One specific website that you may want to visit if you’re the conspiracy theory type who despises governments keeping secrets that are vital to the nation’s welfare. This website comes to us in the form of WikiLeaks. Much like the well known information site Wikipedia, in the sense of design and inclusion of information, WikiLeaks is the place to go for leaked government, corporate, and media secrets. And while news about the site has been little enough to prompt the public to visit it, recent news about a WikiLeaks supporter facing trial. However despite the recent news, the level of awareness directed to WikiLeaks has been minimal to say the least. So why has this seemingless important website about withheld public secrets fallen off the grid like the secrets it harbors?
First we need to look at the conception of WikiLeaks itself which was created a whopping 8 years ago in October 2006 formerly by Julian Assange, but was in accordance to a nonprofit organization known as Sunshine Press: however Assange has been quoted as calling himself, “the heart and soul of this organization, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organizer, financier, and all the rest.”. Within the first year of its conception, Sunshine Press had supposedly claimed a database of 1.2 million documents. Not keeping any of the seized documents a secret, whenever WikiLeaks reveals a hidden documentation it almost suredly finds its way to the front page of news outlets across the country and potentially the world. According to WikiLeaks, the purpose of WikiLeaks is to bring important news and information to the eye of the general public thus allowing fellow readers and historians with the truth of fallacies proclaimed by governments, conglomerate corporations, and media moguls.
With an organization responsible for many groundbreaking pieces of news, how does WikiLeaks run in terms of administration. With normal companies you have all these intricate cogs that make the company operate at peak efficiency, but how does WikiLeaks run. Surely they have a large amount of workers under their disposal. Well you’d be wrong like I was. According to an interview in January 2010, the WikiLeaks team consisted of 5 full time workers and 800 occasional workers all of which are uncompensated.
With the intentions and nature of WikiLeaks being a very high level threat to countless of the
In order to stay live and operate anything you need funding. As I mentioned earlier WikiLeaks is a not-for-profit organization simply meaning that it is ran largely on volunteering and donations. Currently the finances need for annual expenses averages at around €200,000: this would raise up to €600,000 if the volunteer work was paid. Also many lawyers that are used by WikiLeaks are pro bono or donated by businesses like the Associated Press and Los Angeles Times. A large contributor to WikiLeaks is the Wau Holland Foundation provide money only for traveling, hardware, and bandwidth. However there are reports that the inner 5 full time workers, including Assange, have started to receive a salary. But WikiLeaks experienced a little lack of fundings in the end of 2009 going into 2010 stating that they will be closed until the minimum funds needed to operate were met. This wasn’t achieved until February 2010, a whole month after the expected date that they would return.
After staying relatively dormant in the news, WikiLeaks seems to be getting an extremely large amount of negative publicity due to the rape allegations toward Julian Assange and the trail of the former Australian Defence worker. While these will tarnish the reputation of WikiLeaks, they still are providing a service that they, and their hundreds of volunteers, deem important which is revealing the truth to the public. Vitalizing the point of their website, to insure the general populus knows things they should know that were swept under the rug by governments, WikiLeaks has persevered before and will continue to persevere.