Samspage

Wikileaks

Whether you know what Wikileaks is or not, you've probably seen stories, reports, and of coure leaks originally published in Wikileaks some time or another. Wikileaks is very complex, especially in terms of how it's run technically. Everything is encrypte. Everything is secret. Wikileaks runs on over 20 servers located all around the world, and they have hundreds of domain names. They use things like tor to ensure that the traffic is impossible to trace, and bitorrent to make sure things are almost impossible to take down. It has been called 'bullet proof hosting' And they do this for good reason. They post very high profile conflidential, classified documents from governments, corperations, etc. In April 2010, Wikileaks released a video entitled "Colateral Murder" (internally at Wikileaks "Project B") shot from a US Army apache helicopter in Iraq. The video was shot in 2007. It's just under 40 minutes, and it shows american soldiers shooting and killing 18 civilians, 2 of whom were journalists for Reuters. It showedThe most recent leak- and probably the most important one yet- would be "The War Logs." The War Logs revealed many things about the US Military and the Iraq War, Afqhanistan, and more. The documents show an increasing reliance on outside private contractors to aide the military, "to the point that there are more contractors there than soldiers." (NY Times). It also revealed that the number of Iraqi civilians who were killed by both other Iraqis and the US military is much higer than originally thought- 10s of thousands more than what was originally made public by the US military and government during the Bush administration. It also confirmed suspicians that Pakistan, specifically their spy agency Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), has been working with. Lt. General Hamid Gul ran the ISI from 1987-89 and still has enormous influence is revealed to have signifigant ties to al-Qaeda and the Taliban. They also detial American failure to investigate hundreds of reports of torture, rape, and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers. Other leaks include drafts of the controversial ACTA- Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, internet censorship lists from Thailand, secret memos and documents from the church of Scientology, corruption in Kenya, and the "standard operating procedures" from Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay.

New Yorker said it best "The catalogue is especially remarkable because WikiLeaks is not quite an organization; it is better described as a media insurgency. It has no paid staff, no copiers, no desks, no office. Assange does not even have a home. He travels from country to country, staying with supporters, or friends of friends—as he once put it to me, “I’m living in airports these days.”



Sources: http://wikileaks.org/media/about.html http://www.ted.com/talks/julian_assange_why_the_world_needs_wikileaks.html http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/26/editorial-wikileaks-iraq-war-logs http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/world/asia/26isi.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/world/middleeast/24contractors.html http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/22/iraq-war-logs-military-leaks http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/world/war-logs.html http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa