WikiLeaks | Founding, History, Chelsea Manning, & Controversies (2024)

WikiLeaks, media organization and website that functioned as a clearinghouse for classified or otherwise privileged information. WikiLeaks was founded in 2006 by Australian computer programmer and activist Julian Assange.

From the founding of WikiLeaks to Climategate

Assange, a noted computer hacker, pleaded guilty to a host of cybercrime charges in 1991, but, because of his youth, he received only minimal punishment. He was inspired to create WikiLeaks by Daniel Ellsberg’s 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers. Observing that two years had elapsed between Ellsberg’s obtaining the Pentagon Papers and their publication in The New York Times, Assange sought to streamline the whistleblowing process. In 2006 he created the basic design for the site on a computer in Australia, but wikileaks.org soon moved to servers in Sweden (later adding redundant systems in other countries) because of that country’s robust press-protection laws. Although WikiLeaks relied on volunteer labour for much of its daily operation, it deviated from the traditional “wiki” formula in that its content was not editable by end users.

WikiLeaks received its first batch of sensitive documents not from a whistleblower but from The Onion Router (Tor), an encryption network designed to allow users to transmit data anonymously. A WikiLeaks volunteer mined the data emerging from Tor, eventually collecting more than a million documents and providing the site with its first scoop—a message from a Somali rebel leader encouraging the use of hired gunmen to assassinate government officials. It was posted to the site in December 2006. The document’s authenticity was never verified, but the story of WikiLeaks and questions regarding the ethics of its methods soon overshadowed it.

In November 2007 the site posted the standard operating procedures for the U.S. military’s detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The following year the wikileaks.org site was briefly shut down as a result of legal action in the United States, but mirrors of the site, registered in Belgium (wikileaks.be), Germany (wikileaks.de), and the Christmas Islands (wikileaks.cx), were unaffected.

It was not the site’s only legal challenge. After WikiLeaks published internal material from the Scientology movement in 2008, that group threatened suit on the grounds of copyright infringement. WikiLeaks responded by releasing thousands of Scientology documents.

In 2009 the site made news when it released a cache of internal e-mails from East Anglia University’s Climatic Research Unit. Global warming skeptics seized on “Climategate” as proof of a conspiracy to silence debate on the subject or conceal data. A subsequent series of investigations found shortcomings in the peer review process but cleared the scientists of intentional wrongdoing.

WikiLeaks and Chelsea Manning

In 2010 WikiLeaks posted a flurry of documents—almost half a million in total—relating to the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. While much of the information was already in the public domain, the administration of U.S. Pres. Barack Obama criticized the leaks as a threat to U.S. national security. The site also made public an edited video, filmed in 2007 from the gun camera of a U.S. attack helicopter, that depicted the killing of a dozen people, including two Reuters employees. In November 2010 WikiLeaks released selections from a trove of some 250,000 classified diplomatic cables between the U.S. State Department and its embassies and consulates around the world. Those documents dated mostly from 2007 to 2010 but included some dating back as far as 1966. Among the wide-ranging topics covered in those secret documents were behind-the-scenes U.S. efforts to politically and economically isolate Iran, primarily in response to fears of Iran’s development of nuclear weapons.

In the wake of those leaks, lawmakers in the United States pushed for the prosecution of Assange and any journalists or government insiders who had collaborated with WikiLeaks. The first formal charges were filed in May 2010, when Chelsea Manning, a low-level U.S. Army intelligence analyst, was arrested in connection with the release of the 2007 helicopter video. Investigators later accused Manning of the diplomatic cable leak as well. After a lengthy pretrial detention, Manning pleaded guilty to 10 charges. Military prosecutors pursued additional charges, and in July 2013 Manning was found guilty of numerous counts of espionage and theft. Although Manning was acquitted of aiding the enemy, the most serious of the charges, in August 2013 Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison.

In December 2010 wikileaks.org faced a flurry of setbacks. It was forced off-line once again when the site’s domain name provider terminated its account in the wake of a series of distributed denial-of-service attacks; as with previous service interruptions, WikiLeaks remained available on mirror sites or by directly linking to its IP address. Days later Assange was arrested by British police on an outstanding Swedish warrant for alleged sex crimes. That same week the organization’s fundraising efforts took an enormous hit when PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard suspended online payment processing for donations to WikiLeaks, a move that Assange characterized as a “financial blockade.”

WikiLeaks began publishing another round of secret files from the Guantánamo Bay facility in April 2011. The documents contained detailed information about the majority of prisoners detained at Guantánamo from 2002 to 2008, including photographs, health records, and assessments of the potential threat posed by each prisoner. The files also indicated that dozens of detainees had passed through radicalized British mosques prior to their departure for Afghanistan and, ultimately, their capture by U.S. forces.

In August 2011 the German newspapers Der Freitag and Der Spiegel uncovered a massive cache of unedited WikiLeaks documents in a password-protected file that was circulating on the Internet. The password was easily discovered, and the raw documents—the entirety of the U.S. diplomatic cable collection—could be viewed online. WikiLeaks responded to this revelation by posting more than 130,000 unedited cables onto its website. This was a radical departure from the organization’s previous methods, which involved redacting the names of sources or informants in the interest of preserving the safety of those individuals.

Edward Snowden and the Sony Pictures hack

Stating that the “blockade” enacted by financial companies in December 2010 had crippled WikiLeaks operations, in October 2011 Assange announced that the organization would stop publishing and focus its efforts on fundraising. During this time Assange remained under house arrest pending the resolution of his extradition hearing, and he began recording The World Tomorrow (later called The Julian Assange Show), an interview program that debuted on the state-run Russian satellite network RT in April 2012. With his extradition appeal having been denied and the Swedish arrest warrant pending, in June 2012 Assange applied for asylum in Ecuador and sought refuge in that country’s embassy in London.

While Assange remained within the embassy, WikiLeaks resumed the publication of documents to its website. Among these were a massive collection of confidential e-mails from Syrian government officials and an overview of U.S. military detention policies. When National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden fled to Hong Kong, WikiLeaks staffers facilitated his travel to Moscow. They remained with Snowden during his monthlong stay in the international transit zone of a Moscow airport and assisted with his application for asylum in Russia.

In July 2013 Assange launched the WikiLeaks Party and announced his candidacy for a seat in the Australian Senate. Promoting a platform of “transparency, accountability, and justice,” the party fielded a total of seven candidates in Senate races in the Australian states of Victoria, New South Wales, and Western Australia. An interparty feud reduced the number of candidates to six prior to the September 7, 2013, general election, and, in that event, the WikiLeaks Party won less than 1 percent of the national vote. Although it failed to capture a single seat in the Senate, Assange, then in his second year of confinement within the Ecuadoran embassy, stated that the party would continue. In 2015 the party was deregistered by the Australian Electoral Commission.

In November 2014 Sony Pictures Entertainment was the target of a massive data breach, and a group calling itself the Guardians of Peace soon began releasing sensitive company information in small batches. The hack was eventually attributed to North Korea. The following April, WikiLeaks published more than 200,000 of the stolen documents in a searchable database, a move that was immediately criticized by Sony.

WikiLeaks and its links to Russian intelligence

In March 2016 WikiLeaks unveiled a searchable archive of some 30,000 e-mail messages and attachments retrieved from a private server maintained by Hillary Clinton during her tenure as U.S. secretary of state (2009–13). The collection was made public by the State Department through the Freedom of Information Act.

In July 2016, just days before the Democratic Party officially nominated Clinton as its candidate in the 2016 U.S. presidential race, WikiLeaks published more than 60,000 Democratic National Committee (DNC) e-mail messages and documents. The internal communication revealed that top DNC officials had a marked preference for Clinton over her rival for the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders, and DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Shultz resigned as a result. A probe by U.S. intelligence services and the Federal Bureau of Investigation later concluded that individuals with ties to the Russian government had hacked the DNC in an attempt to gain information that would bolster support for Republican Party presidential candidate Donald Trump. WikiLeaks had originally followed a policy of redacting personal or sensitive information from documents prior to release, but the DNC hack database contained credit card information as well as Social Security and passport numbers. Assange publicly declared his opposition to Clinton, but he denied any connection with Russia, although he made regular appearances on RT in the months prior to the November 2016 U.S. presidential election.

On October 7, 2016, a damaging video recording surfaced in which Trump boasted that his celebrity allowed him to grope women with impunity. Less than an hour later, WikiLeaks published a trove of e-mail messages from the personal account of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. Investigators determined that access to Podesta’s Gmail account had been obtained via a spear-phishing attack carried out by Russian hackers. At that point, even people who had supported WikiLeaks began to criticize the organization for its lack of curation of leaked materials, its evolution into a de facto anti-Clinton research operation, and its role in an apparent cyberwar campaign orchestrated by Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin. After Trump’s victory, the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence published a declassified summary of its findings, and it identified individuals within the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service, that it believed were responsible for the hacking attacks on Podesta and the DNC. Assange continued to deny that WikiLeaks had received any material directly from the Russian government.