What is whistleblowing website Wikileaks?

Wikileaks has been in the news several times over the past couple of years. The ‘whistleblowing’ site specialises in taking leaked documents, pictures, video or other files and distributing them so everyone can see them.

It has become a useful resource for anyone who wants to see the secrets of companies and governments out in the open.

What is it?
Earlier this year in July, The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel, published detailed investigations into the ongoing Afghan war, which were based on secret documents leaked from the Pentagon and published by Wikileaks.

It’s not the first time Wikileaks has provided information that embarrassed the American military. In April the site released 39 minutes of classified video footage taken from an American Apache helicopter, showing the apparent shooting by its crew of a wounded Reuters employee and other civilians.

The site doesn’t limit itself to military documents. It was also behind the release in 2009 of the membership list of the British National Party, as well as emails between scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit.

In 2008 Wikileaks released documents from followers of the controversial Scientology movement and from the sale of failed bank Northern Rock. It has published the Australian government’s list of banned websites (which included the web page of a dentist in Queensland) and documents on how Kenyan government officials stole up to $3bn dollars.

It has also been used to report on banks and other corporations attempting to cover up dodgy deals or illegal activity – some of which cannot be reported in the UK because of court injunctions.

Wikileaks spokesperson Daniel Schmitt (who uses a false name) told a journalism conference the site’s role was “to publish information that no-one else can publish legally.”

Who is it?
Wikileaks describes itself as an ‘open-government group’, ‘anti-corruption group’, ‘transparency group’ or ‘whistleblower’s website’. Like its namesake Wikipedia the site is open for anyone to contribute and edit pages, but unlike Wikipedia, pages on Wikileaks are checked by its staff of ‘professional journalists and anti-corruption analysts’ before appearing online.

Anyone with a document or other files to distribute is free to do so through Wikileaks, but all documents are checked for authenticity, the site says. It uses encryption to ensure contributor anonymity as well as to allow it to distribute documents between its staff (while the site is based in Sweden, the staff are located around the world).

According to a 2010 interview, there are only five full-time staff and 800 part-time workers, but none are paid. The site is funded by donations, but it has had legal support from newspapers and news agencies.

Wikileaks staff keep a low profile. The website started in 2007 and had a repository of 1.2 million documents by 2008, but it was not until 2010 that founder Julian Assange and Daniel Schmitt started to regularly appear in the media. Other staff are not usually named, and on its site it calls itself a project of The Sunshine Press, which only describes itself as an international non-profit organisation funded by the public, human rights campaigners, journalists, technologists and lawyers.