Type of site | Document archive and disclosure |
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Available in | English, but the source documents are in their original language |
Owner | Sunshine Press |
Founder(s) | Julian Assange |
Key people | Julian Assange (director) Kristinn Hrafnsson (editor-in-chief) Sarah Harrison (journalist) |
URL | wikileaks |
Commercial | No |
Registration | Optional[1][2] |
Launched | 4 October 2006 |
Trump–Russia relations |
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WikiLeaks (/ˈwɪkiliːks/) is a media organisation and publisher of leaked documents. It is a non-profit and is funded by donations[13] and media partnerships. It has published classified documents and other media provided by anonymous sources.[14] It was founded in 2006 by Julian Assange, an Australian editor, publisher, and activist, who is currently challenging extradition to the United States over his work with WikiLeaks.[15] Since September 2018, Kristinn Hrafnsson has served as its editor-in-chief.[16][17] Its website states that it has released more than ten million documents and associated analyses.[18] WikiLeaks' most recent publication of original documents was in 2019 and its most recent publication was in 2021.[19] From November 2022, numerous documents on the organisation's website became inaccessible.[19][20] In 2023, Assange said that WikiLeaks is no longer able to publish due to his imprisonment and the effect that US government surveillance and WikiLeaks' funding restrictions were having on potential whistleblowers.[21]
WikiLeaks has released document caches and media that exposed serious violations of human rights and civil liberties by various governments. It released footage of the 12 July 2007 Baghdad airstrike, titling it Collateral Murder, in which Iraqi Reuters journalists and several civilians were killed by a U.S. helicopter crew.[22] It published thousands of US military field logs from the war in Aghanistan and Iraq war, diplomatic cables from the United States and Saudi Arabia,[23][24] and emails from the governments of Syria[25][26] and Turkey.[27][28][29] WikiLeaks has also published documents exposing corruption in Kenya[30][31] and at Samherji,[32] cyber warfare and surveillance tools created by the CIA,[33][34] and surveillance of the French president by the National Security Agency.[35][36] During the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, WikiLeaks released emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and from Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, showing that the party's national committee had effectively acted as an arm of the Clinton campaign during the primaries, seeking to undercut the campaign of Bernie Sanders. These releases resulted in the resignation of the chairwoman of the DNC and caused significant harm to the Clinton campaign.[37] During the campaign, WikiLeaks promoted false conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party and the murder of Seth Rich.[38][39][40]
WikiLeaks has won awards and been commended for exposing state and corporate secrets, increasing transparency, assisting freedom of the press, and enhancing democratic discourse while challenging powerful institutions. WikiLeaks and some of its supporters[who?] say the organisation's publications have a perfect record of publishing authentic documents. The organisation has been the target of campaigns to discredit it, including aborted ones by Palantir and HBGary. WikiLeaks has also had its donation systems interrupted by payment processors. As a result, the Wau Holland Foundation helps process WikiLeaks' donations.
The organisation has been criticised for inadequately curating content and violating personal privacy. WikiLeaks has, for instance, revealed Social Security numbers, medical information, credit card numbers and details of suicide attempts.[41][42][43] News organisations, activists, journalists and former members have also criticised WikiLeaks over allegations of anti-Clinton and pro-Trump bias, various associations with the Russian government, buying and selling of leaks, and a lack of internal transparency. Journalists have also criticised the organisation for promotion of conspiracy theories, and what they describe as exaggerated and misleading descriptions of the contents of leaks. The US CIA and United States Congress defined the organisation as a "non-state hostile intelligence service" after the release of Vault 7.[44]
WikiLeaks is also based on an openness culture, as it is a crowd-sourced, crowd-funded non-profit organization operating internationally.
WikiLeaks is an international non profit organization that receives and subsequently shares on its website confidential documents from large organizations or governments.
Julian Assange had introduced a new term into the lexicon of several generations. This term was 'WikiLeaks' and described an international non-profit organisation, committed to publishing secret information, news leaks, and classified media provided by anonymous sources.
WikiLeaks was founded in 2006 as an international non-profit organization specializing in the publication of 'classified, censored or otherwise restricted material of political, diplomatic or ethical significance' obtained via anonymous sources
With a keen sense of timing, given the Greenlandic and Danish governments' hosting of the 7th Arctic Council ministerial meeting, seven 'sensitive' US diplomatic cables were leaked by WikiLeaks, an international non-profit organisation that publishes materials from anonymous sources, news leaks, and whistleblowers
Wikileaks is a nonprofit that depends on donations from around the world to fund its operation. A second system that came under attack on a model parallel to the attack on technical infrastructure was the payment system... Like the Sunlight Foundation and similar transparency-focused organizations, Wikileaks is a nonprofit focused on bringing to light direct, documentary evidence about government behavior so that many others, professional and otherwise, can analyze the evidence and search for instances that justify public criticism.
WikiLeaks (www.wikileaks.org) is a non-commercial and non-profit Internet whistleblowing platform that has been online since 2006. Julian Assange founded it. It is funded by online donations.
WikiLeaks is independent of commercial, corporate, government or lobbygroup control or ownership. It is a non-membership, non-profit organisation funded by donations
As a non-profit organization, Wikileaks is funded by crowdfunding donations, which were subsequently blocked by PayPal, Mastercard, a Swiss Bank and Bank of America in protest over their political acitivity, a troubling example of 'the ability of private infrastructure companies to restrict speech without being bound by the contraints of legality, and the possibility that government actors will take advantage of this affordance in an extra-legal public-private partnership for censorship'.
In late 2010, the online nonprofit media organization WikiLeaks published classified documents detailing correspondence between the U.S. State Department and its diplomatic missions around the world, numbering around 250,000 cables.
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was invoked but never defined (see the help page).WikiLeaks ... is fueling Internet conspiracy theories by offering a $20,000 reward for information on a Democratic National Committee staffer who was killed last month ... in what police say was robbery gone wrong ... Assange implied this week in an interview that Rich was the source of the leak and even offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of his murderer. Meanwhile, the Russian government funded propaganda outlet RT had already been covering Rich's murder two weeks prior. RT and other Russian government propaganda outlets have also been working hard to deny the Russian government was the source of the leak, including by interviewing Assange about the Rich murder. ... The original conspiracy theory can be traced back to a notoriously unreliable conspiracy website