What is Wikileaks

Wikipedia‘s definition of “Wikileaks”:

Wikileaks is a website that publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive governmental, corporate, organizational, or religious documents, while attempting to preserve the anonymity and untraceability of its contributors. Within one year of its December 2006 launch, its database had grown to more than 1.2 million documents, leading to many front-page newspaper articles and political reforms.

Achievements

Since their going public in December 2006, Wikileaks have won several significant Awars like the “New Media Award 2008” by the Economist magazine. In 2009, Wikileaks won the Amnesty International UK’s Media Award for their 2008 publication “Kenya: The Cry for Blood”.

In 2008 Wikileaks published documents of business practices of Swiss Bank Julius Baer. The documents contained allegations of illegal activities of the Bank on their Cayman Island branch. Julius Baer sued Wikileaks, and Wikileaks.org was taken offline, but remained accessable thru its various world wide mirrors. Eventually the case was dropped, after a coalition of major U.S. newspaper publishers and press organisations filed a motion protesting the censorship. As of today the documents remain available on Wikileaks mirrors.

Financial problems

While Wikipedia managed to collect 8mill US$ within the last few weeks to keep up operational, Wikileaks has major financial issues. According to their spokesman Julian Assange Wikileaks requires about 600,000US$ per year only to maintain their services.

Main Page Offline

To underline the necessity of financial help, Wikileaks has gone offline until Januar, 11th. The website currently states:

To concentrate on raising the funds necessary to keep us alive into 2010, we have reluctantly suspended all other operations, until Jan 11.

Find more information on how you can (financially) support and contribute to Wikileaks here…