Concept in Definition ABC

There have always been information leaks and those who, for one reason or another, are ready to filter it, but even the so-called “information age” (of which, Internet constitutes its culmination so far), no one had adequate platforms to filter this information, having to rely on personal contacts.

Wikileaks is an online platform to which documents of all kinds can be sent, anonymously and - at least theoretically - safely, for examination and publication.

Wikileaks rose to fame in 2010, when it published a series of digital content on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On the first, he revealed the unpublished video of an attack by US soldiers on journalists from the Reuters agency, while in the case of the second was about thousands of confidential documents, until then secret, that were treated by Wikileaks together with some of the media from communication most prestigious in the world.

The history of Wikileaks starts in 2006, when a group of journalists and hackers decide to join forces for the sake of transparency.

Said purpose, noble in theory, has been clouded both by the forms and by the content sometimes published by the site, and that they have earned the organization behind it criticism for being careless with the way they handle the information.

From the founders, two figures emerged strongly at first as visible faces of the organization: hackers Julian Assange and Daniel Domscheit-Berg

Without a doubt, the most public face of the organization has been and is Julian Assange, while Daniel Domscheit-Berg was in the background, although he also served as spokesperson for the entity in some occasions.

Due to disagreements between the two, Domscheit-Berg left Wikileaks in 2010, accusing Assange of exercising excessive personalism and neglecting basic aspects of the safety of those who leaked documents to the organization, so that their identities could be discovered by third parties through espionage.

Throughout this time, Wikileaks has continued to perform its document filtering function, leading to some major news earthquakes:

The video of the shooting of Reuters journalists in Baghdad, previously commented, which was produced in 2007, but was not published by Wikileaks until 2010, the year in which it was leaked.

The scandal was enormous, considering that in the video (which corresponded to the recording of the US Army of the maneuver) it can be perfectly captured that the victims of the attack did not carry weapons or make mention of being a threat for the Apache helicopter that shot them, and that the superiors in charge of supervising the action, gave their approval.

In addition to the journalists who lost their lives in the attack, nine more people were also murdered, some of which when they tried to save the first who fell by taking them to a hospital.

The diaries of the invasion of Afghanistan by the United States and other allied countries, made in 2001, but whose documents were published in 2010 by leading newspapers from around the world such as the North American New York Times, the German Der Spiegel, or the British The Guardian.

These documents explained details until then not disclosed by the government American or its allies, such as the number of civilian casualties caused by the attacks, or the deaths caused by "friendly fire."

Iraq War Documentsleaked by Bradley Manning, a US Army soldier who believed that the administration American was committing an injustice, and she wanted to explain it to the world.

These documents explained, among other things, the cases of torture of Iraqis, as well as the inaction of the forces to the abuses of the soldiers of the remodeled Iraqi army that was composed after the victory of the coalition.

The cablegate, consisting of the filtration of diplomatic cables crossed between the embassies of the United States distributed in the world and the government of that country.

The Stratford files, corresponding to various events in which this security company has intervened in recent years, such as the Bhopal (India) petrochemical disaster, the operation to kill Osama Bin Laden, or the War of the Falklands.

The last of the major Wikileaks leaks occurred in 2017, when it revealed a significant amount of material on how the US secret service (the CIA) spies on our computers and is capable of attacking them with malware.

Wikileaks also has a self-defense mechanism in the event of a really serious attack: the insurance.aes256 file.

This consists of a file 1.99 Gigabyte protected by strong encryption (256-bit AES), which has only been hung up and for which the decryption key has not been revealed. This would be depending on the circumstances, and it is logical think that in Wikileaks they already take into account indirect methods to publicize this key, so that governments (especially the US) cannot prevent it.

Despite numerous incidents and attacks of all kinds, and with Julian Assange taking refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London since 2012, Wikileaks continues performing its function of making known to the world secret documents that are communicated and sent by people of all kinds, after their verification and check.

Photos: Fotolia - Zdenek / HuHu Lin

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