ikiLeaks e il noto sito specializzato nella pubblicazione di informazioni e documenti coperti da segreto o comunque riservati, che oggi si trova a dover fronteggiare i costi di un successo crescente. E l’obiettivo è solo uno: salvaguardare la libertá che fino ad oggi gli ha concesso di dire e pubblicare ció che volevano. Senza porsi il problema di difendere interessi di sponsor e azionisti del caso. A nulla sono valsi finora i premi ricevuti come l’Economist Freedom of Expression Awardnel 2008 e, nel 2009, l’Amnesty International New Media Award. Per continuare servono soldi. Da un lato, per il funzionamento del sito e per il personale. Dall’altro, i responsabili del progetto hanno bisogno di fondi per portare avanti una soluzione che permetta loro – e chiunque voglia collaborare – di non rimanere più vittime della censura o di leggi contro la libertá di espressione. Le donazioni, finora, hanno sfiorato quota 140mila dollari. Ma cosa ha in mente Wikileaks per difendersi dalla censura? L’idea in sé è semplice e nello stesso tempo molto ambiziosa. Si tratterebbe di convincere la piccola Repubblica parlamentare islandese a recepire una serie di leggi, prese da altri paesi per trasformare l’isola e i suoi 300mila abitanti in una sorta di paradiso offshore per giornalisti ed editori. “Pensiamo di prendere le leggi a protezione e delle fonti dalla Svezia ad esempio, il Primo Emendamento dagli Stati Uniti, e le norme per la protezione dei giornalisti esistenti in Belgio”, ha spiegato Daniel Schmitt, portavoce di WikiLeaks, in occasione del 26° Congresso del Chaos Computer Club, che si è tenuto a Berlino a fine dicembre 2009. Ma perché proprio l’Islanda? Anche in questo caso i responsabili di WikiLeaks non hanno dubbi e per questo hanno coniato un motto suggestivo. “Non lasciarti mai sfuggire una crisi”. Reykjavík, infatti, ha visto tre delle sue principali banche collassare nel 2009 sotto una montagna di debiti, la sua moneta – la corona islandese – precipitare e i risparmi di moltissimi islandesi andare in fumo. Di fronte a questi avvenimenti il governo islandese, considerato da sempre il più stabile in Europa, è crollato. Tanto che la rivista “Forbes” si è spinta a definire l’Islanda un “Paese senza economia”. E’ a questo punto che entrerebbe in scena WikiLeaks – sostengono i suoi amministratori – facendo leva, non solo sul malcontento dei suoi cittadini per la situazione generale, ma anche sui benefici economici che di fatto un paradiso offshore – anche se non di tipo finanziario – potrebbero garantire. Se in Islanda dovessero passare le leggi sostenute da WikiLeaks, si riuscirebbe “ad adattare i bisogni della libertá di espressione alla societá dell’informazione”, assicurano i responsabili del progetto. Ma per farlo, e quindi sostenere le spese per una seria azione di pressione fuori e dentro al Parlamento islandese, servono ancora 460mila dollari circa. Bisogna tenere conto che WikiLeaks non accetta denaro da aziende e da governi. (www.repubblica.it) Per ora WikiLeaks ringrazia alle istituzioni sotto elencate per l’aiuto accordato:
1. Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press (RCFP)
2. The American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE)
3. The Associated Press – world wide news agency, based in New York
4. Citizen Media Law Project – Harvard university
5. The E.W Scripps Company – newspapers, TV, cable TV etc.
6. Gannet Co. Inc – the largest publisher of newspapers in the USA, including USA Today
7. The Hearst Corporation – media conglomerate which publishes the San Francisco Chronicle
8. The Los Angeles Times
9. National Newspaper Association (NNA)
10. Newspaper Association of America (NAA)
11. The Radio-Television News Directors Association (RTNDA)
12. The Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ)
13. Public Citizen – founded by Ralph Nader
14. together with the California First Amendment Coalition (CFAC)
15. The Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF)
16. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
17. The Project on Government Oversight (POGO)
18. Jordan McCorckle, the University of Texas
Invitiamo quindi I nostri lettori a contribuire e aiutare questo sito per riuscire a mantenersi e continuare a fare il suo lavoro. Per farlo dovete collegarvi al sito:
Wikileaks Forced to Leak Its Own Secret Info
What’s Wikileaks, the net’s foremost document leaking site, supposed to do when a whistle-blower submits a list of email addresses belonging to the site’s confidential donors as a leaked document? That’s exactly the conundrum Wikileaks faced this week after someone from the controversial whistle-blowing site sent an emergency fund-raising appeal on Saturday to previous donors. But instead of hiding email addresses from the recipients by using the bcc field, the sender put 58 addresses into the cc field, revealing all the addresses to all the recipients. Someone then submitted the email as a leaked document, writing “WikiLeaks leaks it’s own donors, aww irony. BCC next time kthx.” Wikileaks, which has been criticized for lacking discretion in deciding whether to release documents or not, published the email and the donors’ email addresses on Wednesday. The entry noted that the email was submitted “possibly to test the project’s principles of complete impartiality when dealing with whistleblowers.” One notable email address belongs to convicted former hacker Adrian Lamo, who now runs his own security company. In a Twitter post on Saturday, Lamo noted the screw-up, writing “Thanks WikiLeaks, for leaking your donor list.[…] That’s dedication.” See more in his comment to this story. Earlier this month, Wikileaks scored another leaking coup, publishing hundreds of thousands of pages of copyright-free but rarely seen Congressional Research Service reports. Congress members and their staff rely on those reports to craft laws and policy, but the reports are rarely made public. The site also just recently published an unseen NATO civilian casualty 2008 report for Afghanistan, showing the country’s civilians casualties jumped 46% last year. Wikileaks says that no one leaking documents to the site has ever been identified, but the site’s amateur slip-up isn’t likely to be soothing to those who have or are thinking about slipping docs to the fearless site. In the comments, Jay Lim of Wikileaks says whistle-blowers need not worry. “[W]hile definitely not good form, the mistake was a missed shortcut made by one of our admin people and is not related to the efforts or systems involved in source protection,” Lim wrote. Source: Ryam Singel (www.wired.com)
Short Wikileaks story:
Went a public in January 2007, when it first appeared on the web. The site states that it was “founded by Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and start-up company technologists, from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa”. The creators of Wikileaks were unidentified as of January 2007,although it has been represented in public since January 2007 by non-anonymous speakers such as Julian Assange, who had described himself as a member of Wikileaks’ advisory board and was later referred to as the “founder of Wikileaks”. As of June 2009, the site had over 1,200 registered volunteers[4] and the advisory board consisted of Assange, Phillip Adams, Wang Dan, CJ Hinke, Ben Laurie, Tashi Namgyal Khamsitsang, Xiao Qiang, Chico Whitaker, and Wang Youcai. Wikileaks states that its “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.” In January 2007, the website stated that it had over 1.2 million leaked documents that it was preparing to publish. The group has subsequently released a number of other significant documents which have become front-page news items, ranging from documentation of equipment expenditures and holdings in the Afghanistan war to corruption in Kenya. Their stated goal is to ensure that whistle-blowers and journalists are not thrown into jail for emailing sensitive or classified documents, such as what happened to Chinese journalist Shi Tao, who was sentenced to 10 years in jail in 2005 after publicising an email from Chinese officials about the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. The project has drawn comparisons to Daniel Ellsberg’s leaking of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. In the United States, the leaking of some documents may be legally protected. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the Constitution guarantees anonymity, at least in the area of political discourse. Author and journalist Whitley Strieber has spoken about the benefits of the Wikileaks project, noting that “Leaking a government document can mean jail, but jail sentences for this can be fairly short. However, there are many places where it means long incarceration or even death, such as China and parts of Africa and the Middle East.” The site has won a number of significant awards, including the 2008 Economist magazine New Media Award. In June 2009, Wikileaks and Julian Assange won Amnesty International UK’s Media Award 2009 (in the category “New Media”) for the 2008 publication of “Kenya: The Cry of Blood – Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances”, a report by the Kenyan National Commission on Human Rights about police killings in Kenya.
