Wikileaks



Wikileaks

Introduction

WikiLeaks is a global, not for profit organization, which circulates assents of undercover, clandestine and private media through news leaks and anonymous news sources. This website, initiated in 2006, stated a record of over 1200000 documents in one year of their commencement. WikiLeaks expresses its creators being a joint of Chinese nonconformists, reporters, start-up company technologists, and mathematician from the U.S., South Africa, Australia, Europe, and Taiwan. An Australian Internet activist Julian Assange is by, and large referred like its director. The site was initial commences being a user editable "wiki" but has gradually transformed to a new traditionalist site and no more acknowledges any user remarks or amends. This paper discusses the background of wikileaks, security and privacy issues, its impact and its ethical concerns.

Background

WikiLeaks is a nonprofit media organization initiated in 2007. It is a whistleblower website at the centre of a storm, disclosing more than 250,000 American political dispatches. They claim that their aim is to bring significant news and information to the masses. The core idea of WikiLeaks is the idea of free access to information related to public affairs. It thus leads former projects to promote freedom of information such as Cryptome or CL-power (Fernandez, 2010). The name of the project derives from the fact that at times the commentary of published content in a wiki could be edited, but this now no longer is the case. The term 'leaks' stands for 'leaks', 'holes' or 'leaks' and refers to the not intended for publication documents that WikiLeaks of some anonymous whistleblower receives (Geoffrey et al, 2011). Despite similar root word and lettering in the logo, there is no organizational connection between WikiLeaks and Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation. In autumn 2009, WikiLeaks had developed to a central collection of 1.2 million documents of dissidents and anonymous sources. Among other things, the governments of China, Israel, North Korea, Russia, Zimbabwe and Thailand blocked the access to WikiLeaks, at least temporarily. WikiLeaks claims to give a ground-breaking, safe and anonymous means for sources to reveal information to their reporters through its electronic drop box. The website has won several awards, including the New Media Award in 2008 from Economist magazine (Berg, 2011). With the slogan of "We open governments”, WikiLeaks was established by Julian Assange in April 2010, when it posted a video from an incident of 2007 which showed Iraqi civilians being executed by American armed forces, upon a site known as Collateral Murder.

The launch of the site was conducted in December 2006, although its activity began in July 2007-2008. Since then the database has grown steadily to accumulate 1.2 million documents (Leigh & Harding, 2011). The architect was Julian Assange. It is run by The Sunshine Press. The organization unveil leaks or Orthodox unethical behavior by governments, with special emphasis on the countries that are considered totalitarian regimes, but also in matters related to religion and businesses around the world. For now, the most important actions of WikiLeaks have focused on the activity outside ...