WikiLeaks
WikiLeaks is an international non-profit media organization that publishes submissions of otherwise unavailable documents from anonymous news sources and leaks. Its website, launched in 2006, is run by The Sunshine Press. Within a year of its launch, the site claimed a database that had grown to more than 1.2 million documents. The organization has described itself as having been founded by Chinese dissidents, as well as journalists, mathematicians, and start-up company technologists from the United States, Taiwan, Europe, Australia, and South Africa. The New Yorker magazine describes Julian Assange, an Australian Internet activist, as its director.
1. What is WikiLeaks ?
Hosting
WikiLeaks describes itself as “an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking”. WikiLeaks is hosted by PRQ, a Sweden-based company. PRQ is said to have “almost no information about its clientele and maintains few if any of its own logs.” The servers are spread around the world with the central server located in Sweden. Julian Assange has said that the servers are located in Sweden (and the other countries) "specifically because those nations offer legal protection to the disclosures made on the site". He talks about the Swedish constitution, which gives the information providers total legal protection. It is forbidden according to Swedish law for any administrative authority to make inquiries about the sources of any type of newspaper.
After the site became the target of attacks from hackers, WikiLeaks moved its site to Amazon's servers. Later, the website was "ousted" from the Amazon servers, without a public statement from the company. WikiLeaks then decided to install itself on the servers in France. Recently, Assange said that he is seriously considering seeking political asylum in neutral Switzerland and setting up a WikiLeaks foundation in the country to move the operation there.
Members and goals
The WikiLeaks website first appeared on the Internet in