WikiLeaks Ceases Operations Temporarily To Raise More Money

If you haven’t directly visited Wikileaks, you will have almost certainly have come across it indirectly.

The site, run by non-profit The Sunshine Press, is a non-profit organization funded by human rights campaigners, investigative journalists, technologists and the general public publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive governmental, corporate, organizational, or religious documents, while attempting to preserve the anonymity and untraceability of its contributors.

Within one year of its December 2006 launch, its database had grown to more than 1.2 million documents, leading to many front-page newspaper articles and political reforms.

As the National (and Wikileak’s homepage) so eloquently puts it, “Wikileaks has probably produced more scoops in its short life than the Washington Post has in the past 30 years”. These scoops have included members of the UK’s British National Party as well as the hacking of Sarah Palin’s Yahoo Mail account.

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Today it announces on its homepage that the site will be ceasing operations temporarily. It claims to have  “hundreds of thousands of pages from corrupt banks, the US detainee system, the Iraq war, China, the UN” but do not have the resources to release them.

The homepage explains:

“We have raised just over $50,000 for this year but can not meaningfully continue operations until costs are covered. These amount to just under $200,000 PA. If staff are paid, our yearly budget is $600,000.”

If you’d like to support the site you can do via its homepage via Paypal, Bank Transfer or Cheque. You You can also support the site technically by providing “rackspace, power and an uplink, or a dedicated server or storage space, for at least 12 months, or software development work for WikiLeaks”. To do so, contact them directly via wl-supporters@sunshinepress.org.