The website Wikileaks is in the news again after releasing secret US military reports on the war in Afghanistan. Find out about the site’s legal position here.
Wikileaks was created to allow people – whether they are journalists, government workers or anyone else – to publish sensitive documents without worrying about their jobs or their safety.
Anyone can submit documents to the site. If the editorial team thinks that they are important enough, they are published anonymously. The files are stored by a Swedish company which specialises in providing secure hosting for sensitive or controversial material.
Wikileaks is on difficult ground because many of the documents it publishes are confidential. If nothing else, publishing them is often a breach of copyright.
Sweden offers important legal protection, because it has powerful laws to protect “whistleblowers” – it is illegal to investigate the identity of an anonymous source.
Wikileaks has also protected itself in the way it is structured. For example, it has no registered address or property in America, making it much harder for US organisations to take legal action against it.
But the real test for a site like Wikileaks is what happens when cases are brought against it. The site claims to have withstood over a hundred separate legal challenges.Although they have sometimes been taken offline temporarily, the site has yet to be shut down altogether.
Similarly, although it is much easier to prosecute the “whistleblowers” who leak the documents in the first place, Wikileaks claims it has never been forced to give up a source.
Overall, the legal response to Wikileaks varies enormously from country to country. In June 2010, Iceland passed a law to protect such sites – and asked Wikileaks to help to draft the legislation. The USA is less welcoming: it has warned that the Afghanistan leak is “a breach of federal law”.
How far should a site like Wikileaks be allowed to go? Share your thoughts in the comments box below.
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