CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION FUNDING OPERATIONAL CHALLENGES 2.

2. ADMINISTATION SITE MANAGEMENT ISSUES HOSTING NAME AND POLICIES VERIFICATION OF SUBMISSION LEGAL BACKGROUNDS 3. FOUNDER JULIAN ASSANGE 4. LEAKS MAJOR LEAKS LEAKS RELATED INDIA OTHER LEAKS 5. CRITICIZM 6. SUPPORT FOR WIKILEAKS 7. CONCLUSION 8. BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION TO WIKILEAKS
WikiLeaks is an international non-profit organization that publishes submissions of private, secret, and classified media from anonymous news sources and news leaks. Its website, launched in 2006 under The Sunshine Press organization, claimed a database of more than 1.2 million documents within a year of its launch.wikileaks is a voluntary, non-profit media organization which allows sources to remain anonymous and drop secret or classified documents into the electronic drop-box in order the inner workings of governments , banks, large companies and religious organizations. WikiLeaks describes its founders as a mix of Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians, and start-up company technologists from the United States, Taiwan, Europe, Australia, and South Africa. Julian Assange, an Australian Internet activist, is generally described as its director. The site was originally launched as a user-editable wiki, but has progressively moved towards a more traditional publication model and no longer accepts either user comments or edits. The wikileaks.org domain name was registered on 4 October 2006. The website was unveiled, and published its first document in December 2006. The creators of WikiLeaks have not been formally identified. It has been represented in public since January 2007 by Julian Assange and others. Assange describes himself as a member of WikiLeaks' advisory board. News reports in The Australian have called Assange the "founder of WikiLeaks". According to Wired magazine, a volunteer said that Assange described himself in a private conversation as "the heart and soul of this organization, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organiser, financier, and all the rest". As of June 2009, the site had over 1,200 registered volunteers and listed an advisory board comprising Assange and eight other people. The WikiLeaks disclosure has revealed not only numerous government secrets, but also the driving mentality of major factions in our political and media class. Simply put, there are few countries in the world with citizenries and especially media outlets more devoted to serving, protecting and venerating government authorities than the U.S.

WikiLeaks states 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. In January 2007, the website stated that it had over 1.2 million leaked documents that it was preparing to publish.

Funding

In December 2009, WikiLeaks announced that it was experiencing a shortage of funds and suspended all access to its website except for a form to submit new material. Material that was previously published was no longer available, although some could still be accessed on unofficial mirrors. WikiLeaks stated on its website that it would resume full operation once the operational costs were covered. WikiLeaks saw this as a kind of strike "to ensure that everyone who is involved stops normal work and actually spends time raising revenue. While the organization initially planned for funds to be secured by 6 January 2010 it was not until 3 February 2010 that WikiLeaks announced that its minimum fundraising goal had been achieved. On 22 January 2010, PayPal suspended WikiLeaks' donation account and froze its assets. WikiLeaks said that this had happened before, and was done for "no obvious reason. The account was restored on 25 January 2010. As of June 2010, WikiLeaks was a finalist for a grant of more than half a million dollars from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation but did not make the cut. WikiLeaks commented via Twitter, "WikiLeaks was highest rated project in the Knight challenge, strongly recommended to the board but gets no funding. Go figure." WikiLeaks said that the Knight foundation announced the award to "'12 Grantees who will impact future of news' but not WikiLeaks" and questioned whether Knight Foundation was "really looking for impact" A spokesman of the Knight Foundation disputed parts of WikiLeaks' statement, saying "WikiLeaks was not recommended by Knight Staff to the board."

However, he declined to say whether WikiLeaks was the project rated highest by the Knight advisory panel, which consists of non-staffers, among them journalist Jennifer 8. Lee, who has done PR work for WikiLeaks with the press and on social networking sites.

Operational challenges
On 17 July, Jacob Appelbaum spoke on behalf of WikiLeaks at the 2010 Hackers on Planet Earth conference in New York City, replacing Assange because of the presence of federal agents at the conference He announced that the WikiLeaks submission system was again up and running, after it had been temporarily suspended. Assange was a surprise speaker at a TED conference on 19 July 2010 in Oxford, and confirmed that the site had begun accepting submissions again. Upon returning to the US from the Netherlands, on 29 July, Appelbaum was detained for three hours at the airport by US agents, according to anonymous sources. The sources told Cnet that Appelbaum's bag was searched, receipts from his bag were photocopied, his laptop was inspected, although in what manner was unclear. Appelbaum reportedly refused to answer questions without a lawyer present, and was not allowed to make a phone call. His three mobile phones were reportedly taken and not returned. On 31 July, he spoke at a Defcon conference and mentioned his phone being "seized". After speaking, he was approached by two FBI agents and questioned. Assange has acknowledged that the practice of posting largely unfiltered classified information online could one day lead the Web site to have "blood on our hands." He expressed the view that the potential to save lives, however, outweighs the danger to innocents. Furthermore, WikiLeaks has highlighted independent investigations which have failed to find any evidence of civilians harmed as a result of WikiLeaks' activities. In 2010, at least a dozen key supporters of WikiLeaks left the website, most notably, Daniel Domscheit-Berg who left to form OpenLeaks.com, a new leak organisation and website with a different management and distribution philosophy.

ADMINISTRATION
The WikiLeaks team then consisted of five people working full-time and about 800 people who worked occasionally, none of whom were compensated. WikiLeaks has no official headquarters. The expenses per year are about 200,000, mainly for servers and bureaucracy, but would reach 600,000 if work currently done by volunteers were paid for. WikiLeaks does not pay for lawyers, as hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal support have been donated by media organizations such as the Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, and the National Newspaper Publishers Association. Its only revenue stream is donations, but WikiLeaks has planned to add an auction model to sell early access to documents. The Wau Holland Foundation helps to process donations to WikiLeaks. In July 2010, the Foundation stated that WikiLeaks was receiving no money for personnel costs, only for hardware, travelling and bandwidth. An article in TechEye wrote: As a charity accountable under German law, donations for WikiLeaks can be made to the foundation. Funds are held in escrow and are given to WikiLeaks after the whistleblower website files an application containing a statement with proof of payment. The foundation does not pay any sort of salary nor give any renumeration to WikiLeaks' personnel, corroborating the statement of the site's former German representative Daniel Schmitt [real name Daniel Domscheit-Berg] on national television that all personnel works voluntarily, even its speakers. However, in December 2010 the Wau Holland Foundation stated that 4 permanent employees, including Julian Assange, had begun to receive salaries.

Site management issues

Within WikiLeaks, there has been public disagreement between founder and spokesperson Julian Assange and Daniel Domscheit-Berg, the site's former German representative who was suspended by Assange. Domscheit-Berg announced on 28 September 2010 that he was leaving the organisation due to internal conflicts over management of the site.

Hosting
WikiLeaks describes itself as "an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking".The site is available on multiple servers and different domain names following a number of denial-of-service attacks and its severance from different Domain Name System (DNS) providers. Until August 2010, WikiLeaks was hosted by PRQ, a Sweden-based company providing "highly secure, no-questions-asked hosting services". PRQ is said to have "almost no information about its clientele and maintains few if any of its own logs" Currently, Wikileaks is mainly hosted by Bahnhof in a facility that used to be a nuclear bunker. Other servers are spread around the world with the central server located in Sweden. Julian Assange has said that the servers are located in Sweden (and the other countries) "specifically because those nations offer legal protection to the disclosures made on the site". He talks about the Swedish constitution, which gives the information providers total legal protection. It is forbidden according to Swedish law for any administrative authority to make inquiries about the sources of any type of newspaper. These laws, and the hosting by PRQ, make it difficult to take WikiLeaks offline; such laws place an onus of proof upon any complainant whose suit would circumscribe WikiLeaks liberty, e.g., its rights, of exercising free speech online. Furthermore, "Wikileaks maintains its own servers at undisclosed locations, keeps no logs and uses military-grade encryption to protect sources and other confidential information." Such arrangements have been called "bulletproof hosting." On 17 August 2010, it was announced that the Swedish Pirate Party will be hosting and managing many of WikiLeaks' new servers. The party donates servers and bandwidth to WikiLeaks without charge. Technicians of the party will make sure that the servers are maintained and working. After the site became the target of a denial-of-service attack from a hacker on its old servers, WikiLeaks moved its site to Amazon's servers. Later, however, the website was "ousted" from the Amazon servers. In a public statement, Amazon said that WikiLeaks

was not following its terms of service. The company further explained, "There were several parts they were violating. For example, our terms of service state that 'you represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content... that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity.' It's clear that WikiLeaks doesn't own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content." WikiLeaks then decided to install itself on the servers of OVH in France. After criticism from the French government, the company sought two court rulings about the legality of hosting WikiLeaks. While the court in Lille immediately declined to force OVH to shut down the WikiLeaks site, the court in Paris stated it would need more time to examine the highly technical issue. WikiLeaks is based on several software packages, including MediaWiki, Freenet, Tor, and PGP. WikiLeaks strongly encouraged postings via Tor because of the strong privacy needs of its users. On 4 November 2010, Julian Assange told Swiss public television TSR that he is seriously considering seeking political asylum in neutral Switzerland and setting up a WikiLeaks foundation in the country to move the operation there. According to Assange, Switzerland and Iceland are the only countries where WikiLeaks would feel safe to operate.

Financing
WikiLeaks is a non-profit organisation, and it is dependent on public donations. Its main financing methods include conventional bank transfers and online payment systems. Wau Holland Foundation, one of the WikiLeaks' main funding channels, stated that they received more than 900,000 (US$1.2 million) in public donations between October 2009 and December 2010, out of which 370,000 has been passed on to WikiLeaks. Hendrik Fulda, vice president of the Wau Holland Foundation, mentioned that the Foundation had been receiving twice as many donations through PayPal as through normal banks, before PayPal's decision to suspend WikiLeaks' account. He also noted that every new

WikiLeaks publication brought "a wave of support", and that donations were strongest in the weeks after WikiLeaks started publishing leaked diplomatic cables.

Name servers
WikiLeaks had been using EveryDNS's services, which led to DDoS attacks on the host The attacks affected the quality of service at EveryDNS, so the company withdrew their service from WikiLeaks. Pro-WikiLeaks supporters retaliated by launching a DDoS attack against EveryDNS. Due to mistakes in the blogosphere, some supporters accidentally mistook EasyDNS for EveryDNS and attacked it. The attacks caused both EveryDNS and EasyDNS to experience outages. Afterwards EasyDNS decided to provide WikiLeaks its name server service.

Name and policies

Despite using the name "WikiLeaks", the website is no longer wiki-based as of December 2010. Also, despite some popular confusion due to both having the term "wiki" in their names, WikiLeaks and Wikipedia have no affiliation with each other; i.e. "wiki" is not a brand name. Wikia, a for-profit corporation loosely affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation, did however purchase several WikiLeaks-related domain names (including wikileaks.com and wikileaks.net) as a "protective brand measure" in 2007. To the user, WikiLeaks will look very much like Wikipedia. Anybody can post to it, anybody can edit it. No technical knowledge is required. Leakers can post documents anonymously and untraceably. Users can publicly discuss documents and analyze their credibility and veracity. Users can discuss interpretations and context and collaboratively formulate collective publications. Users can read and write explanatory articles on leaks along with background material and context. The political relevance of documents and their verisimilitude will be revealed by a cast of thousands. However, WikiLeaks established an editorial policy that accepted only documents that were "of political, diplomatic, historical or ethical interest". This coincided with early criticism that having no editorial policy would drive out good material with spam and

promote "automated or indiscriminate publication of confidential records." It is no longer possible for anybody to post to it or edit it, as the original FAQ promised. Instead, submissions are regulated by an internal review process and some are published, while documents not fitting the editorial criteria are rejected by anonymous WikiLeaks reviewers. By 2008, the revised FAQ stated that "Anybody can post comments to it. Users can publicly discuss documents and analyse their credibility and veracity. After the 2010 relaunch, posting new comments to leaks was no longer possible.

Verification of submissions
WikiLeaks states that it has never released a misattributed document. Documents are assessed before release. In response to concerns about the possibility of misleading or fraudulent leaks, WikiLeaks has stated that misleading leaks "are already well-placed in the mainstream media. WikiLeaks is of no additional assistance." The FAQ states that: "The simplest and most effective countermeasure is a worldwide community of informed users and editors who can scrutinize and discuss leaked documents." According to statements by Assange in 2010, submitted documents are vetted by a group of five reviewers, with expertise in different fields such as language or programming, who also investigate the background of the leaker if his or her identity is known. In that group, Assange has the final decision about the assessment of a document.

Legal background
The legal status of WikiLeaks is complex. Assange considers WikiLeaks a whistleblower protection intermediary. Rather than leaking directly to the press, and fearing exposure and retribution, whistleblowers can leak to WikiLeaks, which then leaks to the press for them. Its servers are located throughout Europe and are accessible from any uncensored web connection. The group located its headquarters in Sweden because it has one of the worlds strongest shield laws to protect confidential source-journalist relationships. WikiLeaks has stated that they "do not solicit any information".

FOUNDER JULIAN ASSANGE

Julian Paul Assange is an Australian publisher, journalist, software developer and Internet activist. He is the founder, spokesperson, and editor in chief of WikiLeaks, a whistleblower website and conduit for worldwide news leaks, with the stated purpose of creating open governments. Assange has worked as a computer programmer and was a hacker during his youth. He has lived in several countries, and has made public appearances in many parts of the world to speak about freedom of the press, censorship, and investigative journalism. Assange founded the WikiLeaks website in 2006 and serves on its advisory board. He has published material about extrajudicial killings in Kenya, toxic waste dumping in Cte d'Ivoire, Church of Scientology manuals, Guantanamo Bay procedures, and banks such as Kaupthing and Julius Baer. In 2010, he published classified details about American involvement in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. On 28 November 2010, WikiLeaks and its five international print media partners began publishing secret US diplomatic cables. For his work with WikiLeaks Assange has received glowing praise and accolades, along with public condemnation and calls for his execution. He received a number of awards and nominations, including the 2009 Amnesty International Media Award for publishing material about extrajudicial killings in Kenya and Readers' Choice for Time magazine's 2010 Person of the Year. Sources in the Kremlin linked to President Dmitry Medvedev suggested that he "could be awarded a Nobel prize". The White House have been among the most critical of his actions. Assange is currently wanted for questioning in Sweden regarding alleged sexual offences, and was arrested in London, England on 7 December 2010. He is currently on bail and under house arrest in England pending an extradition hearing on 7 and 8 February. Assange has denied the allegations and claimed that they are politically motivated. Assange said "I don't have too many fears about being extradited to Sweden. There are much bigger concerns about being extradited to the United States" where he fears facing charges related to his journalistic activity instead of the alleged sexual offences.

Assange was born in 1971 in Townsville, Australia, spent most of his childhood with his mother, Christine, and schooled at home, actually, many homes. In the exhaustive interview with him, published in The New Yorker, he romanticized his early childhood and said it was spent like Tom Sayer, the character made immortal by Mark Twain. He was bright in maths, and his mother was supportive enough to buy him a commodore 64 computer in 1987. Since it was pre-WWW era, the naturally curious Assange exploring the networks around him, and thus started a lifelong hide and seek in cyber space. He married when he was 18 and has a son Daniel, but his wife and son left him in 1991 when police raided their house and accused him of hacking into the computer system of Nortel, a telecommunication company. He was arrested and convicted, but did no jail time. He worked as a researcher with Suelette Dreyfus, an academic, assisted her with her 1997 book Underground: Tales of Hacking. Assange also did a course in Physics and Maths at Melbourne University. Assange is an unpaid volunteer. Assange is a lonely and restless soul. He has lived a crowded life, having motorcycled across Vietnam, camped in Iceland to complete projects for Wikileaks in secrecy and delivered lectures all over the world. Assange is an international trafficker, of sorts. He and his colleagues collect documents and imagery that governments and other institutions regard as confidential and publish them on a Web site called WikiLeaks.org. Since it went online, three and a half years ago, the site has published an extensive catalogue of secret material, ranging from the Standard Operating Procedures at Camp Delta, in Guantnamo Bay, and the Climate gate e-mails from the University of East Anglia, in England, to the contents of Sarah Palins private Yahoo account. The catalogue is especially remarkable because WikiLeaks is not quite an organization; it is better described as a media insurgency. It has no paid staff, no copiers, no desks, no office. Assange does not even have a home. He travels from country to country, staying with supporters, or friends of friends. He is the operations prime mover, and it is fair to say that WikiLeaks exists wherever he does. At the same time, hundreds of volunteers from around the world help maintain the Web sites complicated infrastructure; many participate in small ways, and between three and

five people dedicate themselves to it full time. Key members are known only by initials M, for instanceeven deep within WikiLeaks, where communications are conducted by encrypted online chat services. The secretiveness stems from the belief that a populist intelligence operation with virtually no resources, designed to publicize information that powerful institutions do not want public, will have serious adversaries. Assange won the 2008 Economist Index on Censorship Award. He won the 2009 Amnesty International UK Media Award (New Media), for exposing extrajudicial assassinations in Kenya by distributing and publicizing the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR)'s investigation The Cry of Blood Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances. Accepting the award, Assange said, "It is a reflection of the courage and strength of Kenyan civil society that this injustice was documented." In 2010 Assange was awarded the Sam Adams Award, Readers' Choice in Time magazine's Person of the Year poll, and runner-up for Person of the Year. An informal poll of editors at Postmedia Network named him the top newsmaker for the year after six out of 10 felt Assange had "affected profoundly how information is seen and delivered". Le Monde named him person of the year with fifty six percent of the votes in their online poll. Le Monde is one of the five publications to cooperate with Wikileaks' publication of the recent document leaking.

MAJOR LEAKS
Camp Delta Standard Operating ProceduresThe Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures is a document that was written under the authority of Geoffrey D. Miller when he was the officer in charge of Joint Task Force Guantanamo. Guantnamo Bay is a bay located in Guantnamo Province at the southeastern end of Cuba. It is the largest harbor on the south side of the island and is surrounded by steep hills creating an enclave cut off from its immediate hinterland. The Guantanamo Bay Naval Base surrounds the southern portion of the bay. Since 2002, the base has included the detainment camp for captured al-Qaeda personnel who have been, or may someday be, charged with terrorism, as well as those still deemed to be a risk to US national security. This leaked document was published on Wikileaks on Wednesday November 7, 2007.A never-before-seen military manual detailing the day-to-day operations of the U.S. military's Guantnamo Bay detention facility has been leaked to the web, affording a rare inside glimpse into the institution where the United States has imprisoned hundreds of suspected terrorists since 2002. The 238-page document, "Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures," is dated March 28, 2003. The disclosure highlights the internet's usefulness to whistle-blowers in anonymously propagating documents the government and others would rather conceal. The Pentagon has been resisting -- since October 2003 -- a Freedom of Information Act request from the American Civil Liberties Union seeking the very same document. The Camp Delta document includes schematics of the camp, detailed checklists of what "comfort items" be given to detainees as rewards, six pages of instructions on how to process new detainees, instructions on how to psychologically manipulate prisoners, and rules for dealing with hunger strikes. The document was signed by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, Miller introduced harsh interrogation methods to

Guantnamo, such as shackling detainees into stress positions and using guard dogs to exploit. It also raises concerns over a section on the International Committee of the Red Cross, or ICRC, which indicates that some prisoners were hidden from Red Cross representatives. The manual shows how the military coded each prisoner according to the level of access the Red Cross would have. The four levels are:

No Access Visual Access -- ICRC can only look at a prisoner's physical condition. Restricted Access -- ICRC representatives can only ask short questions about the prisoner's health. Unrestricted Access

That actually raises a lot of concerns about the administration's genuineness in terms of allowing ICRC full access, as was promised to the world. They are the only organization that has access to the detainees, and this raises a lot of questions. The ICRC does not make public reports about the conditions in prisons and gulags around the world, but instead meets privately with governments to persuade them to change their policies. The manual also includes instructions on how to use military dogs to intimidate prisoners.

July 12, 2007 Baghdad air strike

On 5 April 2010, WikiLeaks released classified U.S. military footage from a series of attacks on 12 July 2007 in Baghdad by a U.S. helicopter that killed 12, including two Reuters news staff, Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen, on a website called "Collateral Murder". The footage consisted of a 39-minute unedited version and an 18minute version which had been edited and annotated. Analysis of the video indicates that the pilots thought the men were carrying weapons (which were actually camera equipment). When asked if they were sure that the men were carrying weapons, they answered in the affirmative. The July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrikes were a series of three air-to-ground attacks conducted by a team of two United States Army AH-64 Apache helicopters in Al-Amin al-Thaniyah, in the district of New Baghdad in Baghdad, during the Iraq War. In the first strike "Crazyhorse 1/8" directed 30 mm calibre cannon fire at a group of ten men alleged by the US Army to be Iraqi insurgents. One was claimed to have had an AK 47 in his right hand, while others appeared to the soldiers to be carrying other weapons. Two of the victims turned out to be Reuters news staff; Saeed Chmagh and Namir NoorEldeen, whose cameras were mistaken for weapons. Nine men were killed, including Noor-Eldeen. Chmagh was initially wounded by "Crazyhorse 1/9 [Kyle]." The second air strike using 30 mm fire was directed at a man who pulled up in a van and attempted to help the wounded Chmagh. Two children inside the van were wounded, and three more men were killed, including Chmagh. In the third air strike, the "Bush" helicopter team deployed three AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, which destroyed a building, after having seen men, some possibly armed and some unarmed, enter the building. An undisclosed number of civilians were killed in this

building, including women and children living there and a person walking on the footpath. The attacks received worldwide coverage following the release of 39 minutes of classified cockpit video footage in 2010. Reuters had unsuccessfully requested the footage under the Freedom of Information Act in 2007. The footage was acquired from an undisclosed source in 2009 by the Internet leak website WikiLeaks, which released a shorter, edited version on April 5, 2010, under the name "Collateral Murder" along with the full version. Recorded from the gunsight Target Acquisition and Designation System of one of the attacking helicopters, the video shows the three incidents and the radio chatter between the aircrews and ground units involved. An anonymous US military official confirmed the authenticity of the footage. In May 2010, a 22-year-old American Army intelligence analyst named Bradley Manning was arrested after telling Adrian Lamo he had leaked the air strike video, along with a video of another air strike and around 260 000 diplomatic cables, to WikiLeaks. As of June 7, Manning had not yet been formally charged. Manning said that the diplomatic documents expose "almost criminal political back dealings" and that they explain "how the first world exploits the third, in detail". WikiLeaks said "allegations in Wired that we have been sent 260,000 classified US embassy cables are, as far as we can tell, incorrect".WikiLeaks have said that they are unable as yet to confirm whether or not Manning was actually the source of the video, stating "we never collect personal information on our sources", but saying also that "if Brad Manning is the whistleblower then, without doubt, he's a national hero" and "we have taken steps to arrange for his protection and legal defence".

Afghan War Diary

On 25 July 2010, WikiLeaks released to The Guardian, The New York Times, and Der Spiegel over 92,000 documents related to the war in Afghanistan between 2004 and the end of 2009. The documents detail individual incidents including friendly fire and civilian casualties. The scale of leak was described by Julian Assange as comparable to that of the Pentagon Papers in the 1970s. The documents were released to the public on 25 July 2010. On 29 July 2010 WikiLeaks added a 1.4 GB "insurance file" to the Afghan War Diary page, whose decryption details would be released if WikiLeaks or Assange were harmed. About 15,000 of the 92,000 documents have not yet been released on WikiLeaks, as the group is currently reviewing the documents to remove some of the sources of the information. Speaking to a group in London in August 2010, Assange said that the group will "absolutely" release the remaining documents. He stated that WikiLeaks has requested help from the Pentagon and human-rights groups to help redact the names, but has not received any assistance. He also stated that WikiLeaks is "not obligated to protect other people's sources...unless it is from unjust retribution." The Obama administration has asked Britain, Germany and Australia among others to consider bringing criminal charges against Assange for the Afghan war leaks and to help limit Assange's travels across international borders. In the United States, a joint investigation by the Army and the Federal Bureau of Investigation may try to prosecute "Mr. Assange and others involved on grounds they encouraged the theft of government property". WikiLeaks' recent leaking of classified U.S. intelligence has been described by commentator of The Wall Street Journal as having "endangered the lives of Afghan informants" and "the dozens of Afghan civilians named in the document dump as U.S. military informants. Their lives, as well as those of their entire families, are now at terrible risk of Taliban reprisal." Assange stated that WikiLeaks has withheld some

15,000 documents that identify informants to avoid putting their lives at risk. Specifically, Voice of America reported in August 2010 that Assange, responding to such criticisms, stated that the 15,000 still held documents are being reviewed "line by line," and that the names of "innocent parties who are under reasonable threat" will be removed. Amnesty International and Reporters without Borders criticized WikiLeaks for what they saw as risking peoples lives by identifying Afghans acting as informers. A Taliban spokesman said that the Taliban had formed a nine-member "commission" to review the documents "to find about people who are spying." the Taliban had a "wanted" list of 1,800 Afghans and was comparing that with names WikiLeaks provided, stating "after the process is completed, Taliban court will decide about such people."

Iraq War Logs

The Iraq War documents leak is the disclosure of a collection of 391,832 United States Army field reports, also called the Iraq War Logs, of the Iraq War from 2004 to 2009 to several international media organizations and published on the Internet by WikiLeaks on 22 October 2010. The files record 66,081 civilian deaths out of 109,000 recorded deaths. The leak resulted in the Iraq Body Count project adding 15,000 civilian deaths to their count, bringing their total to over 150,000, with roughly 80% of those civilians. It is the biggest leak in the military history of the United States, surpassing the Afghan War documents leak of 25 July 2010. The documents also suggest "hundreds" of civilians were killed at US military checkpoints after the invasion in 2003. And the files show the US kept records of civilian deaths, despite previously denying it. The death toll was put at 109,000, of whom 66,081 were civilians. The US criticised the largest leak of classified documents in its history.

U.S. Intelligence report on WikiLeaks

On 15 March 2010, WikiLeaks released a secret 32-page U.S. Department of Defense Counterintelligence Analysis Report from March 2008. The document described some prominent reports leaked on the website which related to U.S. security interests and described potential methods of marginalizing the organization. WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange said that some details in the Army report were inaccurate and its recommendations flawed, and also that the concerns of the U.S. Army raised by the report were hypothetical. The report discussed deterring potential whistleblowers via termination of employment and criminal prosecution of any existing or former insiders, leakers or whistleblowers. Reasons for the report include notable leaks such as U.S. equipment expenditure, human rights violations in Guantanamo Bay.

Diplomatic cables release

The United States diplomatic cables leak (also known as Cablegate) began on 28 November 2010 when WikiLeaks started to publish classified documents of detailed correspondence between the U.S. State Department and its diplomatic missions around the world, releasing further documents every day. WikiLeaks forwarded diplomatic cables to five major newspapers around the world, which have been publishing articles by agreement with WikiLeaks. The publication of the U.S. embassy cables is the third in a series of U.S. classified document "mega-leaks" distributed by WikiLeaks in 2010, following the Afghan War documents leak in July, and the Iraq War documents leak in October. The contents of the cables describe international affairs from 300 embassies dated from 19662010, containing diplomatic analysis of world leaders, an assessment of host countries, and a discussion about international and domestic issues. The first 220 of the 251,287 documents were published on 28 November, with simultaneous press coverage from El Pas (Spain), Le Monde (France), Der Spiegel (Germany), The Guardian (United Kingdom) and The New York Times (United States).[3][4] Over 130,000 of the documents are unclassified, some 100,000 are labeled "confidential", about 15,000 documents have the higher classification "secret", and none are classified as "top secret" on the classification scale. As of 11 January 2011, 2,017 individual cables had been released. WikiLeaks plans to release all the cables in phases over several months at a pace of about eighty cables per day; however, should the pace of eighty cables a day be strictly upheld, it would take ten years for all of the cables to be released. Reactions to the leak varied widely. Some western government officials expressed strong disapproval and condemnation, and criticized WikiLeaks for potentially jeopardizing international relations and global security. The leak also generated intense

interest from the public, journalists, and media analysts. WikiLeaks received support from some commentators who questioned the necessity of government secrecy in a democracy that serves the interests of its people and depends on an informed electorate. Some political leaders referred to Julian Assange, editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, as a criminal, but also blamed the U.S. Department of Defense for security lapses that led to the leak. Supporters of Assange have referred to him as a heroic defender of free speech and freedom of the press. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that an "open and transparent government is something that the President believes is truly important. But the stealing of classified information and its dissemination is a crime". In response to some of the negative reaction, Navi Pillay, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, has expressed her concern over the "cyber war" against WikiLeaks. Catalina Botero Marino, Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression for the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights, and Frank William La Rue, U.N. Special Rapporteur, issued a joint statement calling on states and other actors to keep international legal principles in mind. WikiLeaks and its members have complained about continuing harassment and surveillance by law enforcement and intelligence organizations, including extended detention, seizure of computers, veiled threats, covert following and hidden photography. Two lawyers for Julian Assange in the United Kingdom told The Guardian that they believed they were being watched by the security services after the U.S. cables leak, which started on 28 November 2010.

U.S. diplomatic cables leak responses

WikiLeaks and its members have complained about continuing harassment and surveillance by law enforcement and intelligence organisations, including extended detention, seizure of computers, veiled threats, covert following and hidden photography. Two lawyers for Julian Assange in the United Kingdom told that they believed they were being watched by the security services after the U.S. cables leak, which started on 28 November 2010.

Furthermore, several companies severed ties with WikiLeaks. After providing 24-hour notification, American owned EveryDNS dropped WikiLeaks from its entries on 2 December 2010, citing DDoS attacks that "threatened the stability of its infrastructure".The site's 'info' DNS lookup remained operational at alternative addresses for direct access respectively to the WikiLeaks and Cablegate websites. On the same day, Amazon.com severed its ties with WikiLeaks, to which it was providing infrastructure services, after an intervention by an aide of U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman. Amazon denied acting under political pressure citing a violation of its terms of service. Citing indirect pressure from the U.S. Government, Tableau Software also dropped WikiLeaks' data from its site for people to use for data visualization. In the days following, hundreds of mirrors of the WikiLeaks site appeared and the Anonymous group of internet activists, called on supporters to attack the websites of companies which do not support WikiLeaks, under the banner of Operation Payback, previously aimed at anti-piracy organisations. AFP reported that attempts to shut down the wikileaks.org address had lead to the site surviving via the so-called Streisand effect, whereby attempts to censor information online leads to it being replicated in many places. On 3 December, Pay Pal, the payment processor owned by eBay, permanently cut off the account of the Wau Holland Foundation that had been redirecting donations to WikiLeaks. PayPal alleged that the account violated its "Acceptable Use Policy", specifically that it was used for "activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity." The Vice President of PayPal later stated that they stopped accepting payments after the State Department told us these were illegal activities. It was straightforward. Later the same day, he said that his previous statement was incorrect, and that it was in fact based on a letter from the State Department to WikiLeaks. On 8 December 2010, the Wau Holland Foundation released a press statement, saying it has filed a legal action against PayPal for blocking its account used for WikiLeaks payments and for libel due to Pay Pals allegations of "illegal activity". On 6 December, the Swiss bank, Post Finance, announced that it had frozen the assets of Assange that it holds, totaling 31,000 euros. In a statement on their website, they stated

that this was because Assange "provided false information regarding his place of residence" when opening the account. WikiLeaks released a statement saying this was due to that Assange, "as a homeless refugee attempting to gain residency in Switzerland, had used his lawyer's address in Geneva for the bank's correspondence". On the same day, MasterCard announced that it "is taking action to ensure that WikiLeaks can no longer accept MasterCard-branded products", adding "MasterCard rules prohibit customers from directly or indirectly engaging in or facilitating any action that is illegal." The next day, Visa Inc. announced it was suspending payments to WikiLeaks, pending "further investigations". In a move of support for WikiLeaks, XIPWIRE established a way to donate to WikiLeaks, and waived their fees. Datacell, the Swiss-based IT company that enabled WikiLeaks to accept credit card donations, announced that it will take legal action against Visa Europe and MasterCard, in order to resume allowing payments to the website. On December 18, Bank of America announced it would "not process transactions of any type that we have reason to believe are intended for Wikileaks" citing "Wikileaks may be engaged in activities that are... inconsistent with our internal policies for processing payments". WikiLeaks responded in a tweet by encouraging their supporters who were BoA customer to close their accounts. Bank of America has long been believed to be the target of WikiLeaks' next major release. On 7 December, The Guardian stated that people can still donate to WikiLeaks via Commerzbank Kassel in Germany or Landsbanki in Iceland or by post to a post office box at the University of Melbourne or at the wikileaks.ch domain. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay has stated that Visa, MasterCard and Amazon may be 'violating WikiLeaks' e pluribus unum right to freedom of expression' by withdrawing their services. On 21 December, media reported that Apple had removed an application from its App Store, which provided access to the embassy cable leaks.

As part of its 'Initial Assessments Pursuant to ... WikiLeaks', the US Presidential Executive Office has issued a memorandum to the heads of Executive Departments and Agencies asking whether they have an 'insider threat program'.

Leaks related INDIA

Hillary mocks India's UNSC bid
The United States official diplomatic wires leaked by WikiLeaks have exposed that US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, has mocked India's bid for permanent United Nations SceurityCouncilSeat runner for UNSC seat. (UNSC). According to leaked documents, Hillary Clinton defined India as a self-appointed front In a cable dealing with UNSC expansion, the US State Department reportedly asked its diplomats to collect details about the bids of self-appointed front-runners for the permanent seat of UNSC. Hillary also added Brazil, Germany and Japan to the 'self-appointed front runners' list. The shocking news came just few weeks after US President Barack Obama offered US' support for India's UNSC seat bid. During his maiden visit to India in Nov 2010.

Rahul fears Hindu terrorism in India

ON Dec 17: The latest release by whistle-blower website WikiLeaks exposed that Congress General Secretary Rahul Gandhi told the American ambassador, India has been facing terror threat from radical Hindu groups than the Muslim militants. The leaked cables published on Guardian revealed that Rahul Gandhi, warned US ambassador Timothy Roemer in 2009 about the increasing tension over the "growth of radicalized Hindu groups which create religious tensions and political confrontations with the Muslim community".

In one cable, US ambassador described Rahul's statements as "there was evidence of some support for [Islamist group Lashkar-e-Taiba] among certain elements in India's indigenous Muslim community, the bigger threat may be the growth of radicalized Hindu groups, which create religious tensions and political confrontations with the Muslim community." Another cable related to Rahul Gandhi read, "the risk of a 'home-grown' extremist front, reacting to terror attacks coming from Pakistan or from Islamist groups in India, was a growing concern and one that demanded constant attention".

Another cable sent from Delhi discussed about the "the rising profile of young leaders." US ambassador Roemer found this as a positive development for a better relation with India.

OTHER LEAKS
Tibetan Dissent in China
Wikileaks has made 35 censored videos of civil unrest in Tibet available in a bid to get round the "great firewall of China". Wikileaks said that posting the videos was a "response to the Chinese Public Security Bureau's carte-blanche censorship of YouTube, the BBC, CNN, the Guardian and other sites" that had carried sensitive video

9/11 pager messages

On 25 November 2009, WikiLeaks released 570,000 intercepts of pager messages sent on the day of the September 11 attacks. Bradley Manning commented that those were from a NSA database. Among the released messages are communications between Pentagon officials and New York City Police Department.

Sarah Palin's Yahoo email account contents

in September 2008, during the 2008 United States presidential election campaigns , the contents of a Yahoo account belonging to Sarah Palin (the running mate of Republican presidential nominee John McCain) were posted on WikiLeaks after being hacked into by members of Anonymous. It has been alleged by Wired that contents of the mailbox indicate that she used the private Yahoo account to send work-related messages, in violation of public record laws. The hacking of the

account was widely reported in mainstream news outlets. Although WikiLeaks was able to conceal the hacker's identity, the source of the Palin emails was eventually publicly identified as David Kernell, a 20-year-old economics student at the University of Tennessee and the son of Democratic Tennessee State Representative Mike Kernell from Memphis.

Killings by the Kenyan police

WikiLeaks publicized reports on extrajudicial executions by Kenyan police for one week starting 1 November 2008 on its home page. Two of the human rights investigators involved, Oscar Kamau Kingara and John Paul Oulu, who made major contributions to a Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR) report that was redistributed by WikiLeaks, The Cry of Blood Report on Extra-Judicial Killings and Disappearances, were assassinated several months later, on 5 March 2009. WikiLeaks called for information on the assassination. In 2009, Amnesty International UK gave WikiLeaks and Julian Assange an award for the distribution of the KNCHR's The Cry of Blood report.

BNP membership list

After briefly appearing on a blog, the membership list of the far-right British National Party was posted to WikiLeaks on 18 November 2008. The name, address, age and occupation of many of the 13,500 members were given, including several police officers, two solicitors, four ministers of religion, at least one doctor, and a number of primary and secondary school teachers. In Britain, police officers are banned from joining or promoting the BNP and at least one officer was dismissed for being a member. The BNP was known for going to considerable lengths to conceal the identities of members. On 19 November, BNP leader Nick Griffin stated that he knew the identity of the person who initially leaked the list on 17 November, describing him as a "hardliner" senior employee who left the party in 2007. On 20 October 2009, a list of BNP members from April 2009 was leaked. This list contained 11,811 members.

Toxic dumping in Africa: The Minton report

In September 2006, commodities giant Trafigura commissioned an internal report about a toxic dumping incident in the Ivory Coast, which affected 108,000 people. The document, called the Minton Report, names various harmful chemicals "likely to be present" in the waste and notes that some of them "may cause harm at some distance". The report states that potential health effects include "burns to the skin, eyes and lungs, vomiting, diarrhea, loss of consciousness and death", and suggests that the high number of reported casualties is "consistent with there having been a significant release of hydrogen sulphide gas". On 11 September 2009, Trafigura's lawyers, Carter-Ruck, obtained a secret "superinjunction" against The Guardian, banning that newspaper from publishing the contents of the document. Trafigura also threatened a number of other media organizations with legal action if they published the report's contents, including the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation and The Chemical Engineer magazine. On 14 September 2009, WikiLeaks posted the report. On 12 October, Carter-Ruck warned The Guardian against mentioning the content of a parliamentary question that was due to be asked about the report. Instead, the paper published an article stating that they were unable to report on an unspecified question and claiming that the situation appeared to "call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1689 Bill of Rights". The suppressed details rapidly circulated via the internet and Twitter and, amid uproar, Carter-Ruck agreed the next day to the modification of the injunction before it was challenged in court, permitting The Guardian to reveal the existence of the question and the injunction. The injunction was lifted on 16 October.

Kaupthing Bank
WikiLeaks has made available an internal document from Kaupthing Bank from just prior to the collapse of Iceland's banking sector, which led to the 20082010

Icelandic financial crisis. The document shows that suspiciously large sums of money were loaned to various owners of the bank, and large debts written off. Kaupthing's lawyers have threatened WikiLeaks with legal action, citing banking privacy laws. The leak has caused an uproar in Iceland. Criminal charges relating to the multibillion Euro loans to Exista and other major shareholders are being investigated. The bank is seeking to recover loans taken out by former bank employees before its collapse.

CRITICIZM
Many governments of the world are criticizing wikileaks because they think wikileaks is violating media related ethics. Australia, France, Iraq, US and many other countries are criticizing wikileaks. Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard made a statement that she 'absolutely condemns' WikiLeaks' actions and that the release of information on the site was 'grossly irresponsible' and 'illegal.' WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is Australian and he responded two days later by accusing his prime minister of betraying him as an Australian citizen. However, on 8 December 2010after WikiLeaks published U.S. diplomatic cables in which United States diplomats labelled him a "control freak", former Australian Prime Minister and current foreign minister Kevin Rudd said the leak of the US secret cables raised questions about US security. Rudd said, "The core responsibility, and therefore legal liability, goes to those individuals responsible for that initial unauthorized release." The French Industry Minister ric Besson said in a letter to the CGIET technology agency, WikiLeaks "violates the secret of diplomatic relations and puts people protected by diplomatic secret in danger." Therefore it would be 'unacceptable' that the site was hosted on servers based in France. The minister asked for measures to bar WikiLeaks from France. The President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, also criticised WikiLeaks following the release of United States diplomatic cables. Ahmadinejad claimed that the release of cables purporting to show concern with Iran by Arab states was a planned leak by the United States to discredit his government, though he did not indicate

whether he believed WikiLeaks was in collusion with the United States or was simply an unwitting facilitator. Following the November 2010 release of United States diplomatic cables, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton denounced the group saying, "this disclosure is not just an attack on America's foreign policy interests, it is an attack on the international community." Peter King, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee of the United States House of Representatives has stated his support for listing WikiLeaks as a "foreign terrorist organization" explaining that "WikiLeaks presents a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States.

SUPPORT FOR WIKILEAKS

Wikileaks is getting support from various parts of the world as they consider it as a whistleblower which is necessary for the ethical growth of the world. In July 2010 Veterans for Peace president Mike Ferner editorialized on the group's website "neither Wikileaks nor the soldier or soldiers who divulged the documents should be prosecuted for revealing this information. We should give them a medal." Documentary filmmaker John Pilger wrote an August 2010 editorial in the Australian publication Green Left titled "Wikileaks must be defended." In it, Pilger said WikiLeaks represented the interests of "public accountability" and a new form of journalism at odds with "the dominant section ... devoted merely to taking down what cynical and malign power tells it." Daniel Ellsberg, the man who released the Pentagon Papers in 1971, has been a frequent defender of WikiLeaks. Following the November 2010 release of U.S. diplomatic cables, Ellsberg rejected criticism that the site was endangering the lives of U.S. military personnel and intelligence assets stating "not one single soldier or informant has been in danger from any of the WikiLeaks releases. That risk has been largely overblown."

Ellsberg went on to note that government claims to the contrary were "a script that they roll out every time there's a leak of any sort." Following the US diplomatic cable release, which a number of media reports sought to differentiate from Ellsberg's whistle blowing, Ellsberg claimed, "EVERY attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time. On 3 December 2010 Republican Congressman of Texas, Ron Paul, spoke out publicly during a Fox Business interview in support of WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange; "In a free society we're supposed to know the truth," Paul said. "In a society where truth becomes treason, then we're in big trouble." Paul went on to state, "Why don't we prosecute The New York Times or anybody that releases this?" In another speech at US House of Representatives Paul again defended WikiLeaks against criticism for revealing the truth and warned the US administration that "lying is not patriotic". Fellow Republican congressman Connie Mack IV of Florida also praised WikiLeaks, stating that Americans have a right to know the contents of the leaks, no matter how we acquire that knowledge. Australias most senior and high-profile media professionals expressed their support for WikiLeaks in a letter to Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard. The letter was initiated by the Walkley Foundation, who present the yearly Walkley Awards for Excellence in Journalism. The letter was signed by "the ten members of the Walkley Advisory Board as well as editors of major Australian newspapers and news websites and the news directors of the countrys three commercial TV networks and two public broadcasters." Their position is summarized as follows: In essence, WikiLeaks, an organisation that aims to expose official secrets, is doing what the media have always done: bringing to light material that governments would prefer to keep secret. It is the medias duty to responsibly report such material if it comes into their possession. To aggressively attempt to shut WikiLeaks down, to threaten to prosecute those who publish official leaks, and to pressure companies to cease doing

commercial business with WikiLeaks, is a serious threat to democracy, which relies on a free and fearless press. Following the November 2010 leak of United States diplomatic cables The Atlantic, in a staff editorial, opined "Wikileaks is a powerful new way for reporters and human rights advocates to leverage global information technology systems to break the heavy veil of government and corporate secrecy that is slowly suffocating the American press." Calling legal and physical threats against WikiLeaks volunteers "shameful" the magazine went on to state, "Not since President Richard Nixon directed his minions to go after Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg and New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan ... has a working journalist and his source been subjected to the kind of official intimidation and threats that have been directed at Assange and Manning by high-ranking members of the Obama Administration." On 4 December 2010, Reporters Without Borders condemned the "blocking, cyberattacks and political pressure" being directed at WikiLeaks. The organisation is also concerned by some of the extreme comments made by American authorities concerning WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange. On 21 December the organisation announced it will host a mirror website for the leaked US diplomatic cables being published by WikiLeaks. In an article titled "Only WikiLeaks can save US policy" published on the online foreign affairs magazine The Diplomat, former long-time CIA counter-terrorism expert Michael Scheuer said the source of interest in WikiLeaks revelations was in the inherent dishonesty of recent U.S. administrations. "In recent years, the US public has had to hear its leaders repeatedly tell Americans that black was white," Scheuer wrote, referencing the presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Evan Hughes, editor-in-chief of wired.com published his support for WikiLeaks in an online editorial titled "Why WikiLeaks is Good for America." Despite an often contentious relationship between Wired and WikiLeaks, with the former having being accused by the latter of complicity in the identification and arrest of Bradley Manning,

Hughes argued that "WikiLeaks stands to improve our democracy, not weaken it." He went on to note that "The greatest threat we face right now from WikiLeaks is not the information it has spilled and may spill in the future, but the reactionary response to it thats building in the United States that promises to repudiate the rule of law and our free speech traditions, if left unchecked."

A December 2010 rally in Australia protesting the Australian government's treatment of Julian Assange The New York Times reported that over 200 WikiLeaks mirror sites sprang up after some hosting companies cut their services to the company. On 5 December, a group of activists and hackers known as "Anonymous" called upon supporters to attack sites of companies that oppose WikiLeaks as part of Operation Avenge Assange. PayPal has been targeted following their decision to stop processing donations for WikiLeaks. Gregg Housh, who previously worked on other projects with Anonymous, said that he had noticed an organized attempt taking place to attack companies that have not supported WikiLeaks. In reference to the support being shown for WikiLeaks, Mr. Housh said; "The reason is amazingly simple, we all believe that information should be free, and the Internet should be free." On 8 December 2010, the PayPal website was victim of a Denial-of-service attack by Anonymous. Later that day, PayPal announced in their blog that they will release all remaining funds in the account to the foundation that was raising funds for WikiLeaks. On the same day, the websites of Visa and MasterCard were attacked by WikiLeaks supporters. By then over 1,200 mirror sites had been set up for hosting content no longer accessible at WikiLeaks.com. Anonymous also issued a fresh statement; "While we don't have much of an affiliation with WikiLeaks, we fight for the same reasons. We want transparency, and we counter censorship...This is why we intend to utilize our resources to raise awareness, attack those against, and support those who are helping lead our world to freedom and democracy."

In December 2010, the Internet Society stated that despite the international concern about the content released by WikiLeaks, "we nevertheless believe it must be subject to the same laws and policies of availability as all Internet sites" and that free expression should not be restricted by governmental or private controls over computer hardware or software, telecommunications infrastructure, or other essential components of the Internet. ISOC also called for appropriate action to "pursue and prosecute entities (if any) that acted maliciously to take it [WikiLeaks] off the air because suppressing communication would merely serve to undermine the integrity of the global Internet and its operation. On 8 December 2010 the international civic organisation Avaaz launched a petition in support of WikiLeaks, which was signed by over 250 thousand people within the first few hours, the total number went up to 600 thousand by 15 December 2010. In early December 2010, Noam Chomsky offered his support to protesters across Australia planning to take to the streets in defence of WikiLeaks. In an interview for Democracy Now!, Chomsky criticized the government response, saying, "perhaps the most dramatic revelation ... is the bitter hatred of democracy that is revealed both by the U.S. Government -- Hillary Clinton, others -- and also by the diplomatic service." In an effort to curb the rising tide of establishment anger at Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, more than 150 journalists from around the world have signed a public letter of support. Stating that Assange is being criticized for making public information that should never have been withheld from the public in the first place, the letter praises Wikileaks for providing an outstanding contribution to transparency and accountability on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, subjects where transparency and accountability has been severely restricted by government secrecy and media control. Many of the journalists are prominent investigative reporters working in Europe, Latin America, Russia, Australia, and the Middle East. A full list of the signatories can be seen on the Global Investigative Journalism Network web.

BRAZIL President Luiz Incio Lula da Silva expressed his "solidarity" with Julian Assange following Assange's 2010 arrest in the United Kingdom. Lula went on to state in reference to WikiLeaks disclosure of classified US diplomatic cables in November and December 2010WikiLeaks had "exposed a diplomacy that had appeared unreachable." He further criticized the arrest of Julian Assange as "an attack on expression. In December 2010 the office of Russian president Dmitry Medvedev issued a statement calling on non-governmental organizations to consider "nominating Julian Assange as a Nobel Prize laureate." The announcement followed commentary by Russian ambassador to NATO Dmitry Rogozin who stated that Julian Assange's earlier arrest on Swedish charges demonstrated that there was "no media freedom" in the west. In December 2010 United Nations Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Opinion and Expression Frank LaRue stated he agreed with the idea that Julian Assange was a "martyr for free speech." LaRue went on to say Assange or other WikiLeaks staff should not face legal accountability for any information they disseminated, noting that, "if there is a responsibility by leaking information it is of, exclusively of the person that made the leak and not of the media that publish it. And this is the way that transparency works and that corruption has been confronted in many cases." High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay subsequently voiced concern at the revelation that private companies were being pressured by states to sever their relationships with WikiLeaks. Now the question arises weither wikileaks is ethical or unethical ? . what I perceive is in majority of the cases wikileaks

CONCLUSION
Wikileaks is getting appreciation as well as is being criticized on the ground of national security of a country. Wikileaks is exposing many country government especially USA. Many countries are criticizing wikileaks they believe wikileaks is violating media norms. Only time will tell how credible wikileaks .But wikileaks denies being a front for any government or intelligence agency. They maintain they are a group of independent professionals who believe in free press Now the question arises weither wikileaks is ethical or unethical? What I perceive is in majority of the cases wikileaks is exposing governmental mal practices that is a good thing. Wikileaks changed the face of media.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:
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14. http://news.oneindia.in/2010/12/17/rahul-fears-hindu-terrorism-in-indiawikileaks.html 15. The tribune, December 13.page no.14 article- just who is Julian Assange