Mr. Julian Assange is a child of the Internet age. A former hacker and software programmer, he helped found WikiLeaks in 2006, a Web site that publishes otherwise unavailable documents provided by anonymous sources. It calls itself "an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking." WikiLeaks simply spills the beans, shining light on information governments prefer to keep secret.
In the year after it was founded, WikiLeaks published some 1.2 million documents, establishing itself as a thorn in the side of numerous governments. Among the materials it "liberated" was a report on the corruption of Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi, leaked just before the 2007 elections (and unleashing sufficient outrage to allegedly swing the election outcome); operating procedures for the Guantanamo Bay detention facility; technical manuals for the Church of Scientology; former U.S. vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's private e-mail; e-mail in the controversy surrounding the Climate Research Group at East Anglia University; and documents related to loans by an Icelandic bank just before the collapse of that country's financial sector. Thus WikiLeaks would appear to be an equal opportunity offender.
The organization has caused the most controversy with two recent postings. In April, WikiLeaks revealed "Collateral Murder," a 38-minute video taken from the cockpit of a U.S. Army helicopter that showed U.S. soldiers in a series of attacks in Baghdad nearly three years earlier that resulted in 18 deaths, including two journalists. Last month, the organization posted 92,000 documents related to the U.S. war in Afghanistan, most of them raw field reports. This time, WikiLeaks partnered with three news publications — The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel — to try to give the disclosures a relevant context.