BACKGROUND: WikiLeaks - self-proclaimed whistleblower website

By Andy Goldberg Nov 29, 2010, 8:54 GMT

San Francisco - As the world focused on a trove of secret US documents released by WikiLeaks Sunday, which exposed years of diplomatic communications and provided candid assessments of world leaders, the group's web site went down for several hours.

The glitch may have been due to a massive surge of interest in the organization. Some reports said that an apparent hacker attack crashed the website, just as 250,000 leaked US diplomatic despatches were being made public.

The www.wikileaks.org domain was brought down by a method known as distributed denial of service (DDoS), in which a huge number of computers repeatedly demand web pages from the server, shutting out ordinary human users and causing the server to jam.

There was no indication Sunday who might have mounted the attack.

Whatever the reason for the outage, the implication was the same. The Scandinavian-based volunteer organization co-founded by its current editor-in-chief - an Australian journalist and online activist named Julian Assange - had once again hit the big time.

The site that first went public in late 2006 is by now used to making headlines the world over - first with the release in July of 92,000 secret documents that detailed six years of the war in Afghanistan; next in October after publishing nearly 400,000 classified US military documents related to the war in Iraq; and on Sunday with the leak of more than a quarter million documents detailing communications between the State Department in Washington and more than 270 worldwide outposts.

WikiLeaks is a quintessentially modern media organization, as much a reflection of the digital age as YouTube, Facebook and the online volunteer encyclopedia Wikipedia, with whom it shares much more than just the first four letters of its name.

According to an interview given by Assange at the start of the year, it relies on a core of just five full-time workers and a network of more than 1,000 volunteers who vet, edit and publish what is now surely the largest database of leaked documents in history.

The organization describes itself as as 'an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking' and its documents are hosted by a Swedish company as well as on its own servers. Both use military-grade encryption to protect sources, and withstand intrusion attempt by the governments, companies and scores of malicious hackers who would no doubt love to silence the world's ultimate whistleblower.

WikiLeaks, which The New Yorker magazine, dubbed a 'media insurgency', is apolitical in the sense that it does not really care who it leaks secret information about. Its allegiance is to what is called 'radical transparency' - the belief that the less secrets there are, the better off we will be.

According to WikiLeaks, it was founded in 2006 by Chinese dissidents, as well as journalists, mathematicians and start-up company technologists from the United States, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa.

It originally stated that its 'primary interest is in exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to people of all regions who wish to reveal unethical behaviour in their governments and corporations.'

At first the site planned to allow anyone to post whatever documents they wanted. This quickly proved impractical as it would have allowed legitimate documents to be swamped in a sea of spam and bogus leaks. Now would-be whistleblowers submit their information via an online form, which is evaluated by WikiLeaks staff and volunteers who have expertise in different fields such as language, software or law.

Despite its media insurgency tag the effectiveness of the site is still dependent on gaining attention from the old media vanguards that still dictate the news agenda. Thus it came to an exclusivity arrangement with The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel over the Afghanistan documents whereby those publications were granted access to the information weeks before it was posted on the WikiLeaks site.

The US diplomatic cables published Sunday were made available weeks ahead to the three news outlets, as well as Spain's El Pais and France's Le Monde newspapers.

The site has earlier posted millions of documents online from all over the world. Some of the most famous included the operational procedures at the US military prison on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the emails of the Climate Research Unit and the publication in April of a secret video taken in 2007 of a US helicopter attack in Iraq that killed a dozen civilians, including two unarmed journalists.