Wikileaks was known before the release of 250,000 cables of U.S. diplomats. Even "Cablegate" meant to be the big breakthrough for Julian Assange and his whistleblower site, I would like to have a quick look on what happened before.
Wikileaks was founded in 2006 by Julian Assange and several “Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and startup company technologists, from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa“(click here for the original site). Its primary goal was (and still is) „the 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“. In short: Wikileaks publishes everything which they think shows misbeahviour by the ruling class, which includes corporations and gouvermments. A goal which Julian Assange quite often states is total transparancy. In the beginning they simply revealed the documents on their Wiki site. Later on they started to deliver the documents exclusively to Media Companies which published and interpreted them. Wikileaks is a non-profit organisation and did not receive money for the transfer of the documents. Their source of income are donations of organisations related to the media business and privately via Flattr.
Till their public breakthrough they published disruptive documents with minor interest for the Western World. Documents revealed high-level corruption in Kenya, informations about the procedures in Guantanamo, a toxic-waste scandal in Africa and Sarah Palin´s e-mail account (Click here for a list of all the information published by WikiLeaks).
In 2010 it seems like they started to concentrate on revealing documents which harm the US governmment and which were delivered by US Amry employee Bradley Manning.
Read more in Part II (click here)
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