Wikileaks, an international publishing service for whistle-blowers, goes to extraordinary lengths to protect its sources. Julian Assange, an Australian former hacker, founded the service in 2007. It now has perhaps 800 volunteer technologists, activists and lawyers around the world. In addition to footage revealing how soldiers in an Apache helicopter killed unarmed civilians in Iraq, it has published evidence of corruption in Kenya, financial improprieties in Iceland, procedures for detainees in Guantánamo Bay and a string of Sarah Palin’s e-mails.
Anyone can submit a document by old-fashioned post or over the internet and volunteers check its authenticity before publication. Wikileaks wraps encrypted submissions in layers of junk data to obscure their size and origin, then routes them through servers in Sweden (where it is a crime to disclose a source) and Belgium (where a wiretapped conversation with a journalist is inadmissible in court).
It is impossible for a single government or corporation to prevent a document from being published or to force its removal. As a result, Wikileaks calls itself “multi-jurisdictional”.
Read more at The Economist.
