Surveillance and Society: Wikileaks

"WikiLeaks is a multi-national media organization and associated library. It was founded by its publisher Julian Assange in 2006. WikiLeaks specializes in the analysis and publication of large datasets of censored or otherwise restricted official materials involving war, spying and corruption. It has so far published more than 10 million documents and associated analyses."

The publisher's twitter channel.

"WarDiaries.Wikileaks.org is a website which provides an easy way to search through the Iraq and Afghan War Diaries, which were made public by Wikileaks on 22nd October 2010. The documents are a set of over 391,000 reports which cover the war in Iraq from 2004 to 2009 and Afghanistan from 2004 to 2009."

"Amazon is the leading cloud provider for the United States intelligence community. In 2013, Amazon entered into a $600 million contract with the CIA to build a cloud for use by intelligence agencies working with information classified as Top Secret. Then, in 2017, Amazon announced the AWS Secret Region, which allows storage of data classified up to the Secret level by a broader range of agencies and companies. Amazon also operates a special GovCloud region for US Government agencies hosting unclassified information. Currently, Amazon is one of the leading contenders for an up to $10 billion contract to build a private cloud for the Department of Defense."

"All major French political parties were targeted for infiltration by the CIA's human ("HUMINT") and electronic ("SIGINT") spies in the seven months leading up to France's 2012 presidential election."

"The revelations are contained within three CIA tasking orders published today by WikiLeaks as context for its forth coming CIA Vault 7 series. Named specifically as targets are the French Socialist Party (PS), the National Front (FN) and Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) together with current President Francois Hollande, then President Nicolas Sarkozy, current round one presidential front runner Marine Le Pen, and former presidential candidates Martine Aubry and Dominique Strauss-Khan."

"5th April 2010 10:44 EST WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad -- including two Reuters news staff.

Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-sight, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded."

"Thursday, 25th October 2012, WikiLeaks begins releasing the ’Detainee Policies’: more than 100 classified or otherwise restricted files from the United States Department of Defense covering the rules and procedures for detainees in U.S. military custody. Over the next month, WikiLeaks will release in chronological order the United States’ military detention policies followed for more than a decade. The documents include the Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) of detention camps in Iraq and Cuba, interrogation manuals and Fragmentary Orders (FRAGOs) of changes to detainee policies and procedures. A number of the ’Detainee Policies’ relate to Camp Bucca in Iraq, but there are also Department of Defense-wide policies and documents relating to Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and European U.S. Army Prison facilities."

"Starting on Friday 22 July 2016 at 10:30am EDT, WikiLeaks released over 2 publications 44,053 emails and 17,761 attachments from the top of the US Democratic National Committee -- part one of our new Hillary Leaks series. The leaks come from the accounts of seven key figures in the DNC: Communications Director Luis Miranda (10520 emails), National Finance Director Jordon Kaplan (3799 emails), Finance Chief of Staff Scott Comer (3095 emails), Finanace Director of Data & Strategic Initiatives Daniel Parrish (1742 emails), Finance Director Allen Zachary (1611 emails), Senior Advisor Andrew Wright (938 emails) and Northern California Finance Director Robert (Erik) Stowe (751 emails). The emails cover the period from January last year until 25 May this year."

""EUNAVFOR MED - Operation SOPHIA" - Six Monthly Report: June, 22nd to December, 31st 2015" - Written by the Operation Commander, Rear Admiral Enrico Credendino of the Italian Navy, for the European Union Military Committee and the Political and Security Committee of the EU. It gives refugee flow statistics and outlines the performed and planned operation phases (1, 2A, 2B and 3), the corresponding activities of the joint EU forces operating in the Mediterranean and the future strategies for the operation."

"Julian Assange, WikiLeaks publisher, said: "In this important Bundestag inquiry, the German and international public is the injured party. The purpose of this inquiry, properly stated, is to discover who is responsible for the injury of a great many people's rights and how these violations were committed. As the injured party, the public has a right to understand this inquiry's work. It is only through effective public oversight that this inquiry's stated objectives of transparency and justice will be met."

"In its latest release of classified US documents, WikiLeaks is shining the light of truth on a notorious icon of the Bush administration’s "War on Terror" — the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which opened on January 11, 2002, and remains open under President Obama, despite his promise to close the much-criticized facility within a year of taking office.

In thousands of pages of documents dating from 2002 to 2008 and never seen before by members of the public or the media, the cases of the majority of the prisoners held at Guantánamo — 765 out of 779 in total — are described in detail in memoranda from JTF-GTMO, the Joint Task Force at Guantánamo Bay, to US Southern Command in Miami, Florida.

These memoranda, known as Detainee Assessment Briefs (DABs), contain JTF-GTMO’s recommendations about whether the prisoners in question should continue to be held, or should be released (transferred to their home governments, or to other governments). They consist of a wealth of important and previously undisclosed information, including health assessments, for example, and, in the cases of the majority of the 172 prisoners who are still held, photos (mostly for the first time ever)."

"On March 16, 2016 WikiLeaks launched a searchable archive for over 30 thousand emails & email attachments sent to and from Hillary Clinton's private email server while she was Secretary of State. The 50,547 pages of documents span from 30 June 2010 to 12 August 2014. 7,570 of the documents were sent by Hillary Clinton. The emails were made available in the form of thousands of PDFs by the US State Department as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request. The final PDFs were made available on February 29, 2016."

"WarDiaries.Wikileaks.org is a website which provides an easy way to search through the Iraq and Afghan War Diaries, which were made public by Wikileaks on 22nd October 2010. The documents are a set of over 391,000 reports which cover the war in Iraq from 2004 to 2009 and Afghanistan from 2004 to 2009."

" WikiLeaks publishes highly classified documents showing that the US National Security Agency bugged a private climate change strategy meeting; between UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin; singled out the Chief of Staff of UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for long term interception targetting his Swiss phone; singled out the Director of the Rules Division of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), Johann Human, and targetted his Swiss phone for long term interception; stole sensitive Italian diplomatic cables detailing how Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu implored Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to help patch up his relationship with US President Barack Obama, who was refusing to talk to Netanyahu; intercepted top EU and Japanese trade ministers discussing their secret strategy and red lines to stop the US "extort[ing]" them at the WTO Doha arounds (the talks subsequently collapsed); explicitly targetted five other top EU economic officials for long term interception, including their French, Austrian and Belgium phone numbers; explicitly targetted the phones of Italy's ambassador to NATO and other top Italian officials for long term interception; and intercepted details of a critical private meeting between then French president Nicolas Sarkozy, Merkel and Berluscon, where the latter was told the Italian banking system was ready to "pop like a cork". "Some of the intercepts are classified TOP-SECRET COMINT-GAMMA and are the most highly classified documents ever published by a media organization."

"Friday 31 July 2015, 9am CEST, WikiLeaks publishes "Target Tokyo", 35 Top Secret NSA targets in Japan including the Japanese cabinet and Japanese companies such as Mitsubishi, together with intercepts relating to US-Japan relations, trade negotiations and sensitive climate change strategy. The list indicates that NSA spying on Japanese conglomerates, government officials, ministries and senior advisers extends back at least as far as the first administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, which lasted from September 2006 until September 2007."

"Wikileaks today (23 November, 2019) publishes an e-mail, sent by a member of an OPCW fact-finding mission to Syria to his superiors, in which he expresses his gravest concern over intentional bias introduced to a redacted version of the report he co-authored. The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons sent a team of experts to investigate allegations that a chemical attack took place in the Syrian city of Douma on the 7th of April 2018. The author of the e-mail was a member of that team and claims the redacted preliminary version of the report, misrepresents the facts he and his colleagues discovered on the ground. The e-"mail is dated 22nd of June."

"WikiLeaks series on deals involving Hillary Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta. Mr Podesta is a long-term associate of the Clintons and was President Bill Clinton's Chief of Staff from 1998 until 2001. Mr Podesta also owns the Podesta Group with his brother Tony, a major lobbying firm and is the Chair of the Center for American Progress (CAP), a Washington DC-based think tank."

Pope’s Private Letter Reveals Early Involvement in Power Struggle (30 January, 2019): "Documents released by WikiLeaks today shed light on a power struggle within the highest offices of the Catholic Church. Amongst the documents is a private letter written by Pope Francis. The existence of this letter, addressed to the papal envoy Cardinal Raymond Burke, has been the source of much speculation in the media [1]. It is now published for the first time in full and with the Pope’s signature..."

"The WIKILEAKS Public Library of US Diplomacy (PlusD) holds the world's largest searchable collection of United States confidential, or formerly confidential, diplomatic communications. As of April 8, 2013 it holds 2 million records comprising approximately 1 billion words. The collection covers US involvements in, and diplomatic or intelligence reporting on, every country on earth. It is the single most significant body of geopolitical material ever published. The PlusD collection, built and curated by WikiLeaks, is updated from a variety of sources, including leaks, documents released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and documents released by the US State Department systematic declassification review."

Julian Assange, WikiLeaks publisher, said: "The Saudi Cables lift the lid on a increasingly erratic and secretive dictatorship that has not only celebrated its 100th beheading this year, but which has also become a menace to its neighbours and itself." "Friday 19th June at 1pm GMT, WikiLeaks began publishing The Saudi Cables: more than half a million cables and other documents from the Saudi Foreign Ministry that contain secret communications from various Saudi Embassies around the world. The publication includes "Top Secret" reports from other Saudi State institutions, including the Ministry of Interior and the Kingdom's General Intelligence Services. The massive cache of data also contains a large number of email communications between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and foreign entities. The Saudi Cables are being published in tranches of tens of thousands of documents at a time over the coming weeks. "

"Over 100 documents from Church of Scientology organizations and corporations." Among them, "Church of Scientology collected Operating Thetan documents: "The collected secret "bibles" of Scientology, a global cult founded by science fiction author and con-man L. Ron Hubbard and popularized by the membership of Hollywood celebrities such as Tom Cruise. Most of the document has, ironically, been verified by a Scientology (Religious Technology Center) legal demand to Wikileaks to remove the material (see 'Note' below). A portion of the material is in Hubbard's distinctive handwriting. An analysis of the PDF metadata dates the document collection to 1995. The documents appear to have been smuggled out by a break-away Scientology group collectively known as the "Freezone"."

WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange said: "This archive shows the inner workings of an influential multinational corporation. It is newsworthy and at the centre of a geo-political conflict. It belongs in the public domain. WikiLeaks will ensure it stays there."

"More than two million emails from Syrian political figures, ministries and associated companies, dating from August 2006 to March 2012. This extraordinary data set derives from 680 Syria-related entities or domain names, including those of the Ministries of Presidential Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Finance, Information, Transport and Culture."

"TiSA is the largest of the three proposed giant multinational trade agreements. Along with the TPP and TTIP, the "Three Big T's" create a new global economic and legal bloc. TiSA is the agreement around the vitally important services industry. According to World Bank figures, services comprise around 75% of the EU economy, 80% of the US economy and the majority of economies of most countries. The global economy is shifting towards a service-oriented economy. However, despite its importance both the US Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have thus far given no position on the TiSA Agreement."

On 16 November 2015, WikiLeaks releases a searchable and highlightable text of the agreed version of the Trans-Pacific-Partnership (TPP) Agreement. The text of the Agreement was released by TPP Parties on 5 November 2015 and can be accessed by chapter. The text will continue to undergo legal review and will be translated into French and Spanish language versions prior to signature. Any officially released updates to these documents will be included here as they become available."

"WikiLeaks releases a searchable and highlightable text of a draft version (April 2016) of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) Agreement.. The text of the Agreement was published by Greenpeace (Netherlands) on 2 May 2016 and can be accessed by chapter.

The TTIP is a multi-trillion dollar international treaty that is being negotiated in secret between the United States and the European Union. It remains secret almost in its entirety, closely guarded by the negotiators, and only big corporations are given special access to its terms. The TTIP countries cover half of global GDP and is one of the largest agreements of its kind in history. The TTIP aims to create a global economic bloc outside of the WTO framework, as part of a geopolitical economic strategy against the BRICS countries of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

The Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has dubbed the TTIP an "economic NATO," comparing it to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization military alliance. Over the last two years WikiLeaks has published chapters from two other secret global trade deals, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) and the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA), despite unprecedented efforts by negotiating governments to keep them under wraps."

On 21 December 2018, WikiLeaks publishes a searchable database of more than 16,000 procurement requests posted by United States embassies around the world

"This spectacular 2,000 page US military leak consists of the names, group structure and theatre equipment registers of all units in Iraq with US army equipment . It exposes secretive document exploitation centers, detainee operations, elements of the State Department, Air Force, Navy and Marines units, the Iraqi police and coalition forces from Poland, Denmark, Ukraine, Latvia, Slovakia, Romania, Armenia, Kazakhstan and El Salvador. The material represents nearly the entire order of battle for US forces in Iraq and is the first public revelation of many of the military units described. Among other matters it shows that the United States may have violated the United Nations Chemical Weapons Convention."

"Wikileaks has released 70 United Nations investigative reports classified "Strictly Confidential". The reports expose matters from allegations of hundreds of European peace-keepers sexually abusing refugee girls to generals in Peru using Swiss bank accounts to engage in multi-million dollar frauds against the UN. A number of the reports are both classified "Strictly Confidential" and have selected regions redacted. Often these redacted regions can be "unredacted" by "cut and pasting" the blanked region. On the description page for each report, where possible, Wikileaks has provided a simple text version of the report that includes the redacted information. "

Vault 7: CIA Hacking Tools Revealed: Tuesday 7 March 2017, WikiLeaks began its new series of leaks on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Code-named "Vault 7" by WikiLeaks, it is the largest ever publication of confidential documents on the agency..."

The WikiLeaks index site to leaks collections.

"The Yemen Files are a collection of more than 500 documents from the United States embassy in Sana'a, Yemen. Comprising more than 200 emails and 300 PDFs, the collection details official documents and correspondence pertaining to the Office for Military Cooperation (OMC) located at the US embassy. The collection spans the period from 2009 until just before the war in Yemen broke out in earnest during March 2015. This time period covers both Hillary Clinton's term as Secretary of State (20092013) and the first two years of Secretary John Kerry’s tenure. Julian Assange said: "The war in Yemen has produced 3.15 million internally displaced persons. Although the United States government has provided most of the bombs and is deeply involved in the conduct of the war itself reportage on the war in English is conspicuously rare."

"The Pentagon Papers, officially titled "Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force", was commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1967. In June of 1971, small portions of the report were leaked to the press and widely distributed. However, the publications of the report that resulted from these leaks were incomplete and suffered from many quality issues.

On the 40th anniversary of the leak to the press, the National Archives, along with the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon Presidential Libraries, has released the complete report. There are 48 boxes and approximately 7,000 declassified pages. Approximately 34% of the report is available for the first time."

WikiLeaks releases more internal documents from the OPCW regarding the investigation into the alleged chemical attack in Douma in April 2018.

"Today [14 December 2019) WikiLeaks releases more documents showing internal disagreement within the OPCW about how facts were misrepresented in a redacted version of a report on an alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria in April 2018.

Amongst these is a memorandum written in protest by one of the scientists sent on a fact finding mission (FFM) to investigate the attack. It is dated 14 March 2019 and is addressed to Fernando Arias, Director General of the organisation. This was exactly two weeks after the organisation published its final report on the Douma investigation..."

Wikileaks today publishes an e-mail, sent by a member of an OPCW fact-finding mission to Syria to his superiors, in which he expresses his gravest concern over intentional bias introduced to a redacted version of the report he co-authored.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons sent a team of experts to investigate allegations that a chemical attack took place in the Syrian city of Douma on the 7th of April 2018. The author of the e-mail was a member of that team and claims the redacted preliminary version of the report, misrepresents the facts he and his colleagues discovered on the ground. The e-"mail is dated 22nd of June.

Fishrot Files - Part 1 (12 November, 2019) -WikiLeaks publishes over 30,000 documents (the first of two batches) it has obtained from a whistleblower within SAMHERJI, a multinational fishing company based in Iceland. They expose corrupt schemes by the company in Namibia to gain access to rich fishing grounds off the African country’s shores.'

Fishrot Files - Part 2 (26 November, 2019) - WikiLeaks releases documents pertaining to the Fishrot case that have come to light as a result of investigation into bribes, money laundering and tax evasion. These investigations have been launched by several institutions across Norway, Iceland and Namibia as a result of WikiLeaks' Fishrot publication earlier this month.

"Founded in 1985 by journalists and scholars to check rising government secrecy, the National Security Archive combines a unique range of functions: investigative journalism center, research institute on international affairs, library and archive of declassified U.S. documents ("the world's largest nongovernmental collection" according to the Los Angeles Times), leading non-profit user of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, public interest law firm defending and expanding public access to government information, global advocate of open government, and indexer and publisher of former secrets."

An important part of CIA's ongoing effort to be more open and to provide for more public accountability has been a recognition of the importance of declassifying historically significant Agency documents. The process of opening up the Agency's historical record didn't begin until sometime in the 1980s when then Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) William Casey authorized the declassification and transfer of nine million pages of OSS records to the National Archives and established the Historical Review Program.

"DNSA consists of expertly curated, and meticulously indexed, declassified government documents covering U.S. policy toward critical world events – including their military, intelligence, diplomatic and human rights dimensions – from 1945 to the present. Each collection is assembled by foreign policy experts and features chronologies, glossaries, bibliographies, and scholarly overviews to provide unparalleled access to the defining international issues of our time."

Learn all about FBI records—including how to access previously released records and how to request records in accordance with the Freedom of Information (FOIA) and Privacy Acts, collectively referred to as FOIPA.

The Vault is the FBI's electronic FOIA Library, containing nearly 7,000 documents and other media that have been scanned from paper into digital copies so you can read them in the comfort of your home or office. Included here are many new FBI files that have been released to the public but never added to this website; dozens of records previously posted on our site but removed as requests diminished; files from our previous FOIA Library; and new, previously unreleased files.

U.S. Declassified Documents Online provides immediate access to a broad range of previously classified federal records spanning the twentieth and twenty first centuries. The collection brings together the most sensitive documents from all the presidential libraries and numerous executive agencies in a single, easily searchable database. The search and discovery interface for the collection allows researchers to locate the full text of documents and quickly filter their search results by document type, issue date, source institution, classification level, and date declassified as well as other document characteristics.

"This publication continues WikiLeaks' Spy Files series with releases about surveillance contractors in Russia. While the surveillance of communication traffic is a global phenomena, the legal and technological framework of its operation is different for each country. Russia's laws - especially the new Yarovaya Law - make literally no distinction between Lawful Interception and mass surveillance by state intelligence authorities (SIAs) without court orders."

"ICE Patrol is a searchable database of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) employees with LinkedIn files."