Wikileaks

Wikileaks is an organization that is committed to revealing important information that governments and other entities seek to hide from the public. This function is mainly the domain of investigative journalism and it could be argued that wikileaks is just another media house. Nothing could be further from the truth. Wikileaks is revolutionary in that it has managed to provide whistleblowers with a secure means to reveal information while successfully protecting their identities. Julian Assange is the public face of wikileaks. He is an Australian and together with three other permanent employees, he runs the site with the help of about eight hundred volunteers who do not receive any remuneration. The website is hosted on PRQ, a Swedish company, due to the legal protections accorded to whistleblowers by the Swedish constitution. The controversial website began to gain notoriety when it published the manual used to administer the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in November 2007. The document revealed that the American army would not give the Red Cross access to some prisoners contrary to international laws governing the treatment of prisoners of war. In February 2008, the site revealed allegations that a branch of the Swiss Bank Julius Baer in the Cayman Islands was flouting banking laws. In the heat of the 2008 American Presidential elections, wikileaks revealed the contents of Sarah Palin’s, the Republican Party’s nominee for the post of American Vice President, yahoo email account. In 2008, the organization posted a list of members of the extremist British National Party’s members on its website. In March 2010, as if to mock the efforts of the United States of America’s government to gag wikileaks, the organization published the top-secret report of the Department of Defense report on how to deter wikileaks. This was followed in April the same year the release of a secret video of the slaying of two employees of Reuters in Iraq. This led the website to become the most searched for item on Google. In July, the site released thousands of documents revealing the deaths that occurred in N.A.T.O. (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) occupied Afghanistan. In August 2010, the site released documents revealing the planning of the Love Parade in Duisburg, Germany in the aftermath of the stampede that occurred during the event. In November of 2010. The organization partnered with five newspapers to publish leaked secret diplomatic cables of more than two hundred American embassies. This angered the American government which has used it superpower status to make life difficult for wikileaks and its employees. Julian Assange was confronted with allegations of rape which he is yet to shake off. The website also became the victim of hacker attacks and several companies refused to continue hosting it on their servers. Its funding also dried up as PayPal, Visa and other electronic payment companies refused to be associated with it denying it access to much needed funds. Despite repeated denials it is clear that the actions of these companies are due to pressure from the American government. It has been argued that wikileaks actions are illegal and it is, even unpatriotic, to reveal classified government documents. It is clear that the organization has been extremely careful to not to flout the law and has taken advantage of the conducive legal environment of some nations such as Sweden to do what would land anyone committing such actions in another country such as America in jail. Its actions may have caused irreparable diplomatic harm to the United States of America but the benefits of its actions far outweigh the costs. It is becoming increasingly difficult for countries to commit illegal acts secretly in the hope that their actions would never come to light. This in my opinion is the single greatest positive achievement of wikileaks.