The group has released a number of significant documents which have become front-page news items. Early releases included documentation of equipment expenditures and holdings in the Afghanistan war and corruption in Kenya. In April 2010, WikiLeaks published gunsight footage from the 12 July 2007 Baghdad airstrike in which Iraqi journalists were among those killed by an Apache helicopter, as the Collateral Murder video. In July of the same year, WikiLeaks released Afghan War Diary, a compilation of more than 76,900 documents about the War in Afghanistan not previously available to the public. In October 2010, the group released a package of almost 400,000 documents called the Iraq War Logs in coordination with major commercial media organisations. This allowed every death in Iraq, and across the border in Iran, to be mapped. In April 2011, WikiLeaks began publishing 779 secret files relating to prisoners detained in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
In November 2010, WikiLeaks collaborated with major global media organisations to release U.S. State department diplomatic cables in redacted format. The release was nicknamed CableGate referencing the Watergate scandal and implying that this release was as dramatic as the Presidential scandal. On 1 September 2011, it became public that an encrypted version of WikiLeaks' huge archive of unredacted U.S. State Department cables had been available via Bittorrent for months, and that the decryption key (similar to a password) was available to those who knew where to look. WikiLeaks blamed the breach on its former partner, The Guardian, and that newspaper's journalist David Leigh, who revealed the key in a book published in February 2011; The Guardian argued that WikiLeaks was to blame since they gave the impression that the decryption key was temporal (something not possible for a file decryption key). Der Spiegel reported a more complex story involving errors on both sides. Widely expressed fears that the CableGate release could endanger innocent lives have so far proved unfounded.
The wikileaks.org domain name was registered on 4 October 2006. The website was unveiled, and published its first document, in December 2006. WikiLeaks has been predominantly represented in public since January 2007 by Julian Assange, who is now generally recognised as the "founder of WikiLeaks". According to Wired magazine, a volunteer said that Assange described himself in a private conversation as "the heart and soul of this organisation, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organizer, financier, and all the rest".
WikiLeaks relies heavily on volunteers and previously described its founders as a mix of Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians, and start-up company technologists from the United States, Taiwan, Europe, Australia, and South Africa. The site was originally launched as a user-editable wiki (hence its name), but has progressively moved towards a more traditional publication model and no longer accepts either user comments or edits. As of June 2009, the site had over 1,200 registered volunteers and listed an advisory board comprising Assange and eight other people, some of which denied any association with the organisation.
Despite using the name "WikiLeaks", the website is no longer wiki-based as of May 2010. Also, despite some popular confusion due to both having the term "wiki" in their names, WikiLeaks and Wikipedia have no affiliation with each other ("wiki" is not a brand name); Wikia, a for-profit corporation loosely affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation, did however purchase several WikiLeaks-related domain names (including wikileaks.com and wikileaks.net) as a "protective brand measure" in 2007.
According to The Times (London), WikiLeaks and its members have complained about continuing harassment and surveillance by law enforcement and intelligence organisations, including extended detention, seizure of computers, veiled threats, "covert following and hidden photography. Two lawyers for Julian Assange in the United Kingdom told The Guardian that they believed they were being watched by the security services after the U.S. cables leak, which started on 28 November 2010.
Furthermore, several companies severed ties with WikiLeaks. After providing 24-hour notification, American-owned EveryDNS dropped WikiLeaks from its entries on 2 December 2010, citing DDoS attacks that "threatened the stability of its infrastructure". The site's 'info' DNS lookup remained operational at alternative addresses for direct access respectively to the WikiLeaks and Cablegate websites.[204] On the same day, Amazon.com severed its ties with WikiLeaks, to which it was providing infrastructure services, after an intervention by an aide of U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman. Amazon denied acting under political pressure, citing a violation of its terms of service. Citing indirect pressure from the U.S. Government, Tableau Software also dropped WikiLeaks' data from its site for people to use for data visualisation.
In the days following, hundreds of (and eventually more than a thousand) mirrors of the WikiLeaks site appeared, and the Anonymous group of Internet activists called on supporters to attack the websites of companies which opposed WikiLeaks, under the banner of Operation Payback, previously aimed at anti-piracy organisations. AFP reported that attempts to shut down the wikileaks.org address had led to the site surviving via the so-called Streisand effect, whereby attempts to censor information online leads to it being replicated in many places.
On 3 December, PayPal, the payment processor owned by eBay, permanently cut off the account of the Wau Holland Foundation that had been redirecting donations to WikiLeaks. PayPal alleged that the account violated its "Acceptable Use Policy", specifically that the account was used for "activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity. The Vice President of PayPal later stated that they stopped accepting payments after the "State Department told us these were illegal activities. It was straightforward." Later the same day, he said that his previous statement was incorrect, and that it was in fact based on a letter from the State Department to WikiLeaks. On 8 December 2010, the Wau Holland Foundation released a press statement, saying it has filed a legal action against PayPal for blocking its account used for WikiLeaks payments and for libel due to PayPal's allegations of "illegal activity".
On 6 December, the Swiss bank PostFinance announced that it had frozen the assets of Assange that it holds, totalling 31,000. In a statement on its website, it stated that this was because Assange "provided false information regarding his place of residence" when opening the account. WikiLeaks released a statement saying this was because Assange, "as a homeless refugee attempting to gain residency in Switzerland, had used his lawyer's address in Geneva for the bank's correspondence".
On the same day, MasterCard announced that it was "taking action to ensure that WikiLeaks can no longer accept MasterCard-branded products", adding "MasterCard rules prohibit customers from directly or indirectly engaging in or facilitating any action that is illegal. The next day, Visa Inc. announced it was suspending payments to WikiLeaks, pending "further investigations". In a move of support for WikiLeaks, XIPWIRE established a way to donate to WikiLeaks, and waived their fees. Datacell, the Swiss-based IT company that enabled WikiLeaks to accept credit card donations, announced that it would take legal action against Visa Europe and Mastercard, in order to resume allowing payments to the website.
On 7 December 2010, The Guardian stated that people could donate to WikiLeaks via Commerzbank in Kassel, Germany, or Landsbanki in Iceland, or by post to a post office box at the University of Melbourne or at the wikileaks.ch domain.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay stated that Visa, Mastercard, and Amazon may be "violating WikiLeaks' right to freedom of expression" by withdrawing their services.
On 21 December, media reported that Apple had removed an application from its App Store, which provided access to the embassy cable leaks.
As part of its 'Initial Assessments Pursuant to ... WikiLeaks', the US Presidential Executive Office has issued a memorandum to the heads of Executive Departments and Agencies asking whether they have an 'insider threat program'.
On 14 July 2011 WikiLeaks and DataCell Ltd. of Iceland filed a complaint against the international card companies, VISA Europe and MasterCard Europe, for infringement of the antitrust rules of the EU, in response to their withdrawal of financial services to the organisation. In a joint press release, the organisations stated: "The closure by VISA Europe and MasterCard of Datcells access to the payment card networks in order to stop donations to WikiLeaks violates the competition rules of the European Community.
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