wikileaks.ch^[1][2]
wikileaks.org (originally)^[Note]

WikiLeaks is an international non-profit organisation that publishes submissions of private, secret, and classified media from anonymous news sources and news leaks. Its website, launched in 2006 under The Sunshine Press organisation,^[3] claimed a database of more than 1.2 million documents within a year of its launch.^[7] WikiLeaks describes its founders as a mix of Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians, and start-up company technologists from the United States, Taiwan, Europe, Australia, and South Africa.^[3]Julian Assange, an Australian Internet activist, is generally described as its director.^[8] The site was originally launched as a user-editable wiki, but has progressively moved towards a more traditional publication model and no longer accepts either user comments or edits.

In April 2010, WikiLeaks posted video from a 2007 incident in which Iraqi civilians and journalists were killed by US forces, on a website called Collateral Murder. In July of the same year, WikiLeaks released Afghan War Diary, a compilation of more than 76,900 documents about the War in Afghanistan not previously available for public review.^[9] In October 2010, the group released a package of almost 400,000 documents called the Iraq War Logs in coordination with major commercial media organisations. In November 2010, WikiLeaks began releasing U.S. State department diplomatic cables.

The Streisand effect is a primarily online phenomenon in which an attempt to hide or remove a piece of information has the unintended consequence of perversely causing the information to be publicized more widely and to a greater extent than would have occurred if no contrary action had been attempted. It is named after American entertainer Barbra Streisand, following a 2003 incident in which her attempts to suppress photographs of her residence inadvertently generated further publicity.

As early as 1993, John Gilmore observed that "the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."^[1] Examples of such attempts include actions against photographs, numbers, files or websites (for example via a cease-and-desist letter). Instead of being suppressed, the information receives extensive publicity, often being widely mirrored across the Internet or distributed on file-sharing networks.^[2][3]

Mike Masnick originally coined the term Streisand effect in reference to a 2003 incident in which Barbra Streisand unsuccessfully attempted to sue photographer Kenneth Adelman and Pictopia.com for US$50 million in an attempt to have the aerial photograph of her mansion removed from the publicly available collection of 12,000 California coastline photographs, citing privacy concerns.^[2][4][5] Adelman stated that he was photographing beachfront property to document coastal erosion as part of the California Coastal Records Project.^[6] As a result of the case, public knowledge of the picture increased substantially and it became popular on the Internet, with more than 420,000 people visiting the site over the following month.^[7]