Wikileads

Newsworthiness. Understanding it is essential to success in journalism.
Whoever decides which documents to release at Wikileaks has a solid understanding of newsworthiness. Take this recent upload. It’s an invoice for Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Defense, charging the country for a  shipment of Chinese rockets, bombs and rounds of mortar.
Most days this document might not draw much [...]

Wikileaks.org is not the only place you can post sensitive documents. Also check out LiveLeak.com for video leaks and Scribd.com for documents.
LiveLeak has a Citizen Journalism channel. It’s full of footage of Mexican kidnappings, the effects of the housing crisis and police brutality. Videos can be easily downloaded so users can re-post them later if [...]

Why hasn’t the Church of Scientology sued Wikileaks? They have sued numerous other organizations for offenses far milder than releasing their entire secret bibles for public view, as Wikileaks did on March 24. So far Scientology has done nothing but send Wikileaks a letter. An angry letter, written by lawyers, requesting the documents be removed.
But [...]

From the Index on Censorship’s website:
The Economist New Media Award: Wikileaks
Having faced down an attempt by an investment bank to have it shut down, wikileaks continues to be an invaluable resource for anonymous whistleblowers and investigative journalists.
Wikileaks director of investigations Julian Assange even attended to accept the award — although according to one of the [...]

Confirmed from Sunshine Press, Wikileaks’ PR people: Last Monday’s crash occurred because of the large amount of traffic generated by the graphic photos of people killed in the Tibet riots, and also because of a DDOS attack.
Definition of a DDOS attack, courtesy techweb.com’s TechEncyclopedia:

An assault on a network that floods it with so many additional [...]

When Bank Julius Baer couldn’t find a Wikileaks representative to bring to court, the Cayman Islands bank served a Wikileaks Facebook group officer with a summons.

The summons filed by the bank stated that Daniel Mathews, a Stanford grad student who writes for Wikileaks (but not about Bank Julius Baer), was an officer of Wikileaks - even though he was not. Mathews had contributed to Wikileaks, authoring articles as a volunteer, but had no behind-the-scenes authority.

However, he was - and still is - Stanford’s representative for the Wikileaks Facebook group.

According to Mathews’ attorney, Joshua Koltun, the motion brought against Mathews had no legal bearing.

“I think they were basically trying to grasp for straws,” said Koltun, explaining why lawyers for Bank Julius Baer dragged Mathews into the case. The lawyers, Koltun said, were trying to “impress the judge with the notion that they had served Wikileaks.”

“I’m assuming they were just Googling and prodding around in search of someone to serve,” he said.

Last week I spoke with Koltun about Wikileaks, Mathews and Bank Julius Baer to find out who was liable in this case and to try to determine which of Wikileaks’ actions could get them in trouble with the law.

Read the rest of the post for interview highlights.

According to this post, Wikileaks is down because of China. Wikileaks posted more than 100 photos of the Tibetan protests. (Graphic photos. See them here. But be warned - they are really, really graphic.) China then initiated a DDOS attack, which overran Wikileaks’ server and shut the system down.
That is what one blogger said. I’m [...]

…begging many questions.
Because it’s not just wikileaks.org that fails to load. It’s also wikileaks.cx, wikileaks.be and http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks, all of which worked after the Julius Baer injunction.
So who was the culprit? The British government, angry about the atomic bomb-related drawing? The Church of Scientology, trying to recoup some of its secret doctrines (and reap the associated [...]

The US Army spies on soldier and military families’ blogs, according to a document released by Wikileaks on Thursday. But the document was also released by Wired News last May, so Wikileaks removed it from their site. (According to Wikileaks’ document submission guidelines, the site releases only fresh leaks, so if they make a mistake, [...]

Wikileaks violated copyright law and, as a result, the Church of Scientology could lose money.
So said Bill Hart, a lawyer for the Church interviewed on BBC Radio 4 earlier today (the interview, abridged for broadcast, is about halfway through the show. For the interview in its entirety, click here).
Until a couple of weeks ago, only [...]