WikiLeaks

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“”Tribalist symbol for establishment climbers? Most of our critics have 3 (((brackets around their names))) & have black-rim glasses. Bizarre.

—From WikiLeaks' twitter account, July 23, 2016

“”I love Wikileaks

—Donald Trump, October 10, 2016

“”It's time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: A non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia

—Trump appointee/CIA director Mike Pompeo, April 13, 2017

WikiLeaks is a site that hosts leaked confidential documents while preserving the anonymity of its contributors and staff. It operates as a news site, reviewing and commenting on documents it puts up, and has aroused the ire of many governments and businesses — the Pentagon is after editor-in-chief Julian Assange personally — and showed the populace what effect journalism is supposed to have. Later, however, all impartiality and general human decency with respect for privacy died when Assange dropped the crowd-focus and when his website started parroting anti-Democrat conspiracy theories among others; WikiLeaks has also been criticised for its connections to the Russian government.

WikiLeaks is credited with potentially endangering or otherwise ruining thousands of lives with its atrociously irresponsible handling and public release of delicate records (including passports, home addresses, medical records, financial records, and even political activities), especially concerning private citizens in oppressive countries.

Name

WikiLeaks once used the MediaWiki software developed for Wikipedia, but now runs a CMS that has nothing to do with Wikis at all. For a time, the English Wikipedia had a disclaimer on their article about WikiLeaks telling those who may be confused by the name that the site is in no way owned or affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation, but this was later removed as per their "no disclaimers" policy.

Operation

WikiLeaks' stated aim is to expose the official corruption in repressive governments, but their door is open to almost any kind of leaked documents.

Wikileaks is developing an uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis. Our 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 behavior in their governments and corporations. We aim for maximum political impact. Our interface is identical to Wikipedia and usable by all types of people. We have received over 1.2 million documents so far from dissident communities and anonymous sources.

We believe that transparency in government activities leads to reduced corruption, better government and stronger democracies. All governments can benefit from increased scrutiny by the world community, as well as their own people. We believe this scrutiny requires information. Historically that information has been costly — in terms of human life and human rights. But with technological advances — the internet, and cryptography — the risks of conveying important information can be lowered.

Assange formed his free speech ideals by running an ISP called suburbia.net (still extant) in the 1990s. In 2002, he published the document State and Terrorist Conspiracies, which set out his aims in detail: to increase the friction in the mechanisms by which authoritarian governments conspire against their citizens, thus changing the lay of the land and forcing them to more open communication mechanisms. It's the inchoate hacker (as in cracker) free speech ideal of the 1980s developed into a coherent philosophy. Which is quite an achievement in itself!

Notable leaks

• Several official Scientology documents.
• British National Party membership list during 2008.
• Kent Hovind's Doctoral dissertation.
• The Stratfor email leak which showed how intelligence is exchanged between private agencies and governments throughout the globe.
• "Collateral Murder" and the Iraq War logs which prompted a BBC/Guardian investigation on the Pentagon's torture centers in Iraq.
• The Climategate emails.
• The Saudi Cables, which revealed Saudi Arabia's financial support of Sunni terrorist groups.
• The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement cables.
• The secret US embassy cables, a.k.a. "Cablegate".
• Trans-Pacific Partnership draft chapters.
• Draft chapters of the Trade in Services Agreement.
• A supposed leak of CIA documents detailing how they can hack into cars, phones and TVs to spy on people. And this is just the tip of the iceberg, apparently!

Afghanistan War logs

On July 25, 2010, Wikileaks released tens of thousands of classified military field reports in relation to the Afghanistan War. It provided The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel with over 90,000 classified military documents in what is described as one of the biggest leaks in the history of the United States military. The documents show that:

• There have been hundreds of unreported civilian deaths, and soldiers frequently fudge the numbers in their field reports in counting dead civilians as "insurgents".
• The Taliban apparently uses heat-seeking missiles against allied aircraft, something the US has glossed over. Possibly because they sold the technology to their precursor groups during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Oops.
• The CIA pretty much runs their own paramilitary in Afghanistan, launching raids and ambushes, and even has the ability to call in airstrikes. Letting the CIA have such free roam is, of course, a great idea, since they are so well-known for respecting human rights. And the Afghanistan spy agency is essentially their bitch.
• It basically confirms what we knew already: that the US gives millions of dollars to Pakistan, only for that money to be funneled to insurgents killing American soldiers.

The New York Times said the military never really lied and just made misleading statements; however, saying aircraft has been brought down by conventional weapons when, in fact, they are using heat-seeking technology we sold them, sounds an awful lot like an untrue statement — in other words, a lie, or crediting Afghan forces with victories when they really had nothing to do with it. The parallel to the leaking of the Pentagon Papers (a US Department of Defense study that pretty much proved three consecutive US administrations had made a habit of lying straight to the face of the American people about the Vietnam War) is evident.

The reports paint a clear picture of Afghanistan and the war. Despite almost two decades of war and billions of dollars spent on it, the insurgency is not dying down and is in fact getting stronger. The Taliban has a network of spies, informers and double agents working against the Afghan government and NATO forces. The Afghan National Army and police force are in disarray, plagued by corruption and abuse, and many will defect to the Taliban while the ones who stick it out become reviled by Afghan citizens. In fact, the population now actually thinks the Taliban was better than what they have now. Large portions of the country are controlled by warlords who are above the law, and the government is hopelessly corrupt.

With poverty, corruption on every level, citizens under threat of constant violence, untrained soldiers and police officers, and everything else detailed in the documents, it's hard to imagine the war could ever be won.

Of course, this was information was leaked about 10 years ago. While this may seem disastrous, surely this situation has changed now, surely the compassionate, bright, and wise people in our government are competent enough to have brought attention to these systemic issues and would do whatever they could to help the Afgan government and its people... right?

Philip Sales QC

On 12 August 2016, the UK's Court of Appeal ruled against all expectations that 130,000 Labour members who joined the party after 12 January would not be able to vote in the leadership contest, in accordance with rules that the National Executive Committee decided after Jeremy Corbyn had left the room. This move was done by opponents of Corbyn in an effort to increase the chance of Corbyn's more "electable" opponent Owen Smith becoming leader. However, Corbyn seemed to be the most likely candidate to win by any measure, and Smith actually would make people less likely to become leader, according to Britain Elects.

Although RationalWiki cannot, of course, for legal reasons, say directly that the ruling may have been less than impartial, it is a staggering coincidence that the High Court Judge who ruled against the 130,000 Labour members in the Appeal Court in favour of the NEC just turns out to have worked for Tony Blair directly (who once urged supporters of Corbyn to "get a [heart] transplant"), and was a legal senior adviser to New Labour throughout their time in government.

The literature cited by WikiLeaks confirms that immediately after Labour's victory in the 1997 general election, Sales was recruited by Tony Blair. Interestingly, it also reveals that Sales used to be a practising barrister at law chambers 11KBW, of which Tony Blair was a founder member. At the time of the appointment, there was an uproar over Sales' appointment and plunged Blair into a cronyism row.

According to The Guardian's coverage of the sexual discrimination case brought against Sales' appointment, a source close to the case referred to 11KBW as a "network of old boys and cronies", and that there was "no coincidence that the appointment came from Lord Irvine's and Tony Blair's old chambers".

Since his appointment in 1997, Sir Philip Sales managed to rack up a hefty bill to the taxpayer as the highest earning lawyer in the entire government. Moreover, as a key part of Blair's legal team, he also defended the Government's decision against holding a public inquiry into the Iraq War in the High Court in 2005.

2009 inactivity

Wikileaks ran out of money in December 2009. However, the release of the "Collateral Murder" video reversed this, and the donations started coming in again for a time, until PayPal, MasterCard, Visa, and Bank of America cut them off in reaction to the 2010 US embassy leaks.

Dubious ethics

Criticizing Wikileaks? You must be a paid HillaryShill!

“”Wikileaks will facilitate safety in the ethical leaking movement.

—Assange, making a pinky promise in 2007

“”I used to defend WikiLeaks all the time on the grounds that they were not indiscriminate dumpers of information. They were carefully protecting people's reputations. And they have changed their view on that—and no longer believe, as Julian says, in redacting any information of any kind for any reason—and I definitely do not agree with that approach and think that they can be harmful to innocent people or other individuals in ways that I don't think is acceptable.

—Glenn Greenwald in 2016

“”The most horrible thing we found out that in the spring and summer of 2016 WikiLeaks suddenly compromised the very principles Assange proclaimed, and didn't stop from attacking the very journalists the group had been working with. And he knew full well the danger these journalists faced exposing the offshore schemes of Putin's personal friends. For us, it's a story of betrayal, both principles and people.

—Russian journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan in 2017

WikiLeaks was criticized after they released a document giving the names and details about the last remaining Jews in Baghdad, Iraq, thereby jeopardizing their safety. Other critics have made more general complaints about WikiLeaks jeopardizing the safety of individuals.

Allegations of Facebook censorship

Documents critical of Hillary Clinton, who Julian Assange has a personal mistrust for following her calls as Secretary of State to indict him after diplomatic leaks, have been blocked on Facebook. When WikiLeaks broke the Clinton email scandal in March 2016 and created a searchable online repository of over 30,000 of her emails, linking to the archive produced an error message for Facebook. This was blamed on an error with the anti-spam filter; however, when the hacked Democratic National Committee emails (allegedly gained by Russian intelligence and published at a time by Assange in order to destabilize the Clinton campaign) were released, the link to WikiLeaks was blocked again – and again, the excuse of the anti-spam filter running amok was used.

DNC hack

In July 2016, a person known as Guccifer 2.0 (based on the Romanian hacker Guccifer) stated that he hacked the servers of the DNC and he was the one who leaked the DNC's emails to Wikileaks; he also claimed he came from Romania and that he was "fighting for the world without Illuminati".

However, a number of cybersecurity companies, including CrowdStrike, under contract with the DNC, alleged that the hack was part of a cyberattack series by two separate Russian intelligence groups. One group named "FANCY BEAR or APT 28" gained access in April; the other, named "COZY BEAR" (also called Cozy Duke and APT 29), first breached the network in the summer of 2015. As believed by various intelligence agencies, FANCY BEAR represents the GRU, while COZY BEAR is the FSB. In Russia, two espionage groups compromising the same systems and engaging separately in the theft of identical credentials is not an uncommon sight, as distrust and competition are common in authoritarian regimes, and are in fact often intentionally fueled by the dictator himself.

Assange has never shied away from expressing his disdain for Clinton, and has released his hacks accordingly. The release of the DNC emails was deliberately timed to maximally disrupt the proceedings of the DNC. He also decided it would be a great idea not to redact personal information, including home addresses, phone numbers, passport numbers, credit card and social security numbers of thousands of donors to the DNC, many of whom were perfectly average American citizens. Besides obvious legal issues, it seems difficult for even the most rabid transparency crusaders to think this could possibly be a good idea.

The slow, daily releases of batches of the Podesta emails became an extended October surprise, also designed to hurt the Clinton campaign. WikiLeaks claimed that this release strategy was based on their Stochastic Terminator Algorithm.

Fringe theories

In July 2017, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), a group of former US intelligence officers initially formed to protest the 2003 Iraq invasion, released a memo arguing forensic evidence was inconsistent with an "external hack" and implied a leak by an insider. One of their arguments was that the file transfer speed was much higher than expected for a remote internet connection, and much more resembled copying to a local drive.

John Bambenek, threat systems manager at Fidelis, disputed the claim that the download speed would be impossible over the internet. VIPS member Thomas Drake agreed, and revealed that their report was released over the substantive objections of several VIPS members. Specifically, the report should not have suggested it was a fact that an inside leaker with direct access to the DNC server was responsible. Scott Ritter, another VIPS member, also took issue with the centerpiece claims of the VIPS memo. Lisa Ling, a former Air Force technical sergeant who endorsed the original VIPS memo, reversed her position and asked for her name to be removed from the list of signatories. Rich Barger, director of security research at Splunk, pointed out that the VIPS theory overlooked the likelihood that the files were copied several times before they were leaked, which would create new metadata each time. According to cybersecurity expert John Hultquist, the VIPS memo did not consider a number of scenarios and ignored all contradictory evidence.

Cooperating with neo-Nazis

Swedish Holocaust denier Israel Shamir works as a "freelancer" for Wikileaks. Assange, aware of the dubious reputation of this individual, allegedly wanted to let him work with WikiLeaks under a false name so as to not attract unwanted attention. Former Wikileaks spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg noted WikiLeaks' ties to Shamir among the reasons he quit the organization; he described Shamir as a "famous Holocaust denier and anti-Semite". Shamir was accused of concocting a cable which allegedly quoted European Union diplomats' plans to walk out of the Durban II speech by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for publication in the pro-Putin Russian Reporter in December 2010. Shamir has also been accused of passing "sensitive cables" to the president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko. Such an event could physically endanger Lukashenko's political opponents.

Shamir's son, journalist Johannes Wahlström, is a spokesperson for WikiLeaks in Sweden.

Assange and WikiLeaks appear to be further cementing their ties to the racist far-right by opposing Milo Yiannopoulos' Twitter ban and comparing it to the mass arrests after the failed military coup against Erdoğan in Turkey and Stalin's Great Purge. WikiLeaks also pledged to build an alternative platform to the "cyber feudalis[t]" Twitter. WikiLeaks has also promoted the alt-right aligned Breitbart.com's Clinton Cash books and videos.

Doxxing almost every woman in Turkey

In the immediate aftermath of the 2016 coup attempt in Turkey, WikiLeaks published links to 300,000 "Erdogan Emails", resulting in the doxing of millions of Turkish people. None of the "Erdogan emails" turned out to be from Erdogan or his inner circle. Mostly, they're correspondence and personal information from everyday Turkish citizens, which included the home addresses, phone numbers, party affiliations, and political activity levels of millions of female Turkish voters.

Bromance with Putin

“”#PanamaPapers Putin attack was produced by OCCRP [Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project] which targets Russia & former USSR and was funded by USAID & Soros.

—WikiLeaks, defending their bro Putin from the "evil" Greenwald and his "Panama Papers" leak

Julian Assange, who hosted a show on Putin's propaganda channel Russia Today, appears to have a cozy relationship with the Russian government. National security expert and former US counterintelligence officer John Schindler went as far as to state that "WikiLeaks is a front for Russian intelligence". When MSNBC host Joy Reid tweeted that she planned to discuss the connection between WikiLeaks and the Russian government on her show, WikiLeaks' official twitter account responded by threatening that "our lawyers will monitor your program". WikiLeaks also responded to an article by Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall, which investigated ties between the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin, by accusing him of "weird priority".

In his native Australia, Assange founded the WikiLeaks Party, which sent a delegation headed by Assange's own father to Syria in December 2013, where the WikiLeaks Party members met with Syria's brutal dictator and Putin vassal Bashar al-Assad. WikiLeaks, of course, later denied that they knew or approved of the meeting.

Reporters from The Daily Dot claimed that WikiLeaks excluded evidence from their release of "The Syria Files" that showed evidence of a transfer of €2 billion from the Central Bank of Syria to an account at the VTB Bank of Russia. WikiLeaks denied the reporters' account of events, accused them of being Hillary Clinton supporters, and made an unspecified threat against them ("Go right ahead, but you can be sure we will return the favour one day.").

Assange also requested that his private security detail be provided by Russia's secret police agency and KGB successor, the FSB.

Putting on the tinfoil hat

“”There is no US election. There is power consolidation. Rigged primary, rigged media and rigged 'pied piper' candidate drive consolidation.

—WikiLeaks on Twitter

WikiLeaks' staff believes that the 2016 DNC was using a "white noise machine" against the disruptive minority of Sanders' delegates. Said machines turned out to be an arena Wi-Fi hot spot installed a year before, but that's what a HillaryShill would want you to believe!

After DNC staffer Seth Rich was murdered in what police believed was attempted robbery, WikiLeaks went full Vince Foster and issued a $20,000 reward for information on the murder. They were swiftly criticized by Seth Rich's grieving family for politicizing the investigation. Joel Rich, Seth's father, called the theories about his son's death "bizarre" and accused WikiLeaks of "playing a game".

Just before the 2016 presidential election, WikiLeaks highlighted a hacked email where performance artist Marina Abramović invited the Podesta brothers to a soup dinner as a reward for their donations to her Kickstarter campaign. However, Abramović named this dinner after one of her performance pieces, Spirit Cooking, leading WikiLeaks to tweet that the Podesta brothers ingested "blood, sperm and breastmilk", stoking unfounded rumors that the Clinton campaign engaged in Satanism.

Outing in the "Saudi Cables"

“”We can't sit on material like this for three years with one person to go through the whole lot, line-by-line, to redact. We have to take the best road that we can.

—Assange, no longer giving a fuck

WikiLeaks has leaked the identities of thousands of people in Saudi Arabia, and didn't bother to look through it properly, outing gay people, rape victims and people with HIV, all of whom could be killed for various reasons. The Associated Press reported:

In the past year alone, the radical transparency group has published medical files belonging to scores of ordinary citizens while many hundreds more have had sensitive family, financial or identity records posted to the web. In two particularly egregious cases, WikiLeaks named teenage rape victims. In a third case, the site published the name of a Saudi citizen arrested for being gay, an extraordinary move given that homosexuality is punishable by death in the ultraconservative Muslim kingdom. "They published everything: my phone, address, name, details," said a Saudi man who told AP he was bewildered that WikiLeaks had revealed the details of a paternity dispute with a former partner. "If the family of my wife saw this ... Publishing personal stuff like that could destroy people."

The AP found that the Saudi diplomatic cables alone held at least 124 medical files. Medical records are considered a person's most private information, yet WikiLeaks has absolutely no problem publishing identity records, phone numbers and other information easily exploited by criminals. A partial scan done of the leak led to the finding of over 500 passport, identity, academic, or employment files.

"This has nothing to do with politics or corruption," said Dr. Nayef al-Fayez, a consultant in the Jordanian capital of Amman who confirmed that a brain cancer patient of his was among those whose details were published to the web. Dr. Adnan Salhab, a retired practitioner in Jordan who also had a patient named in the files, expressed anger when shown the document. "This is illegal what has happened," he said in a telephone interview. "It is illegal!" One, a partially disabled Saudi woman who'd secretly gone into debt to support a sick relative, said she was devastated. She'd kept her plight from members of her own family. "This is a disaster," she said in a phone call. "What if my brothers, neighbors, people I know or even don't know have seen it? What is the use of publishing my story?"

The AP also found three dozen records containing messages about marriages, divorces, missing children, elopements, and custody battles. Many were very personal, like the marital certificates, which revealed whether the bride was a virgin. One divorce document detailed a male partner's infertility. Others identified the partners of women suffering from sexually transmitted diseases including HIV and Hepatitis C.

The info dumped by WikiLeaks also identified domestic workers who'd been tortured or sexually abused by their employers, giving the women's full names and passport numbers. Files also named a male teenager who was raped by a man while abroad; another male teenager who was so violently raped his legs were broken and details of a Saudi man detained for "sexual deviation", which is how homosexuality is described in Saudi Arabia.

Scott Long, an LGBT rights activist who has worked in the Middle East, said the names of rape victims were off-limits. And he worried that releasing the names of people persecuted for their sexuality only risked magnifying the harm caused by oppressive officials. "You're legitimizing their surveillance, not combating it," Long said.

WikiLeaks' response to this? Calling AP's revelations a "recycled attack" and somehow mixing in more whining about Hillary Clinton.

Funding

In 2011, WikiLeaks was funded by public donations. In response to donations being blocked by PayPal and the major credit cards, however, WikiLeaks sought out alternative means of accepting donations.

After numerous questionable moral decisions on the part of their refusal to curate their leaks of personal information, supporting them may not be in the best interest of transparency.

Why not contribute to RationalWiki instead?

External links

• WikiLeaks.org
• Wikileaks — Wikipedia
• Interview with Julian Assange, Australian Broadcasting Corporation