Whistleblower site Wikileaks shuts down

BY ASHER MOSES

The anonymous whistleblower website Wikileaks, which has been a thorn in the side of governments and big business for three years, has shut down temporarily because it has run out of money.

The document repository, founded by an Australian living in East Africa, has been the catalyst for countless front-page stories around the world.

It has exposed serious business and political corruption and sparked a political scandal in Australia when it published the federal government's secret blacklist of banned websites.

In a message posted on the site, founder Julian Assange appealed for donations from the public, saying he had received hundreds of thousands of pages relating to "corrupt banks, the US detainee system, the Iraq war, China, the UN and many others" but did not have the resources to release them.

The site, which claims to be non-profit and does not accept donations from governments or corporations, costs about US$600,000 (NZ$850,000) a year to run, including staff.

But so far only US$130,000 has been raised for this year.

"Even $10 will pay to put one of these reports into another 10,000 hands and $1000, a million," Assange wrote.

Wikileaks has an impressive track record of exposing corruption, revealing public interest information and keeping organisations honest.

It has published millions of documents and, says the BBC, has fought off more than 100 legal challenges and won awards from the Economist and Amnesty International.

"One of the reasons why Wikileaks is so useful is that it's able to put original documents up - unfiltered by comment and editorial," Julian Petley, chairman of the British Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, said.

In Australia, it caused a major stir in March last year when it published the Australian Communications and Media Authority's blacklist of websites that would be banned under the federal government's internet filtering policy.

The leak confirmed that the blacklist targeted not just nasty sites but a slew of online poker sites, YouTube links, regular gay and straight porn sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites, websites of fringe religions such as satanic sites, fetish sites, Christian sites, the website of a tour operator and even that of a Queensland dentist.

Soon after its launch, in August 2007, a document obtained by Wikileaks was used as the primary source for a front-page story in The Guardian about corruption surrounding former Kenyan leader Daniel arap Moi.

The site was taken offline in early 2008 after Swiss bank Julius Baer launched legal action to prevent the spread of documents alleging tax and money laundering schemes involving Cayman Islands accounts. The bank dropped the case within a month after a significant public outcry.

Wikileaks was the subject of another injunction late last year when it published a controversial report implicating commodities giant Trafigura in a toxic chemical dumping incident in the Ivory Coast.

It has also published the US Army's operations manual for the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, leaked emails from former Alaska governor Sarah Palin's private Yahoo email account, high-level Scientology documents and the membership list for the far-right British National Party.

In September last year, Wikileaks posted email correspondence between scientists in the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, which was seized on by climate sceptics around the world to suggest that the threat of climate change was being overinflated.

In November, the site released more than half a million US pager messages covering a 24-hour period on the day of the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001.

Media organisations including The Guardian and The Spectator, which have benefited greatly from Wikileaks, have run editorials urging people to donate to the site.

A "Save Wikileaks" group on Facebook has just under 1300 members.

- © Fairfax NZ News