WikiLeaks - Freedom of Information's Greatest Assett

Where would you go if you had a government secret that you felt needed publishing? Just as there’s a wiki for encyclopaedia articles and another for dictionary entries, you might want to try the wiki for whistleblowers and activists, Wikileaks. Among its eclectic collection of leaks are a manual on the ‘Boomerang’ method of sniper location, a description of FBI methods for mobile phone tapping, a full list of British postcodes and a roster of BNP members. Their website describes their mission as providing ‘a multi-jurisdictional public service designed to protect whistleblowers, journalists and activists who have sensitive materials to communicate to the public.’ For a website that has little funding, Wikileaks has shown a remarkable ability to stay in the headlines, bragging of more scoops in its 3 year lifetime than the Washington Post has had in 30. Yet how long the website will be able to survive is questionable, as it is hounded by governments and corporations that often come with the power to switch off servers, confiscate documents and launch major legal battles - weighty financial burdens on a site that survives largely on donations and awards from human rights activists.

For a website that believes in openness and transparency, Wikileaks itself is shrouded in secrecy. Ostensibly to protect the identities of the network behind the website, the only face that has associated itself with the website has been that of the founder, Julian Assange. Even Assange is a figure of much mystery, a former computer hacker turned activist - who, during the incubation period of Wikileaks has been described as “frequently forgetting to eat or sleep, writing mathematical formulas all over the walls and the doors”. A mathematics student who grew disaffected by the amount of research being done at his college for the American Department of Defence, Assange has channelled his efforts into human rights and anti-censorship movements, working on software while campaigning for global privacy rights. Wikileaks has been his biggest success to date and while the organisation is still struggling financially, it’s maintained a steady stream of headline grabbing leaks that have caused uproar in the mainstream media.

The biggest of these was the recent publishing of classified American military footage of a helicopter gunship firing on Iraqi civilians in cold blood, a horrific video that only served the emphasise the case for Wikileaks’ existence. Apart from the gruesome and bloody, the collection of documents that Wikileaks has amassed in 3 years is astounding. The site offers nearly a million articles ranging from Church of Scientology manuals to the guide for standard operating procedures at Guantanamo Bay and therefore has become an invaluable collection of documents that would otherwise be covered up. The problem is that along with this growth has come the inevitable rise in the number of people looking to shut the site down and quickly. Wikileaks hasn’t helped its cause by being exactly the impartial publisher it claims to be, publishing articles from all areas of the political spectrum without bias towards any particular political philosophy. Apart from true free speech activists, this has meant the site has found it hard to make any real allies, something they may desperately need as the site seeks to expand its reach.

The toll of maintaining and updating the website is beginning to become obvious. After three years of maintaining strict secrecy about the identities of its informants, American intelligence services were able to detain an informant, Army analyst Bradley Manning. Aside from the fact that Manning seems to have been a steady source of information for them, this will come as a major blow for Wikileaks as it will mean that other informants will be much less likely to trust the website to protect their identities in the face of an investigation, even though Manning was turned over to the FBI by another hacker. As I write this article, there are reports that Wikileaks is attempting to publish 260,000 classified cables between American diplomats and officials in the Middle East, and that the Pentagon has launched a manhunt to detain Julian Assange before he manages to upload the cables. The only comment from Wikileaks on this issue has been on their Twitter stream simply to say that ‘it looks like we’re about to be attacked by everything the US has’ and ‘Any signs of unacceptable behaviour by the Pentagon towards this press will be viewed dimly’.

This comes at a time when there has been much talk about Wikileaks expanding from the central Assange-based system into a set of autonomous units that operate across the globe. The purpose of such a system would be to reduce the dependency on Assange and his team to maintain the website, while simultaneously increasing the amount of material they publish. Yet there are many risks to such a plan, and it is doubtful whether Wikileaks will be able to organise a secure, multinational network of Wikileaks cells. The most obvious risk is closure and detention by various national governments, but aside from that there’s also the question of whether Wikileak’s finances will be able to sustain expansion of any sort. With its greater size, there also comes the question of how they will monitor what gets published and what doesn’t. With Assange not monitoring everything, there will have to be some method to maintain neutrality and prevent political agendas from seeping into the website.

Wikileaks is vital for the work it does, and there’s no doubt that a great repository of important information will be lost if Wikileaks were to go down forever. Yet, considering the nature of the work they are doing, it’s unfortunately likely that it’s only a matter of time before something happens that either permanently shuts the website down or fundamentally alters its purpose. I hope to be proved wrong and Wikileaks has shown an astonishing ability to bounce back from setbacks. But in pitting various national governments against a few men with limited resources, I don’t know many who would bet money on Wikileaks surviving out the year

Check out what all the commotion is for yourself at WikiLeaks.org