Wikileaks

I have been following the Wikileaks Afghan War Diary 2004-2010 release with great interest. I must admit I admire the work of Julian Assange, one of the main founders of the service. I thought to collect a few of the more informative sources about Wikileaks and Assange here for my reader/s.

Wikileaks at 26C3
Excellent video of the keynote by Julian Assange and Daniel Schmitt of Wikileaks at the 26th Chaos Communication Congress 'Here be dragons' in Berlin on 27th December 2009.

WikiLeaks Release 1.0

Insight into vision, motivation and innovation

During the last 12 months WikiLeaks representatives have been talking at numerous conferences, from technology via human rights to media focused, in an effort to introduce WikiLeaks to the world. WikiLeaks has had major document releases that have spawned attention in all major newspapers by now, it has triggered important reform and has established itself as part of the accepted media reality.

Little did we have the chance though to talk about a bigger picture, especially of how we perceive the future and its constraints.

We therefore would like to talk about our vision of the information society, journalism's role in that society, as well as our role in it. Along this vision we will introduce new features for WikiLeaks Release 1.0, that will be no short of changing the world as we all know it.

A video of the presentation can be downloaded from here as a torrent.

An excellent general overview of Wikileaks and the Afghan Diary can be reached from this link.

The New Yorker has a very long piece on Julian Assange and the “Collateral Murder” video:

Assange is an international trafficker, of sorts. He and his colleagues collect documents and imagery that governments and other institutions regard as confidential and publish them on a Web site called WikiLeaks.org. Since it went online, three and a half years ago, the site has published an extensive catalogue of secret material, ranging from the Standard Operating Procedures at Camp Delta, in Guantánamo Bay, and the “Climategate” e-mails from the University of East Anglia, in England, to the contents of Sarah Palin’s private Yahoo account. The catalogue is especially remarkable because WikiLeaks is not quite an organization; it is better described as a media insurgency. It has no paid staff, no copiers, no desks, no office. Assange does not even have a home. He travels from country to country, staying with supporters, or friends of friends—as he once put it to me, “I’m living in airports these days.” He is the operation’s prime mover, and it is fair to say that WikiLeaks exists wherever he does. At the same time, hundreds of volunteers from around the world help maintain the Web site’s complicated infrastructure; many participate in small ways, and between three and five people dedicate themselves to it full time. Key members are known only by initials—M, for instance—even deep within WikiLeaks, where communications are conducted by encrypted online chat services. The secretiveness stems from the belief that a populist intelligence operation with virtually no resources, designed to publicize information that powerful institutions do not want public, will have serious adversaries.

Finally the War Diary is online here and the site Wikileaks is here.