Wikileaks is led by a man called Julian Assange who is an Australian Internet Activist. Basically Wikileaks is a non-profit website that posts private secrets about famous people from anonymous sources. This has caused outrage amongst lots of people which led to Julian Assange being arrested. It was launched in 2006 by the Sunshine Press and released 1.2 million private documents in its first year. At first the users could edit the documents like Wikipedia but now is not allowed to be edited.
There have been mixed reactions to wikileaks with praise and heavy criticism put towards it. Many people in the American and British Government have heavily criticised Wikileaks for posting private information abot themselves and their fellow colleagues. They accused Wikileaks of harming national security. Journalists have criticised Wikileaks of not providing a checking their posts for example Wikileaks released 1000 documens without a sufficient analysis of any of them. Other people think that Wikileaks is great as it supports freedom of the press and increases transparency to the government so you can see what they are doing. Wikileaks has attracted many awards like The Economist's New Meadia Award in 2008 and in 2010, the New York City Daily News listed WikiLeaks first among websites "that could totally change the news".
Examples of what Wikileaks has posted are: in June 2010 they posted an Afghan War Diary and brought together many documents of the Afghan War which the public did not know and in November 2010 Wikileaks posted US State department diplomatic tables.
Overall I would say that Wikileaks is good and bad. It is good as it allows us to see the truth about what the government does but I understand the criticism that Wikileaks has because it is called private for a reason and it just takes the privacy out of these people's lives.
