According to a January 2010 interview, the WikiLeaks team then consisted of five people working full-time and about 800 people who worked occasionally, none of whom were compensated.[38] WikiLeaks has no official headquarters. The expenses per year are about €200,000, mainly for servers and bureaucracy, but would reach €600,000 if work currently done by volunteers were paid for.[38] WikiLeaks does not pay for lawyers, as hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal support have been donated by media organisations such as the Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, and the National Newspaper Publishers Association.[38] Its only revenue stream is donations, but WikiLeaks is planning to add an auction model to sell early access to documents.[38]Wau Holland Foundation, WikiLeaks receives no money for personnel costs, only for hardware, travelling and bandwidth.[53] An article in TechEYE.net wrote According to the
As a charity accountable under German law, donations for WikiLeaks can be made to the foundation. Funds are held in escrow and are given to WikiLeaks after the whistleblower website files an application containing a statement with proof of payment. The foundation does not pay any sort of salary nor give any renumeration [sic] to WikiLeaks' personnel, corroborating the statement of the site's former German representative Daniel Schmitt (real name Daniel Domscheit-Berg)[54] on national television that all personnel works voluntarily, even its speakers.[53]
Site management issues
Within WikiLeaks, there has been public disagreement between founder and spokesperson Julian Assange and Domscheit-Berg, the site's former German representative who was suspended by Assange. Domscheit-Berg announced on 28 September 2010 that he was leaving the organization due to internal conflicts over management of the site.[55][56][57]
Hosting
WikiLeaks describes itself as “an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking”. WikiLeaks is hosted by PRQ, a Sweden-based company providing “highly secure, no-questions-asked hosting services.” 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.[58] 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.[58] It is forbidden according to Swedish law for any administrative authority to make inquiries about the sources of any type of newspaper.[59]encryption to protect sources and other confidential information." Such arrangements have been called "bulletproof hosting."[60][61] These laws, and the hosting by PRQ, make it difficult to take WikiLeaks offline. Furthermore, "Wikileaks maintains its own servers at undisclosed locations, keeps no logs and uses military-grade
On 17 August 2010, it was announced that the Swedish Pirate Party will be hosting and managing many of WikiLeaks' new servers. The party donates servers and bandwidth to WikiLeaks without charge. Technicians of the party will make sure that the servers are maintained and working.[62][63]
After the site became the target of a denial-of-service attack from a hacker on its old servers, WikiLeaks moved its site to Amazon's servers.[66] Later, however, the website was "ousted"[66] from the Amazon servers, without a public statement from the company. WikiLeaks then decided to install itself on the servers of OVH in France.[67]
WikiLeaks is based on several software packages, including MediaWiki, Freenet, Tor, and PGP.[68] WikiLeaks strongly encouraged postings via Tor[69] because of the strong privacy needs of its users.
On 4 November 2010, Julian Assange told Swiss public television TSR 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.[70][71] According to Assange, Switzerland and Iceland are the only countries where WikiLeaks would feel safe to operate.[72][73]
Name and policies
Despite using the name "WikiLeaks", the website is not wiki-based as of December 2010. Also, despite some popular confusion[74] due to both having the term "wiki" in their names, WikiLeaks and Wikipedia have no affiliation with each other;[75][76] i.e. "wiki" is not a brand name.[update]
The "about" page originally read:[77]
To the user, WikiLeaks will look very much like Wikipedia. Anybody can post to it, anybody can edit it. No technical knowledge is required. Leakers can post documents anonymously and untraceably. Users can publicly discuss documents and analyze their credibility and veracity. Users can discuss interpretations and context and collaboratively formulate collective publications. Users can read and write explanatory articles on leaks along with background material and context. The political relevance of documents and their verisimilitude will be revealed by a cast of thousands.
However, WikiLeaks established an editorial policy that accepted only documents that were "of political, diplomatic, historical or ethical interest" (and excluded "material that is already publicly available").[78] This coincided with early criticism that having no editorial policy would drive out good material with spam and promote "automated or indiscriminate publication of confidential records."[79] It is no longer possible for anybody to post to it or edit it, as the original FAQ promised. Instead, submissions are regulated by an internal review process and some are published, while documents not fitting the editorial criteria are rejected by anonymous WikiLeaks reviewers. By 2008, the revised FAQ stated that "Anybody can post comments to it. [...] Users can publicly discuss documents and analyze their credibility and veracity."[80] After the 2010 relaunch, posting new comments to leaks was no longer possible.[81]
Verification of submissions
WikiLeaks states that it has never released a misattributed document. Documents are assessed before release. In response to concerns about the possibility of misleading or fraudulent leaks, WikiLeaks has stated that misleading leaks "are already well-placed in the mainstream media. WikiLeaks is of no additional assistance."[82] The FAQ states that: "The simplest and most effective countermeasure is a worldwide community of informed users and editors who can scrutinize and discuss leaked documents."[83]
According to statements by Assange in 2010, submitted documents are vetted by a group of five reviewers, with expertise in different fields such as language or programming, who also investigate the background of the leaker if his or her identity is known.[84] In that group, Assange has the final decision about the assessment of a document.[84]
Legal status
- Legal background
The legal status of WikiLeaks is complex.[85] Its servers are located throughout Europe and are accessible from any uncensored web connection. The files it leaks are from countries around the world in which they may have various legal statuses.[citation needed] WikiLeaks headquarters is in Sweden[86] WikiLeaks has stated it does not request classified or confidential materials.[86] However, on previous occasions WikiLeaks has requested recommendations and has published lists of "Most Wanted" documents from the public.[87] They may be protected against the US Espionage Act of 1917 as news organizations are allowed to publish confidential military and national security information if they did not directly solicit it. After the Pentagon Papers[86] because of its strong shield laws to protect confidential journalistic sources. were leaked in, the US Supreme Court ruled that “Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government”.
- Comments of governmental attacks on Wikileaks and Assange
Spencer Zifcak notes that with no charge, and no trial completed, it is completely inappropriate to state that Wikileaks is guilty of illegality[88]. On the Australian, UK, and US governments attacks on Assange, a legal expert states he is the target of a global smear campaign to demonise him as a criminal or as a terrorist, without yet any legal fact.[89]
- In specific countries
In the United States the Justice Department has indicated it is considering criminal charges against WikiLeaks.[90][91] Attorney General Eric Holder has indicated that these charges could stem from the Espionage Act of 1917 or from other unspecified laws.[92] Legal scholars have stated that charges under the Espionage Act could be possible, but such a move has been characterized as "difficult" by former prosecutors because of First Amendment rights in the United States.[90][91]
In Australia, the government and the Australian Federal Police didn't state which Australian law have been broken by Wikileaks. But Julia Gillard insists to say the foundation of Wikileaks, the stealing of secret documents from the US administration, is illegal in foreign countries[93]
Insurance file
On 29 July 2010 WikiLeaks added a 1.4 GB "Insurance File" to the Afghan War Diary page. The file is AES encrypted and has been speculated to serve as insurance in case the WikiLeaks website or its spokesman Julian Assange are incapacitated, upon which the passphrase could be published, similar to the concept of a dead man's switch.[94][95] Following the first few days' release of the United States diplomatic cables starting 28 November 2010, the US television broadcaster CBS predicted that "If anything happens to Assange or the website, a key will go out to unlock the files. There would then be no way to stop the information from spreading like wildfire because so many people already have copies."[96] CBS correspondent Declan McCullagh stated, "What most folks are speculating is that the insurance file contains unreleased information that would be especially embarrassing to the U.S. government if it were released."[96]
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