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According to the website, which has published and protected game-changing documents from inside governments, corporations, religious groups, and more, “to concentrate on raising the funds necessary to keep us alive into 2010, we have reluctantly suspended all other operations”.
The default page of the website asks: “We protect the world but will you protect us?” The Sunshine Press, the nonprofit organisation behind WikiLeaks, is soliciting donations from individuals around the globe.
Besides cash donations, they are also inviting individuals to support them legally. However, the site does not accept government or corporate funding in order to maintain their “absolute integrity”.
Julian Assange, one of the WikiLeaks directors, compares the suspension of the website to a strike called by unions. “They remind people that their labour has value by withdrawing supply entirely. We give important free information to the world every day. So by withdrawing supply and making our supply to zero, people start to perceive again the value of what we are doing,” he told in a recent interview.
“In part, this is a desire for us to enforce self-discipline. It is for us a way to ensure that everyone stops normal work and actually spends time raising revenue,” Assange said.
According to him, there are very significant upcoming releases that require huge bandwidth and large amount of labour, and some could even come under heavy legal attack. “So we need to be in a stronger position before we can publish the material.”
In less than a month, the site has managed to raise just over $130,000 as against $200,000 they require for this year if they have to meaningfully continue operations. “If staff are to be paid, our yearly budget is $600,000,” it said.
Initially, the site had suspended operations on Christmas eve last year with a promise to come online on January 6, which was later extended to January 11 and then to January 18. Now the site says they “will be back soon”. Within this period, PayPal, one of the many channels offered by WikiLeaks for individuals to donate, froze WikiLeaks’ assets for a brief period.
The site claims to have a database of more than 1.2 million leaked documents. It first went online in January 2007. The site has generated a fair amount of controversy in the past by publishing confidential documents that involve businesses and governments caught in the web of corruption and non-transparent deals. It also forced some government agencies to come out in the open, with details about their projects.
For instance, Nandan Nilekani, chairman of Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), was forced to put in the public domain the working paper on the unique identity number project for every resident after WikiLeaks published the 41-page document in its site in November, 2009. FC reported on the leak of UIDAI documents on November 17.
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