Can i open wikileaks

In particular, hard drives retain data after formatting which may be visible to a digital forensics team and flash media USB sticks, memory cards and SSD drives retain data even after a secure erasure. If you used flash media to store sensitive data, it is important to destroy the media.

If you do this and are a high-risk source you should make sure there are no traces of the clean-up, since such traces themselves may draw suspicion. If a legal action is brought against you as a result of your submission, there are organisations that may help you. The Courage Foundation is an international organisation dedicated to the protection of journalistic sources.

WikiLeaks publishes documents of political or historical importance that are censored or otherwise suppressed. We specialise in strategic global publishing and large archives. The following is the address of our secure site where you can anonymously upload your documents to WikiLeaks editors. You can only access this submissions system through Tor. See our Tor tab for more information. We also advise you to read our tips for sources before submitting.

If you cannot use Tor, or your submission is very large, or you have specific requirements, WikiLeaks provides several alternative methods. Contact us to discuss how to proceed. WikiLeaks is a multi-jurisdictional public service designed to protect whistleblowers, journalists and activists who have sensitive materials to communicate to the public. Since July , we have worked across the globe to obtain, publish and defend such materials, and, also, to fight in the legal and political spheres for the broader principles on which our work is based: the integrity of our common historical record and the rights of all peoples to create new history.

We believe that transparency in government activities leads to reduced corruption, better government and stronger democracies. All governments can benefit from increased scrutiny by the world community, as well as their own people. We believe this scrutiny requires information. Historically that information has been costly - in terms of human life and human rights. But with technological advances - the internet, and cryptography - the risks of conveying important information can be lowered. In its landmark ruling on the Pentagon Papers , the US Supreme Court ruled that "only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.

We believe that it is not only the people of one country that keep their government honest, but also the people of other countries who are watching that government. That is why the time has come for an anonymous global avenue for disseminating documents the public should see.

Consider the mosquito borne disease malaria. Great Britain used to have malaria. In North America, malaria was epidemic and there are still a handful of infections each year. In Africa malaria kills over people per hour. In Russia, amidst the corruption of the s, malaria re-established itself.

What is the difference between these cases? It is only when the people know the true plans and behavior of their governments that they can meaningfully choose to support them. Historically, the most resilient forms of open government are those where publication and revelation are protected.

Where that protection does not exist, it is our mission to provide it. This lead to enormous changes in the constitution and the establishment of a more open government — one many hundreds of reforms catalyzed by WikiLeaks.

We believe WikiLeaks is the strongest way we have of generating the true democracy and good governance on which all mankind's dreams depend. WikiLeaks combines the protection and anonymity of cutting-edge cryptographic technologies with the comfortable presentation style of Wikipedia, although the two are not otherwise related.

Our network also collects materials in person and from postal drops. We also run a network of lawyers and others to defend our work and our sources. WikiLeaks information is distributed across many jurisdictions, organizations and individuals. Once a document published it is essentially impossible to censor. Principled leaking has changed the course of history for the better; it can alter the course of history in the present; it can lead us to a better future.

He comes into contact with the Pentagon Papers , a meticulously kept record of military and strategic planning throughout the war. Those papers reveal the depths to which the US government has sunk in deceiving the population about the war. Yet the public and the media know nothing of this urgent and shocking information. Indeed, secrecy laws are being used to keep the public ignorant of gross dishonesty practiced by their government. In spite of those secrecy laws and at great personal risk, Ellsberg manages to disseminate the Pentagon papers to journalists and to the world.

Despite criminal charges against Ellsberg, eventually dropped, the release of the Pentagon papers shocks the world, exposes the government, and helps to shorten the war and save thousands of lives. The power of principled leaking to embarrass governments, corporations and institutions is amply demonstrated through recent history.

The public scrutiny of otherwise unaccountable and secretive institutions forces them to consider the ethical implications of their actions.

Berkman Fellow Ethan Zuckerman has some interesting thoughts on the development of Wikileaks and its practices over the years, which will be explained in greater detail when the Berkman Center podcast about Wikileaks is released later this week. Wikileaks has moved through three phases since its founding in In its first phase, during which it released several substantial troves of documents related to Kenya in , Wikileaks operated very much with a standard wiki model: the public readership could actively post and edit materials, and it had a say in the types of materials that were accepted and how such materials were vetted.

The documents released in that first phase were more or less a straight dump to the Web: very little organized redacting occurred on the part of Wikileaks. The video was a highly curated, produced and packaged political statement. It was meant to illustrate a political point of view, not merely to inform. The third phase is the one we currently see with the release of the diplomatic cables: Wikileaks working in close conjunction with a select group of news organizations to analyze, redact and release the cables in a curated manner, rather than dumping them on the Internet or using them to illustrate a singular political point of view.

What news organizations have access to the diplomatic cables and how did they get them? According to the Associated Press , Wikileaks gave four news organizations Le Monde , El Pais , The Guardian and Der Spiegel all , classified documents before anything was released to the public. Each of the five news organizations is hosting the text of at least some of the documents in various forms with or without the relevant metadata country of origin, classification level, reference ID.

The Guardian and Der Spiegel have performed analyses of the metadata of the entire trove, excluding the body text. Wikileaks itself has released as of December 7, documents out of the total , The Associated Press has reported that Wikileaks is only releasing cables in coordination with the actions of the five selected news organizations. Julian Assange made similar statements in an interview with Guardian readers on December 3, Cables are being released daily as the five news organizations publish articles related to the content.

Is each of the five news organizations hosting all the documents that Wikileaks has released? Each of the five news organizations hosts a different selection of the released documents, in different forms, which may or may not overlap. Le Monde has created an application, developed in conjunction with Linkfluence , that hosts the searchable text of several hundred cables.

The text can be searched by the sender country of origin, office or official , date range, persons of interest cited in the docs, classification status, or any combination of the above. Only the untranslated, English text of the cables can be accessed and cut-and-paste is not available. These searches also return El Pais articles written on a given subject, often placed ahead of the cables in the search listings.

The Guardian offers the cable data in several forms: It has performed an analysis of metadata of the entire ,document trove, and made it available in several forms spreadsheets hosted on Google Docs and in downloadable form as well as infographics.

You can download the files via torrent but since they are encrypted — and Wikileaks has not yet provided the key — you won't be able to open them. We can garner at least one thing of note from the file names alone: They probably have a very high level of encryption.

The end of the files, "aes," likely stands for Advanced Encryption Standard bits. It's a way of locking up your files that even the NSA has approved for use on top-secret data. What's in the files is anyone's guess for now, but there's already plenty of speculation. For you. The US government has condemned Wikileaks several times, saying its work has harmed diplomatic relations and put the lives of staff in sensitive positions at risk.

Direct evidence of harm has been hard to find, but in Julian Assange told the Guardian that Wikileaks' exposure of widespread corruption in Kenya influenced violence during national elections that led to 1, deaths.

He justified the release of the information saying Kenyans had a right to know the information. The early leaks it oversaw gave insights into corporate and official abuse on a scale never seen before, he said, adding that it also made it much easier for whistle-blowers and activists to get information into the public domain. He said the organisation was now operating in a very different world than it did a decade ago when it was set up. To begin with, he said, there was much more competition for Wikileaks.

Publishing quickly and doing less to curate documents was one way for Wikileaks to remain relevant, he said. However, he added, there had been a shift in the information it released. Now, the information was less about clear cases of harm or the abuse of power, and more to do with subjects that were much less black and white.

There was a danger, he said, that Wikileaks was now part of the story rather than just the route through which information is released. In the early days of Wikileaks, it took more care - thanks to working with newspapers that did the job of removing sensitive information from documents about the Afghan and Iraq wars. Spokesman Julian Assange has often said that the sheer amount of documents Wikileaks handles makes it all but impossible to censor or edit them if they are to be released in a timely fashion.

In some cases it has no way to contact whoever handed over documents, making it difficult to find out what information might prove damaging. The lack of oversight has led to criticism about the release of almost , emails from Turkey's AKP, with some saying they contained more trivia than treasure.

Wikileaks practices what it calls "radical transparency", said Prof Christensen, which leads it to believe that exposing corruption, malfeasance and abuse of power trumps the damage it might do to individuals.

Many other whistle-blowing sites take greater care with documents they are passed to ensure that no more information than necessary is released.

The "wiki" part of the name simply refers to its aim of letting people collaborate to edit documents and releases.