Tell me again how Wikileaks works

“WikiLeaks is an international organization that publishes submissions of otherwise unavailable documents from anonymous sources and leaks. Its website, launched in 2006, is run by The Sunshine Press.[1] Within a year of its launch, the site claimed a database that had grown to more than 1.2 million documents.[3]

The organization has described itself as having been founded by Chinese dissidents, as well as journalists, mathematicians, and start-up company technologists from the U.S., Taiwan, Europe, Australia, and South Africa.[1] Newspaper articles and The New Yorker magazine (June 7, 2010) describe Julian Assange, an Australian journalist and Internet activist, as its director.[4] Assange himself has stated that he is "the heart and soul of this organization, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organizer, financier, and all the rest".[5]”

Hosting

“WikiLeaks describes itself as “an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking”. WikiLeaks is hosted by PRQ, a Sweden-based company providing “highly secure, no-questions-asked hosting services.” PRQ is said to have “almost no information about its clientele and maintains few if any of its own logs.” The servers are spread around the world with the central server located in Sweden.[54] Julian Assange has said that the servers are located in Sweden (and the other countries) "specifically because those nations offer legal protection to the disclosures made on the site". He talks about the Swedish constitution, which gives the information providers total legal protection.[54] It is forbidden according to Swedish law for any administrative authority to make inquiries about the sources of any type of newspaper.[55] These laws, and the hosting by PRQ, make it difficult to take WikiLeaks offline. Furthermore, "Wikileaks maintains its own servers at undisclosed locations, keeps no logs and uses military-grade encryption to protect sources and other confidential information." Such arrangements have been called "bulletproof hosting."[56][57]

On August 17, 2010, it was announced that the Swedish Pirate Party will be hosting and managing many of WikiLeaks' new servers. The party donates servers and bandwidth to WikiLeaks without charge. Technicians of the party will make sure that the servers are maintained and working.[58][59] Some servers are hosted in underground cold war era nuclear shelters. The physical security layer is 30m White Mountains solid bedrock.[60]

WikiLeaks is based on several software packages, including MediaWiki, Freenet, Tor, and PGP.[61] WikiLeaks strongly encouraged postings via Tor due to the strong privacy needs of its users.[62]”

“U.S. nervously awaits next WikiLeaks

Last Updated: Thursday, November 25, 2010 | 11:28 PM ET Comments414Recommend273

CBC News

The United States government and its diplomats around the world are nervously awaiting the latest release of WikiLeaks documents, more than two million, expected late Friday or Saturday.

U.S. officials said the documents may contain accounts of compromising conversations with political dissidents and friendly politicians. They also could damage U.S. relations with allies around the world and result in the expulsion of U.S. diplomats from foreign postings.

The U.S. ambassador to Canada, David Jacobson, has phoned Minister of Foreign Affairs Lawrence Cannon to inform him of the matter.

In Ottawa, Defence Minister Peter McKay said Thursday he is worried, but only if the leaked information talks about operations overseas. That kind of leak can be very dangerous, he told reporters.

P.O.V.:

Should WikiLeaks publish sensitive U.S. diplomatic files? Why or why not? Let us know in the comments below. Take our survey.

This is the third time that WikiLeaks has released secret documents. In July, it released 77,000 papers on the Afghan war. Then in October, it went public with 400,000 papers on Pentagon reports about the Iraq war.

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/...aks-us025.html#ixzz16PGnOpt8”