Communications of the ACM
With World Watching, Wikileaks Falls Into Disrepair
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange
Credit: Martina Haris / Wikimedia Commons
Would-be whistle-blowers hoping to leak documents to Wikileaks face a potentially frustrating surprise. Wikileaks’ submission process, which had been degraded for months, completely collapsed more than two weeks ago and remains offline, in a little-noted breakdown at the world’s most prominent secret-spilling website.
Despite a surge in mostly laudatory media portraying Wikileaks as a fearless, unstoppable outlet for documents that embarrass corporations and overbearing governments, the site has published only 12 documents since the beginning of the year, the last one four months ago. And on June 12, Wikileaks’ secure submission page stopped working after the site failed to renew its SSL certificate, a basic web protection that costs less than $30 a year and takes only hours to set up.
Wikileaks still prominently displays a link on its homepage to a secure submission form for whistleblowers to upload documents. But the page doesn’t load. The site’s donation page remains reliably available. Wikileaks’ head Julian Assange declined to comment.
From Wired
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