Wikileaks War & Videotape 2011
- 11 years ago
WikiLeaks;
Is an international, online, not-for-profit organisation which publishes secret information, news leaks, and classified media from anonymous sources. Its website, initiated during 2006 in Iceland by the organisation Sunshine Press,claimed a database of more than 1.2 million documents within a year of its initiation.Julian Assange, an Australian Internet activist, is generally described as its founder, editor-in-chief, and director.Kristinn Hrafnsson, Joseph P. Farrell and Sarah Harrison are the only other publicly known and acknowledged associates of Julian Assange.Hrafnsson is also a member of Sunshine Press Productions along with Assange, Ingi Ragnar Ingason and Gavin MacFadyen.
The group has released a number of significant documents which have become front-page news items. Early releases included documentation of equipment expenditures and holdings in the Afghanistan war and corruption in Kenya. During April 2010, WikiLeaks published gunsight footage from the 12 July 2007 Baghdad airstrike in which Iraqi journalists were among those killed by an AH-64 Apache helicopter, known as the Collateral Murder video. During July of the same year, WikiLeaks released Afghan War Diary, a compilation of more than 76,900 documents about the War in Afghanistan not available previously to the public. During October 2010, the group released a set of almost 400,000 documents named the "Iraq War Logs" in coordination with major commercial media organisations. This allowed the mapping of 109,032 deaths in "significant" attacks by insurgents in Iraq that had been reported to Multi-National Force – Iraq, including about 15,000 that had not been previously published.During April 2011, WikiLeaks began publishing 779 secret files relating to prisoners detained in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
During November 2010, WikiLeaks collaborated with major global media organisations to release U.S. State department diplomatic "cables" in redacted format. On 1 September 2011, it became public that an encrypted version of WikiLeaks' huge archive of unredacted U.S. State Department cables had been available by means of the website BitTorrent for months, and that the decryption key (similar to a password) was available to those who knew where to find it. WikiLeaks blamed the breach on its former publication partner, the UK newspaper The Guardian, and that newspaper's journalist David Leigh, who revealed the key in a book published during February 2011;The Guardian argued that WikiLeaks was to blame since they gave the impression that the decryption key was temporary (something not possible for a file decryption key).The German periodical Der Spiegel reported a more complex story involving errors on both sides. The incident resulted in widely expressed fears that the information released could endanger innocent lives.
The wikileaks.org domain name was registered on 4 October 2006.The website was begun, and published its first document, during December 2006.WikiLeaks has been predominantly represented in public since January 2007 by Julian Assange, who is now generally recognised as the "founder of WikiLeaks."According to the magazine Wired, a volunteer said that Assange described himself in a private conversation as "the heart and soul of this organisation, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organizer, financier, and all the rest."
WikiLeaks relies to some degree on volunteers and previously described its founders as a mixture of Asian dissidents, journalists, mathematicians, and start-up company technologists from the United States, Taiwan, Europe, Australia, and South Africa (hence its name), but has progressively adopted a more traditional publication model and no longer accepts either user comments or edits. As of June 2009, the website had more than 1,200 registered volunteers and listed an advisory board comprising Assange, his deputy Jash Vora and seven other people, some of which denied any association with the organisation.[28][29]
Despite using the name "WikiLeaks", the website no longer uses the "wiki" publication method as of May 2010.Also, despite some popular confusion[31] due to both having the term "wiki" in their names, WikiLeaks and Wikipedia are not affiliated with each other ("wiki" is not a brand name);Wikia, a for-profit corporation affiliated loosely with the Wikimedia Foundation, did purchase several WikiLeaks-related domain names (including wikileaks.com and wikileaks.net) as a "protective brand measure" during 2007.
Name servers
WikiLeaks had been using EveryDNS's services, which resulted in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on the host.The attacks affected the quality of service at EveryDNS, so the company withdrew its service from WikiLeaks. Pro-WikiLeaks activists retaliated by initiating a DDoS attack against EveryDNS. Because of mistakes by weblogs, some people accidentally mistook EasyDNS for EveryDNS and a sizable internet backlash against EasyDNS ensued.
Is an international, online, not-for-profit organisation which publishes secret information, news leaks, and classified media from anonymous sources. Its website, initiated during 2006 in Iceland by the organisation Sunshine Press,claimed a database of more than 1.2 million documents within a year of its initiation.Julian Assange, an Australian Internet activist, is generally described as its founder, editor-in-chief, and director.Kristinn Hrafnsson, Joseph P. Farrell and Sarah Harrison are the only other publicly known and acknowledged associates of Julian Assange.Hrafnsson is also a member of Sunshine Press Productions along with Assange, Ingi Ragnar Ingason and Gavin MacFadyen.
The group has released a number of significant documents which have become front-page news items. Early releases included documentation of equipment expenditures and holdings in the Afghanistan war and corruption in Kenya. During April 2010, WikiLeaks published gunsight footage from the 12 July 2007 Baghdad airstrike in which Iraqi journalists were among those killed by an AH-64 Apache helicopter, known as the Collateral Murder video. During July of the same year, WikiLeaks released Afghan War Diary, a compilation of more than 76,900 documents about the War in Afghanistan not available previously to the public. During October 2010, the group released a set of almost 400,000 documents named the "Iraq War Logs" in coordination with major commercial media organisations. This allowed the mapping of 109,032 deaths in "significant" attacks by insurgents in Iraq that had been reported to Multi-National Force – Iraq, including about 15,000 that had not been previously published.During April 2011, WikiLeaks began publishing 779 secret files relating to prisoners detained in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
During November 2010, WikiLeaks collaborated with major global media organisations to release U.S. State department diplomatic "cables" in redacted format. On 1 September 2011, it became public that an encrypted version of WikiLeaks' huge archive of unredacted U.S. State Department cables had been available by means of the website BitTorrent for months, and that the decryption key (similar to a password) was available to those who knew where to find it. WikiLeaks blamed the breach on its former publication partner, the UK newspaper The Guardian, and that newspaper's journalist David Leigh, who revealed the key in a book published during February 2011;The Guardian argued that WikiLeaks was to blame since they gave the impression that the decryption key was temporary (something not possible for a file decryption key).The German periodical Der Spiegel reported a more complex story involving errors on both sides. The incident resulted in widely expressed fears that the information released could endanger innocent lives.
The wikileaks.org domain name was registered on 4 October 2006.The website was begun, and published its first document, during December 2006.WikiLeaks has been predominantly represented in public since January 2007 by Julian Assange, who is now generally recognised as the "founder of WikiLeaks."According to the magazine Wired, a volunteer said that Assange described himself in a private conversation as "the heart and soul of this organisation, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organizer, financier, and all the rest."
WikiLeaks relies to some degree on volunteers and previously described its founders as a mixture of Asian dissidents, journalists, mathematicians, and start-up company technologists from the United States, Taiwan, Europe, Australia, and South Africa (hence its name), but has progressively adopted a more traditional publication model and no longer accepts either user comments or edits. As of June 2009, the website had more than 1,200 registered volunteers and listed an advisory board comprising Assange, his deputy Jash Vora and seven other people, some of which denied any association with the organisation.[28][29]
Despite using the name "WikiLeaks", the website no longer uses the "wiki" publication method as of May 2010.Also, despite some popular confusion[31] due to both having the term "wiki" in their names, WikiLeaks and Wikipedia are not affiliated with each other ("wiki" is not a brand name);Wikia, a for-profit corporation affiliated loosely with the Wikimedia Foundation, did purchase several WikiLeaks-related domain names (including wikileaks.com and wikileaks.net) as a "protective brand measure" during 2007.
Name servers
WikiLeaks had been using EveryDNS's services, which resulted in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on the host.The attacks affected the quality of service at EveryDNS, so the company withdrew its service from WikiLeaks. Pro-WikiLeaks activists retaliated by initiating a DDoS attack against EveryDNS. Because of mistakes by weblogs, some people accidentally mistook EasyDNS for EveryDNS and a sizable internet backlash against EasyDNS ensued.