Julian Assange has been hailed as a hero of investigative journalism and condemned as a risk to national security. Wikileaks, the site of which he is director, has been publishing “sensitive documents” through what it calls “principled leaking” since July 2007. Sunday’s release of more than 75,000 classified reports about the war in Afghanistan is perhaps its biggest leak yet. The site has become a key conduit for whistleblowers, hosting more than 1m documents and datasets ranging from Sarah Palin’s e-mail inbox and the Guantánamo Bay prison manual to a membership list of the the UK’s far-right British National Party and the financial secrets of Kaupthing, the Icelandic bank. It has even posted what it says is a US intelligence report on the site itself. But its highest-impact leak came this year, with a 2007 video – dubbed “collateral murder” by Wikileaks – which appears to show a US helicopter firing on a group in Baghdad, killing two Reuters employees. A US army intelligence analyst has been charged in connection with the video leak and Mr Assange has not visited the US since, fearing arrest. “We believe that transparency in government activities leads to reduced corruption, better government and stronger democracies,” Wikileaks says on its site. Holding governments to account requires information, which has historically been “costly – in terms of human life and human rights”, it says. “But with technological advances – the internet, and cryptography – the risks of conveying important information can be lowered.” Wikileaks maintains a grand internet tradition, dating back to the 1998 allegations about President Clinton’s liaisons with Monica Lewinsky first published on the Drudge Report, of revealing suppressed information. Its ethos is rooted in hacker culture; the “wiki” of its name refers to the same open-access publishing technology used by Wikipedia. But Wikileaks’ emphasis on fact-checking, verification and protection of its sources has a longer journalistic lineage. Its rise to prominence has come as newspapers’ capacity to invest in investigative journalism has been impaired by falling circulation and difficulties in making money from the web. Wikileaks relies on donations to survive, completing its most recent fundraising this year, although the source and size of its financing remains obscure. Speaking at the TED conference in Oxford this month, Mr Assange, 39, described the gathering of hard facts as the only true form of journalism. “Capable, generous men do not create victims, they nurture them,” he said of his motivation. Mr Assange recently told the Guardian that he lived a nomadic lifestyle, carrying a computer in one rucksack and his clothes in another. After keeping a low profile for several years, Mr Assange’s public appearances have recently become more frequent. He has often criticised traditional media outlets for distorting the truth in their stories, telling an audience at London’s City University in July that he hoped the publication of primary source material online would reduce “lying opportunities”. In joining up with the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel to release the Afghan war logs, Wikileaks has sought to combine the impact of front-page news and analytic skills of specialist reporters with the radical transparency of publishing thousands of original documents. “This archive shows the vast range of small tragedies that are almost never reported by the press but which account for the overwhelming majority of deaths and injuries,” Wikileaks wrote on its site as it published the 91,000 documents. Its servers struggled under the weight of traffic on Monday. Even as governments and authorities round the world seek to plug the leaks and their latest outlet, Mr Assange has said that there are plenty more controversial documents in the pipeline. .Copyright The Financ

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WikiLeaks


Posted on Aug 10, 2010

WikiLeaks: hard facts and a hacker ethos

By Tim Bradshaw, Digtial Media Correspondent

Published: July 26 2010 12:36 | Last updated: July 26 2010 12:36

Julian Assange has been hailed as a hero of investigative journalism and condemned as a risk to national security. Wikileaks, the site of which he is director, has been publishing “sensitive documents” through what it calls “principled leaking” since July 2007.

Follow the linked title to read the article in the Financial Times.

Read More About WikiLeaks...

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