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...