Founded by Julian Assange in 2006, the platform brought classified documents, covert operations and government secrets into public view
Sunday marks 20 years since Australian journalist and activist Julian Assange founded WikiLeaks, the whistleblowing platform that would publish some of the most consequential leaks of the internet age, exposing classified US war records, CIA hacking tools, mass surveillance and other closely guarded government secrets.
Registered in 2006, the website provided a secure and anonymous channel for whistleblowers to submit material for publication. Its early releases included operating procedures for the US detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, banking and corporate secrets, and internal documents from the Church of Scientology.
However, it was the scoops published in 2010 that made WikiLeaks a global phenomenon. That year, the website released “Collateral Murder,” raw classified US footage of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad which killed over a dozen people, including two Reuters news staff. WikiLeaks later published more than 91,000 documents from the Washington-led war in Afghanistan and some 391,000 reports from the US invasion of Iraq.
In 2012, Assange hosted ‘The World Tomorrow’ on RT. The 12-episode program covered a number of hotly debated topics and featured guests including Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, former Guantanamo Bay inmate Moazzam Begg, and Imran Khan – who would later become Pakistan’s Prime Minister.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: rt.com
