (NOC) and Office of General Counsel (OGC) on the legality of designating WikiLeaks a “malicious foreign actor” and whether this would make it permissible to conduct surveillance on Americans accessing the website.

“Can we treat a foreign server who stores or potentially disseminates leaked or stolen data on its server as a ‘malicious foreign actor’ for the purpose of targeting with no defeats?” Examples: WikiLeaks, thepiratebay.org). The NOC/OGC answered, “Let me get back to you.” (The page does not indicate if anyone ever got back to the NSA. And “defeats” essentially means protections.) GCHQ, the NSA’s counterpart in the UK, had a program called “ANTICRISIS GIRL,” which could engage in “targeted website monitoring.” This means data of hundreds of users accessing a website, like WikiLeaks, could be collected. The IP addresses of readers and supporters could be monitored. The agency could even target the publisher if it had a public dropbox or submission system. NSA and GCHQ could also target the foreign “branches” of the hacktivist group, Anonymous. An answer to another question from the wiki entry involves the question, “Is it okay to query against a foreign server known to be malicious even if there is a possibility that US persons could be using it as well?

Example: thepiratebay.org.” The NOC/OGC responded, “Okay to go after foreign servers which US people use also (with no defeats). But try to minimize to ‘post’ only for example to filter out non-pertinent information.” WikiLeaks is not an example in this question, however, if it was designated as a “malicious foreign actor,” then the NSA would do queries of American users. In fact, this is how the NOC/OGC would respond to allegations that Americans who visit WikiLeaks had been illegally or inappropriately targeted: Those living outside the US have no protections. Though there is no “terrorism” being investigated here, US intelligence agencies believe they would have the authority to collect data on any person who visits these websites, like WikiLeaks and The Pirate Bay. Of course, since the US partners with intelligence agencies (for example, the “Five Eyes Club”), that data could easily make it back to the government of the country where the targeted foreigners live and the government could use that data against those persons.

Assange, who was granted asylum from Ecuador and has been living in the country’s embassy in the UK for over 600 days, said on “Democracy Now!”, “Finally we have some proof we can present to the public for what we’ve long suspected.” He said this was espionage against a publisher, and he was surprised at how someone could be added to a “foreign malicious actor” list so the government could avoid checks and target a “human network” of people in the US. WikiLeaks - RationalWiki WikiLeaks — from WikiLeaks' twitter account WikiLeaks is a site that hosts leaked confidential documents, while preserving the anonymity of its contributors and staff. It operates as a news site, reviewing and commenting on documents it puts up. It aroused the ire of many governments and businesses — the Pentagon is out to get editor in chief Julian Assange personally — and showed the populace what effect journalism is supposed to have. However, any impartiality died when Assange dropped the crowd-focus and purged his co-founder. Contents [ edit ] Name WikiLeaks once used the MediaWiki software developed for Wikipedia , but now runs a CMS that has nothing to do with Wikis at all.

[ edit ] Operation WikiLeaks' stated aim is to expose the official corruption in repressive governments, but their door is open to almost any kind of leaked documents. Wikileaks is developing an uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis. Our 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. We aim for maximum political impact. Our interface is identical to Wikipedia and usable by all types of people. We have received over 1.2 million documents so far from dissident communities and anonymous sources. We believe that transparency in government activities leads to reduced corruption, better government and stronger democracies. All governments can benefit from increased scrutiny by the world community, as well as their own people. We believe this scrutiny requires information. Historically that information has been costly — in terms of human life and human rights. But with technological advances - the internet, and cryptography — the risks of conveying important information can be lowered. Assange formed his free speech ideals running a free speech ISP, suburbia.net (still extant) in the 1990s.

[note 1] He published a document in 2002, State and Terrorist Conspiracies, [1] setting out his aims in detail: to increase the friction in the mechanisms by which authoritarian governments conspire against their citizens, thus changing the lay of the land and forcing them to more open communication mechanisms. It's the inchoate hacker (as in cracker) free speech ideal of the 1980s developed into a coherent philosophy . Which is quite an achievement in itself! Draft chapters of the Trade in Services Agreement . [14] [ edit ] Afghanistan War logs On July 25th, 2010, Wikileaks released tens of thousands of classified military field reports in relation to the Afghanistan War . It provided the New York Times , [15] The Guardian , [16] and Der Spiegel [17] with over 90,000 classified military documents in what is being described as one of the biggest leaks in the history of the United States military . [18] The documents show that: There have been hundreds of unreported civilian deaths and soldiers frequently fudge the numbers in their field reports in counting dead civilians as 'insurgents'.

The Taliban apparently use heat-seeking missiles against allied aircraft, something the US has glossed over. Possibly because the US sold the technology their precursor groups during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 80s . Oops. The CIA pretty much runs their own paramilitary in Afghanistan , launching raids and ambushes, and even has the ability to call in airstrikes. Letting the CIA have such free roam is, of course, a great idea, since they are so well-known for respecting human rights . And the Afghanistan spy agency is essentially their bitch. It basically confirms what we knew already: that the US gives millions of dollars to Pakistan only for that money to be funneled to insurgents killing American soldiers. NYT says the military never really lied - just made misleading statements; however, saying aircraft have been brought down by conventional weapons when in fact they are using heat-seeking technology we sold them sounds an awful lot like an untrue statement — in other words, a lie, or crediting Afghan forces with victories when they really had nothing to do with it.

The parallel to the leaking of the Pentagon Papers (a US Department of Defense study that pretty much proved three consecutive US administrations had made a habit of lying straight in the face of the American people about the Vietnam War ) is evident. The reports paint a clear picture of Afghanistan and the war. Despite almost a decade of war and billions of dollars spent on it, the insurgency is not dying down, and is in fact getting stronger. The Taliban have a network of spies, informers and double agents working against the Afghan government and NATO forces. The Afghan National Army and police force are in disarray, plagued by corruption and abuse, and many will defect to the Taliban while the ones who stick it out become reviled by Afghan citizens. In fact, the population now actually thinks the Taliban was better than what they have now. Large portions of the country are controlled by warlords who are above the law, and the government is hopelessly corrupt. With poverty , corruption on every level, citizens under threat of constant violence, untrained soldiers and police officers and everything else detailed in the documents, it is hard to imagine the war could ever be won.

[ edit ] Philip Sales QC The UK's Court of Appeal ruled against all expectations on 12 August 2016 that 130,000 Labour members who joined the party after 12 January 2016 would not be able to vote in the leadership contest, in accordance with rules that the National Executive Committee decided after Jeremy Corbyn had left the room. [19] [20] This move was done by opponents of Corbyn in an effort to increase the chance of the more "electable" opponent of Corbyn (Owen Smith) becoming leader; [21] however, Corbyn seems to be the most likely candidate to win by any measure, and Owen Smith actually would make people less likely to become leader, according to Britain Elects.

[22] [23] Although RationalWiki cannot of course for legal reasons say directly that the ruling may have been less than impartial, it is a staggering co-incidence that the High Court Judge who ruled against the 130,000 Labour members in the Appeal Court in favour of the NEC just turns out to have worked for Tony Blair directly (who once urged supporters of Corbyn to "get a [heart] transplant" [24] ), and was a legal senior adviser to New Labour throughout their time in government. [25] The literature cited by WikiLeaks confirms that immediately after Labour 's victory in the 1997 general election, Sales was recruited by Tony Blair . Interestingly, it also reveals that Sales used to be a practising barrister at law chambers 11KBW, of which Tony Blair was a founder member. At the time of the appointment, there was an uproar over Sales' appointment and plunged Blair into a cronyism row.

According to The Guardian 's coverage of the sexual discrimination case brought against Sales' appointment, a source close to the case referred to 11KBW as a "network of old boys and cronies", and that there was "no coincidence that the appointment came from Lord Irvine's and Tony Blair's old chambers". Since his appointment in 1997, Sir Philip Sales managed to rack up a hefty bill to the taxpayer as the highest earning lawyer in the entire government. Moreover, as a key part of Blair's legal team, he also defended the Government's decision against holding a public inquiry into the Iraq War in the High Court in 2005. [26] [ edit ] December 2009 inactivity Wikileaks ran out of money in December 2009. The release of the "Collateral Murder" video reversed this and the donations started coming in again for a time, until PayPal, MasterCard, Visa, and Bank of America cut them off in reaction to the 2010 U.S. embassy leaks.

— Glenn Greenwald [28] Wikileaks was criticized after they released a document giving the names and details about the last remaining Jews in Baghdad, Iraq , thereby jeopardizing their safety. [29] [30] Other critics have made more general complaints about Wikileaks jeopardizing the safety of individuals. [31] [ edit ] Allegations of Facebook censorship Documents critical of Hillary Clinton – a person who Julian Assange has a personal mistrust for, following her calls to indict him after diplomatic leaks whilst Secretary of State [32] – have been blocked on Facebook : When WikiLeaks broke the Clinton email scandal in March 2016 and created an online, searchable repository of over 30,000 of Clinton's emails, [33] linking to the archive produced an error message for Facebook. This was blamed on an error with the anti-spam filter; [34] [35] however, when the hacked DNC emails (allegedly gained by Russian intelligence, and published at a time by Assange in order to destabilize the Clinton campaign [32] ) were released, the link to WikiLeaks was blocked again – and again, the excuse of the anti-spam filter running amok was used.

[36] [37] [ edit ] DNC hack On June 14, the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, under contract with the DNC, announced in a blog post that two separate Russian intelligence groups had gained access to the DNC network. One group, FANCY BEAR or APT 28, gained access in April. The other, COZY BEAR, (also called Cozy Duke and APT 29) first breached the network in the summer of 2015. [38] It's believed that FANCY BEAR represents the GRU, while COZY BEAR is the FSB. In Russia, two espionage groups compromising the same systems and engaging separately in the theft of identical credentials is not an uncommon sight as distrust and competition are common in authoritarian regimes, and are in fact often intentionally fueled by the dictator himself .

[39] The Russians then created a fake Romanian internet hacker, going by the name Guccifer 2.0, to clumsily whitewash their espionage and handed the emails to Wikileaks, who decided it would be a great idea to not redact personal information, including home addresses, phone numbers, passport numbers, credit card and social security numbers of thousands of donors to the DNC, many of whom were perfectly average American citizens, as well as keeping malware files in the emails that could damage anyone viewing the documents on WikiLeaks. [40] Besides the obvious legal issues, it seems difficult for even the most rabid transparency crusaders to think this could possibly be a good idea. Assange has never shied away from expressing his disdain for Hillary Clinton , and the releases of his hacks accordingly. The release of DNC emails was deliberately timed to maximally disrupt the proceedings of the DNC. [32] The slow, daily release of batches of the Podesta emails became an extended "October surprise" designed to hurt the Clinton campaign. WikiLeaks claims that this release strategy is based on their Stochastic Terminator Algorithm .

[41] [ edit ] Cooperating with neo-Nazis Swedish -based holocaust denier Israel Shamir works as a 'freelancer' for Wikileaks. Assange, aware of the dubious reputation of this individual, allegedly wanted to let him work with WikiLeaks under a false name so as to not attract unwanted attention. [42] Former Wikileaks spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg noted Wikileaks' ties to Shamir among the reasons he quit the organization. He described Shamir as a "famous Holocaust denier and anti-Semite." [43] Shamir was accused of concocting a cable which allegedly quoted European Union diplomats' plans to walk out of the Durban II speech by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad , for publication in the pro- Putin Russian Reporter in December 2010. [44] Shamir has also been accused of passing "sensitive cables" to the president of Belarus , Alexander Lukashenko. Such an event could physically endanger Lukashenko's political opponents. [45] Shamir's son, a journalist named Johannes Wahlström, is a spokesperson for WikiLeaks in Sweden.

Assange and WikiLeaks appear to be further cementing their ties to the racist far-right by opposing Milo Yiannopoulos ' Twitter ban, comparing it to the mass arrests after the failed military coup against Erdoğan in Turkey and Stalin 's Great Purge. WikiLeaks also pledged to build an alternative platform to the "cyber feudalis[t]" Twitter. [46] WikiLeaks has also promoted the alt-right aligned Breitbart.com's Clinton Cash books and videos. [47] [ edit ] Doxxing almost every woman in Turkey In the immediate aftermath of the 2016 coup attempt in Turkey , WikiLeaks' published links to 300,000 "Erdogan Emails", resulting in the doxxing of millions of Turkish people. None of the "Erdogan emails" turned out to be from Erdogan or his inner circle. [48] Mostly, they're correspondence and personal information from everyday Turkish citizens, which included the home addresses, phone numbers, party affiliations, and political activity levels of millions of female Turkish voters.

[49] [ edit ] Bromance with Putin “”#PanamaPapers Putin attack was produced by OCCRP [Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project] which targets Russia & former USSR and was funded by USAID & Soros. —WikiLeaks, defending their bro Putin from the "evil" Greenwald and his "Panama Papers" leak [50] Julian Assange, who hosted a show on Putin's propaganda channel " Russia Today ", appears to have a cozy relationship with the Russian government. National security expert and former United States counterintelligence officer John Schindler went as far as to state that "WikiLeaks is a front for Russian intelligence". [51] When MSNBC host Joy Reid tweeted that she planned to discuss the connection between WikiLeaks and the Russian government on her show, WikiLeaks' official twitter account responded by threatening that: "our lawyers will monitor your program." [52] WikiLeaks also responded to an article by Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall, which investigated ties between the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin, by accusing him of "weird priority".

[53] Assange founded a political party in his native Australia, the WikiLeaks Party, that in December of 2013 sent a delegation headed by Assange's own father to Syria , where the WikiLeaks Party members met with Syria's brutal dictator and Putin vassal [54] [55] [56] , Bashar al-Assad . Though Wikileaks later denied that they knew or approved of the meeting. [57] Reporters from The Daily Dot claimed that Wikileaks excluded evidence from their release of "The Syria Files" the showed evidence a transfer of €2 billion from the Central Bank of Syria to an account at the VTB Bank of Russia. Wikileaks denied the reporters' account of events, accused them of being Hillary Clinton supporters, and made an unspecified threat against them ("Go right ahead, but you can be sure we will return the favour one day."). [58] [59] Assange also requested that his private security detail be provided by Russia's secret police agency and KGB successor, the FSB . [note 2] [60] [51] [61] [ edit ] Putting on the tinfoil hat “”There is no US election. There is power consolidation.

Rigged primary, rigged media and rigged 'pied piper' candidate drive consolidation. —WikiLeaks on Twitter [62] WikiLeaks' staff believes that the 2016 DNC was using a "white noise machine" against the disruptive minority of Sanders' delegates. [63] Said machines turned out to be an arena Wi-Fi hot spot installed a year before, [64] but that's what a HillaryShill would want you to believe! After DNC staffer Seth Rich was murdered in what the police believe was attempted robbery, [65] WikiLeaks went full Vince Foster and issued a $20,000 reward for information on the murder. [66] They were swiftly criticized by Seth Rich's grieving family for politicizing the investigation. [67] Joel Rich, Seth's father, called the theories about his son's death "bizarre" and accused WikiLeaks of "playing a game". [68] Just before the 2016 presidential election, WikiLeaks highlighted a hacked email where performance artist Marina Abramović invited the Podesta brothers to a soup dinner as a reward for their donations to her Kickstarter campaign.

However, Abramović named this dinner after one of her performance pieces, Spirit Cooking, leading WikiLeaks to tweet that the Podesta brothers ingested "blood, sperm and breastmilk," stoking unfounded rumors that the Clinton campaign engaged in Satanism . [69] [ edit ] Outing in the "Saudi Cables" “”We can't sit on material like this for three years with one person to go through the whole lot, line-by-line, to redact. We have to take the best road that we can. —Assange, no longer giving a fuck [70] WikiLeaks have leaked the identities of thousands of people in Saudi Arabia , and didn't bother to look through it properly, outing gay people, rape victims and people with HIV , all of whom could be killed for various reasons. [71] The Associated Press reported: [72] In the past year alone, the radical transparency group has published medical files belonging to scores of ordinary citizens while many hundreds more have had sensitive family, financial or identity records posted to the web. In two particularly egregious cases, WikiLeaks named teenage rape victims.

In a third case, the site published the name of a Saudi citizen arrested for being gay, an extraordinary move given that homosexuality is punishable by death in the ultraconservative Muslim kingdom. "They published everything: my phone, address, name, details," said a Saudi man who told AP he was bewildered that WikiLeaks had revealed the details of a paternity dispute with a former partner. "If the family of my wife saw this ... Publishing personal stuff like that could destroy people." The AP found that the Saudi diplomatic cables alone hold at least 124 medical files. Medical records are everywhere considered a person's most private information, yet Wikileaks has absolutely no problem publishing identity records, phone numbers and other information easily exploited by criminals. A partial scan done by the AP of the leak turned up more than 500 passport, identity, academic or employment files. "This has nothing to do with politics or corruption," said Dr. Nayef al-Fayez, a consultant in the Jordanian capital of Amman who confirmed that a brain cancer patient of his was among those whose details were published to the web. Dr. Adnan Salhab, a retired practitioner in Jordan who also had a patient named in the files, expressed anger when shown the document.

"This is illegal what has happened," he said in a telephone interview. "It is illegal!" One, a partially disabled Saudi woman who'd secretly gone into debt to support a sick relative, said she was devastated. She'd kept her plight from members of her own family. "This is a disaster," she said in a phone call. "What if my brothers, neighbors, people I know or even don't know have seen it? What is the use of publishing my story?" The AP also found three dozen records containing messages about marriages, divorces, missing children, elopements and custody battles. Many are very personal, like the marital certificates which reveal whether the bride was a virgin. One divorce document details a male partner's infertility. Others identify the partners of women suffering from sexually transmitted diseases including HIV and Hepatitis C. The info dumped by WikiLeaks also identifies domestic workers who'd been tortured or sexually abused by their employers, giving the women's full names and passport numbers. Files also name a male teenager who was raped by a man while abroad; another male teenager who was so violently raped his legs were broken and details of a Saudi man detained for "sexual deviation" , which is how homosexuality is described in Saudi Arabia.

Scott Long, an LGBT rights activist who has worked in the Middle East, said the names of rape victims were off-limits. And he worried that releasing the names of people persecuted for their sexuality only risked magnifying the harm caused by oppressive officials. "You're legitimizing their surveillance, not combating it," Long said. WikiLeaks response to this? Calling AP's revelations a "recycled attack" and somehow mixing in more whining about Hillary Clinton . [73] [74] [ edit ] Funding In 2011, Wikileaks is funded by public donations. In response to donations being blocked by PayPal and the major credit cards, Wikileaks has sought out alternative means of accepting donations. After numerous questionable moral decisions on the part of their refusal to curate their leaks of personal information, supporting them may not be in the best interest of transparency.

Question: What is the name of the Editor in Chief of Wikileaks?
Answer: JULIAN ASSANGE