WikiLeaks: a whistleblower that governments fear

WASHINGTON - WikiLeaks, the whistleblower website at the centre of a storm over leaking 250,000 US diplomatic despatches, is a not-for-profit media organisation launched in 2007 with the professed goal of bringing “important news and information to the public”.

WikiLeaks, which claims to provide “an innovative, secure and anonymous way for sources to leak information to our journalists” through its electronic drop box, has won a number of awards, including the 2008 Economist magazine’s New Media Award.

Founded by Julian Assange, WikiLeaks with the slogan “We open governments” posted in April 2010 a video from a 2007 incident in which Iraqi civilians were killed by US forces, on a website called Collateral Murder.

In July, WikiLeaks released Afghan War Diary, a compilation of more than 76,900 documents about the war in Afghanistan not previously available for public review.

In October, the group released a package of almost 400,000 documents called the Iraq War Logs in coordination with major commercial media organisations.

(Arun Kumar can be contacted at arun.kumar@ians.in)