Wiki Leaks - The Rise Of The Most Controversial Website

WikiLeaks has been making news around the world in recent years but why is this website so controversial? In a nutshell, WikiLeaks is a journalist organization that publishes news leaks via its website. The leaks are from completely anonymous sources. The website was founded in Iceland in 2006 by Julian Assange, an Australian computer programmer. Julian Assange has been a hacker since 1987 and was extremely good at it. He managed to hack the Pentagon, NASA and so on. After a few ventures and some study at the University of Melbourne, Assange founded WikiLeaks.

Assange went prison and later under house arrest, until his asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London and earlier this year, he was finally arrested. But WikiLeaks continues to publish confidential information. However, since there is a relative danger to mass publishing classified information, WikiLeaks acts as a sort of intermediary for whistle-blowers. They are able to leak it to the press, without having anonymous whistle-blowers accidentally identified.

According to WikiLeaks, they have released more classified intelligence documents than rest of the world press combined. The organization first received global attention in 2010. WikiLeaks published of a US helicopter gunning down multiple journalists in Iraq. One of the leaks was the major culprit for the fall of the Tunisian government, when it revealed information about corruption.

WikiLeaks have about 20 different servers scattered around the world. Then their central server was moved to an underground nuclear vault in Sweden. However, knowing where the server is makes it more vulnerable to attacks so currently, there is not a lot of information on where the central server is. The information from whistle-blowers is received through an electronic drop box or send it via mail to a postal address in Australia.

There is currently no information on how many people work or volunteer in the organization. Amazon has since blocked WikiLeaks from using its servers and a number of countries have censored their internet to prevent WikiLeaks access. Payment services like Visa, MasterCard and PayPal have also blocked donations to WikiLeaks forcing WikiLeaks to depend on Bitcoin for donations. No matter how you looks at it, there is no question that both the idea of WikiLeaks and its volunteers yield so much sensitive information which make them powerful in this new age of information.