Wikileaks

The flow of information in our modern society, dominated by social networks; the internet and other forms of communication,  is a truly fascinating phenomenon. Every minute, there are 100,000 new Tweets, 277,000 Facebook logins and over 2 million searches on Google; 639,800 GB of IP Data are transferred globally. Human beings willingly share the most intimate details of their day, read the thoughts and feelings of others, are exposed to media of varying forms. 

However, perhaps what is more interesting is the information that the human race is not exposed to. For example, illegal activities by banks such as Julius Baer in the Cayman Islands, or 570,000 pager intercepts on the day of 9/11, hidden and stored by the United States Government for over 8 years. As mind boggling as the amount of information the public is exposed to is, the information that is hidden from us is infinitely more staggering. 

What happens in one internet minute?

Since the registration of the domain name wikileaks.org on the 4th of October in 2006, one non-profit organisation has been endeavouring to shed some light on the dust secrets, hidden from the public by our governments, our corporations.

The aim of the Wikileaks organisation is to, in their own words, "bring important news and information to the public... One of our most important activities is to publish original source material alongside our news stories so readers and historians alike can see evidence of the truth."

Julian Assange, originally from Australia, is the founder and current editor-in-chief of Wikileaks. Between 2007 and 2010, Assange spent much of his time travelling across the world on Wikileaks business, visiting North America, Europe, Asia and Africa. He came to national attention in Iceland, when he and Wikileaks exposed a 210 page internal document from Kaupthing bank which revealed the bank had loaned billions of euros to its own major shareholders, contributing heavily to its collapse. Assange and Wikileaks played an important role in the formation of Iceland as a free press haven, after a news piece on the Kaupthing story was blocked by a court injunction. 

Julian Assange

In 2010, Wikileaks rose to international acclaim, having released a video dubbed by Julian Assange as"Collateral Murder." It exposed the murder of Iraqi journalists by an AH-64 Apache helicopter, while the United States servicemen who perpetrated the act laughed.

It was later revealed that Wikileaks had in their possession over a quarter of a million US diplomatic cables, as well as war logs from both Afghanistan and Iraq. 

In a joint collaboration with the British newspapers The Guardian and The Times, United States newspaper The New York Post and Germany's Der Spiegel, Wikileaks exposed many of the documents, though they were carefully redacted. 

The information revealed exposed purported war crimes by the United States and other allied forces in the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars. 

Currently, Julian Assange resides in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, England and has political asylum there. He is wanted by the Swedish police for questioning regarding sexual "misconduct charges," though it is believed once in Sweden, he may be extradited to the United States of America. 

If you wish to learn more about Wikileaks, you can view their website here, or even donate to their cause:

https://www.wikileaks.org/index.en.html

Please note: Though Visa and Mastercard WILL process donations to the Ku Klux Klan, they WILL NOT process donations to Wikileaks.