WikiLeaks is an international non-profit media organisation founded in 2006 by Australian activist Julian Assange that publishes classified, censored, and restricted documents from anonymous sources. It rose to global prominence in 2010 when it released hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. military and diplomatic files, exposing war crimes, covert operations, and government surveillance on an unprecedented scale. Celebrated as a radical transparency project by press freedom advocates and condemned as a threat to national security by governments, WikiLeaks permanently altered the relationship between states and the public's right to know.
How Did WikiLeaks Start and What Was Its Mission?
Julian Assange registered the WikiLeaks domain in October 2006, drawing on a network of activists, journalists, and cryptography experts. The platform's central principle was radical transparency: by giving whistleblowers a technically secure, anonymous submission system, WikiLeaks aimed to expose corruption and abuse wherever it occurred. Its early releases included Kenyan government corruption files (2007) and the secret procedures manual for the U.S. detention facility at Guantánamo Bay. By 2010, WikiLeaks had a global reach and a small editorial team, with Assange serving as editor-in-chief and public face. The organisation partnered with major newspapers including The Guardian, Der Spiegel, and The New York Times to publish and verify large document caches responsibly.
What Were WikiLeaks' Most Important Document Releases?
WikiLeaks' most consequential releases came in rapid succession in 2010. In April, it published the 'Collateral Murder' video, declassified footage of a 2007 U.S. Army helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed 18 people, including two Reuters journalists. In July, it released the Afghan War Logs — 91,731 classified U.S. military records documenting civilian casualties and covert operations in Afghanistan. In October came the Iraq War Logs: 391,832 field reports revealing that U.S. forces had documented at least 66,081 non-combatant deaths and had ignored evidence of Iraqi prisoner abuse. Finally, from November 2010, WikiLeaks published 251,287 U.S. State Department diplomatic cables, embarrassing governments worldwide and triggering diplomatic crises across the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America. The source of these leaks was U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, who was arrested in May 2010 and later sentenced to 35 years in prison before President Obama commuted her sentence in 2017.
| Release | Year | Volume | Key Revelation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Collateral Murder video | 2010 | 1 video | U.S. helicopter kills civilians and journalists in Baghdad |
| Afghan War Logs | 2010 | 91,731 documents | Hidden civilian casualties; Pakistani ISI links to Taliban |
| Iraq War Logs | 2010 | 391,832 documents | 66,000+ civilian deaths; ignored prisoner abuse |
| U.S. Diplomatic Cables | 2010–11 | 251,287 cables | Candid assessments of world leaders; Middle East tensions |
| DNC Emails | 2016 | 19,252 emails | Democratic Party internal conflicts during U.S. election |
What Happened to Julian Assange After WikiLeaks?
Assange's legal troubles began in 2010 when Swedish authorities issued a warrant over sexual assault allegations he denied. Fearing extradition to the United States, he sought asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in June 2012, where he remained for nearly seven years. In April 2019, Ecuador withdrew his asylum, and British police arrested him. The U.S. Department of Justice indicted him on 18 counts, including violations of the Espionage Act of 1917, carrying a potential sentence of up to 175 years. After years of extradition battles, Assange reached a plea deal with U.S. authorities in June 2024, pleading guilty to a single count of conspiring to obtain and disclose national defence information. He was sentenced to time already served and returned to Australia as a free man in late June 2024, closing one of the most protracted press-freedom legal battles in modern history.
