Australian-born Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks.

Wiki is one of those curious little words appropriated by the digital age.
Wikiwiki means ''quick'' or ''fast'' in the lingo of Hawaiians. On the internet it
means open collaboration. It's a place where users are publishers, where
contributions to a great well of information can be made directly by anyone.

The two most famous manifestations of the genre are Wikipedia and
WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks is in the news because it posted on its own sites and
on YouTube classified footage from 2007 of a US Apache helicopter crew
firing on civilians in a Baghdad street, killing 12 to 15 people, including two
employees of Reuters news agency.

In the space of a few days, the footage has been viewed more than 2 million
times on YouTube and shown on television news programs around the world.
It is graphic and horrifying, even more so because it is accompanied by the
audio of the gun crew. It reveals every decision to fire was authorised by the
command and there was great urgency to fire even when there was no
imminent danger.

Members of the cavalry brigade (as the crew of assault helicopters are
called) were heard to laugh at their handiwork. As a wounded person lay on
the ground one of the crew said, ''Come on, buddy, pick up your weapon.''
He was looking for any excuse to continue firing.

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Worse still was the assault on unarmed Iraqis who arrived in a van to help
and rescue the wounded and pick up the dead. They too were fired on,
needlessly, and in the process two children were seriously wounded. ''It's
their fault for bringing children to battle,'' was the audio message from one
of the military.

The Pentagon investigated the incident and decided there had been no
violation of the rules of engagement. In other words, this is standard
operating procedure. WikiLeaks called it ''collateral murder''.

This is not the same picture of the conflict we took away from The Hurt
Locker, but it is a shocking reminder of how war corrupts participants. The
footage was highly classified by the Pentagon. Reuters spent 2½ years
fruitlessly trying to get FoI access to it. No one else in the media had it. Then
a website run by ''outsiders'' landed the goods.

Three months ago, WikiLeaks sent out a Twitter message saying: ''Have
encrypted videos of US bomb strikes on civilians. We need supercomputer
time.'' Wikileaks needed that time to decrypt the video so it could post it to
the world without anyone's fingerprints on it.

In a relatively short space of time, WikiLeaks has come in from the fringe.
The site was started three years ago by a group of activists and computer
nerds, including an Australian journalist and hacker, Julian Assange.

Some of its famous scoops include the report into the dumping of toxic
waste in the Ivory Coast by global oil trading firm Trafigura, the protocols for
the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Wesley Snipes' tax returns,
secret Church of Scientology manuals, NATO's plans for the war in
Afghanistan, even the Australian Communication and Media Authority's
blacklist of websites to be filtered.

In all, there are more than 1 million secret or classified documents on the
WikiLeaks site. They pour in by their thousands each month.

It seems five full-time workers go through the material and an army of

others provide technology skills. How they check, distil and verify in a leak
factory of this size is a marvel. It's called ''extreme transparency''.

Not that the WikiLeaks website is a model of transparency - it's impossible

to contact anyone directly. The whole thing is hosted on a main server in
Sweden, a country in which it is illegal to divulge the identity of a
confidential source. There are back-up servers in Belgium and the US.

WikiLeaks believes it is immune to injunctions seeking to censor its content.

Material can be taken off a server in one country but still be available on a
mirror server in another jurisdiction. It published the report on Trafigura's
activities even though the document was subject to a superinjunction by the
British courts. It published injuncted documents investigating corruption in
the Turks and Caicos Islands.

Once the secrets are out, the courts and privacy-prone plaintiffs are made to
look ineffectual. More often than not, the courts reverse the injunction once
it's posted on wikileaks.org.

How different this is from the days of the Pentagon Papers, where largely as
a result of legal impediments it took two years for the documents to be
published in the press.

That was a time when whistleblowers and leakers depended on journalists

and sometimes politicians to get the word out. Now they can publish their
secrets directly to the world.

How's that for a game-changing development?

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/leaks-pour-forth-from-the-wiki-well-of-

information-20100408-ruxn.html#ixzz22Lfiggpb