What happens if you go on wikileaks

Airmen, don't let your babies grow up to read WikiLeaks. If they do, the Air Force may have no choice but to prosecute them for espionage. Last week, the Air Force Materiel Command's lawyers warned that airmen who read the purloined classified cables on their home computers -- not even government owned or issued devices -- could be prosecuted for "dereliction of duty. WikiLeaks viewership could mean "prosecution for violation of espionage under the Espionage Act.

But the Air Force doesn't stop there. A Christian Science Perspective. Monitor Movie Guide. Monitor Daily. Photos of the Week. Some US government warning have suggested that a federal employee would be breaking the law by reading one of these newspapers reporting on classified State Department documents published on the WikiLeaks website. The photo was taken Nov.

You've read of free articles. Subscribe to continue. Mark Sappenfield. Our work isn't possible without your support. Digital subscription includes: Unlimited access to CSMonitor. Direct evidence of harm has been hard to find, but in Julian Assange told the Guardian that Wikileaks' exposure of widespread corruption in Kenya influenced violence during national elections that led to 1, deaths.

He justified the release of the information saying Kenyans had a right to know the information. The early leaks it oversaw gave insights into corporate and official abuse on a scale never seen before, he said, adding that it also made it much easier for whistle-blowers and activists to get information into the public domain.

He said the organisation was now operating in a very different world than it did a decade ago when it was set up. To begin with, he said, there was much more competition for Wikileaks. Publishing quickly and doing less to curate documents was one way for Wikileaks to remain relevant, he said. However, he added, there had been a shift in the information it released. Now, the information was less about clear cases of harm or the abuse of power, and more to do with subjects that were much less black and white.

There was a danger, he said, that Wikileaks was now part of the story rather than just the route through which information is released. In the early days of Wikileaks, it took more care - thanks to working with newspapers that did the job of removing sensitive information from documents about the Afghan and Iraq wars.

Spokesman Julian Assange has often said that the sheer amount of documents Wikileaks handles makes it all but impossible to censor or edit them if they are to be released in a timely fashion. In some cases it has no way to contact whoever handed over documents, making it difficult to find out what information might prove damaging.

The lack of oversight has led to criticism about the release of almost , emails from Turkey's AKP, with some saying they contained more trivia than treasure. Wikileaks practices what it calls "radical transparency", said Prof Christensen, which leads it to believe that exposing corruption, malfeasance and abuse of power trumps the damage it might do to individuals.

Many other whistle-blowing sites take greater care with documents they are passed to ensure that no more information than necessary is released. The "wiki" part of the name simply refers to its aim of letting people collaborate to edit documents and releases.

The original idea was for Wikileaks to build up a large group of helpers that would censor and prepare information before publication. Is each of the five news organizations hosting all the documents that Wikileaks has released? Each of the five news organizations hosts a different selection of the released documents, in different forms, which may or may not overlap. Le Monde has created an application, developed in conjunction with Linkfluence , that hosts the searchable text of several hundred cables.

The text can be searched by the sender country of origin, office or official , date range, persons of interest cited in the docs, classification status, or any combination of the above. Only the untranslated, English text of the cables can be accessed and cut-and-paste is not available. These searches also return El Pais articles written on a given subject, often placed ahead of the cables in the search listings.

The Guardian offers the cable data in several forms: It has performed an analysis of metadata of the entire ,document trove, and made it available in several forms spreadsheets hosted on Google Docs and in downloadable form as well as infographics.

The Guardian also hosts at least cables on its website, searchable by subject, originating country, and countries referenced. Who is responsible for redacting the documents? What actions did Wikileaks take to ensure that individuals were not put in danger by publication of the documents? According to the Associated Press and statements released by Wikileaks and Julian Assange , Wikileaks is currently relying on the expertise of the five news organizations to redact the cables as they are released, and it is following their redactions as it releases the documents on its website.

This cannot be verified without examining the original documents, which we have not done—nor are we linking to them here. State Department for guidance on redacting the documents prior to their release. In a public letter , Harold Koh, legal adviser to the Department of State, declined to assist the organization and demanded the return of the documents.

Are the documents hosted anywhere else on the Internet? The file, which apparently can still be found on various peer-to-peer networks, is 1. What is in the insurance file is not known.

It has been speculated that it contains the unredacted cables provided by the original source s , as well as other, previously unreleased information held by Wikileaks. There is further speculation, which has been indirectly boosted by Julian Assange, that the key to the file will be distributed in the event of either the death of Assange or the destruction of Wikileaks as a functioning organization. However, none of these things is known.

If the key were released, and if the encrypted insurance file contains unredacted and unreleased secret documents, then those decrypted files would be available to many people nearly instantaneously.

Wikileaks claimed in August that the insurance file had been downloaded more than , times.