Assange, a noted computer hacker, pleaded guilty to a host of cybercrime charges in 1991, but due to his youth he received only minimal punishment. He was inspired to create WikiLeaks by Daniel Ellsberg’s 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers. Observing that two years had elapsed between Ellsberg’s obtaining the Pentagon Papers and their publication in The New York Times, Assange sought to streamline the whistle-blowing process. In 2006 he created the basic design for the site on a computer in Australia, but wikileaks.org soon moved to servers in Sweden (later adding redundant systems in other countries) because of that country’s robust press-protection laws. Although WikiLeaks relied on volunteer labour for much of its daily operation, it deviated from the traditional “wiki” formula in that its content was not editable by end users.
WikiLeaks received its first batch of sensitive documents not from a whistle-blower but from The Onion Router (Tor), an encryption network designed to allow users to transmit data anonymously. A WikiLeaks volunteer mined the data emerging from Tor, eventually collecting more than a million documents and providing the site with its first scoop—a message from a Somali rebel leader encouraging the use of hired gunmen to assassinate government officials. Posted to the site in December 2006, the document’s authenticity was never verified, but the story of WikiLeaks and questions regarding the ethics of its methods soon overshadowed it.
In November 2007 the site posted the standard operating procedures for the U.S. military’s detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The following year the wikileaks.org site was briefly shut down as a result of legal action in the United States, but mirrors of the site, registered in Belgium (wikileaks.be), Germany (wikileaks.de), and the Christmas Islands (wikileaks.cx), were unaffected.
It was not the site’s only legal challenge. After WikiLeaks published internal material from the Scientology movement in 2008, that group threatened suit on the grounds of copyright infringement. WikiLeaks responded by releasing thousands of Scientology documents.
In 2009 the site made news when it released a cache of internal e-mails from East Anglia University’s Climatic Research Unit. Global warming skeptics seized on them as proof of a conspiracy to silence debate on the subject or conceal data. A subsequent series of investigations found shortcomings in the peer review process but cleared the scientists of intentional wrongdoing.
In 2010 WikiLeaks posted a flurry of documents almost half a million in total relating to the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. While much of the information was already in the public domain, the administration of Pres. Barack Obama criticized the leaks as a threat to U.S. national security. The site also made public an edited video, filmed in 2007 from the gun camera of a U.S. attack helicopter, that depicted the killing of a dozen people, including two Reuters employees. In November 2010 WikiLeaks released some 250,000 classified diplomatic cables between the U.S. State Department and its embassies and consulates around the world. Those documents dated mostly from 2007 to 2010 but included some dating back as far as 1966. Among the wide-ranging topics covered in those secret documents were behind-the-scenes U.S. efforts to politically and economically isolate Iran, primarily in response to fears of Iran’s development of nuclear weapons.
In the wake of those leaks, lawmakers in the United States pushed for the prosecution of Assange and any journalists or government insiders who had collaborated with WikiLeaks. The first formal charges were filed in May 2010, when Bradley Manning, a low-level U.S. army intelligence analyst, was arrested in connection with the release of the 2007 helicopter video. Investigators later accused him of the diplomatic cable leak as well. Manning faced court-martial and a lengthy prison sentence if convicted.
In December 2010 wikileaks.org was forced off-line once again, when the site’s domain name provider terminated its account in the wake of a series of distributed denial-of-service attacks; as with previous service interruptions, WikiLeaks remained available on mirror sites or by directly linking to its IP address. Days later Assange was arrested by British police on an outstanding Swedish warrant for alleged sex crimes.
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