WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks Affect the Public Opinion

WikiLeaks is an international new media non-profit organization that publishes submissions of otherwise unavailable documents from anonymous news sources and leaks. Its website, launched in 2006, is run by The Sunshine Press. Within a year of its launch, the site claimed a database that had grown to more than 1.2 million documents. But in the last month it was been getting a lot of attention because of its top secret leaks. It first started in April 2010 when they posted a video from a 2007 incident in which Iraqi civilians and journalists were killed by U.S. forces. Then in July of the same year, WikiLeaks released the afghan war diary, a compilation of more than 76,900 documents about the war in Afghanistan not previously available for public review. In October, the group released a package of almost 400,000 documents called the Iraq War Logs in coordination with major commercial media organizations. But it was in November 2010 when the real secrets leaks began to come out, this time releasing U.S. State Department diplomatic cables.

By November 22, 2010 the public knew, because of a brief message posted on Twitter to its followers, that WikiLeaks next release would be seven times the size of the Iraq War Logs, which were already the biggest leak in US intelligence history. On November 26, 2010 some American leaders briefed about the expected release of the classified US files by the WikiLeaks website because it was likely to cause international embarrassment and I could be able to damage some nation’s relations with the United States. The US State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said: “They are going to create tension in the relationship between our diplomats and our friends around the world”. The US said that they have known for some time that WikiLeaks held the diplomatic cables and that even do no one had been charged with passing them to the website, suspicions focused on US Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, an intelligence analyst arrested in Iraq and charged over an earlier leak. In November 27, 2010 the Obama administration told WikiLeaks that its expected release of the classified State Department cables will put “countless live at risk”, threatening global counterterrorism operations and jeopardize US relations with its allies. So they released a letter from its top lawyers to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who was wanted in Sweden for questioning in a drawn-out rape probe and his attorney telling them that the publication those documents would be illegal and demanding that they stop it.

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