Wikileaks STOCKHOLM: The around 250,000 diplomatic cables that WikiLeaks began releasing at the weekend are but one of many spotlight-grabbing document dumps in the whistleblowing website's short history.
And it is not the last: WikiLeaks' founder and frontman Julian Assange told Forbes magazine Monday the website next planned to leak tens of thousands of documents relating to a major US bank, saying the new "magaleak" could "take down a bank or two."
Here are some of WikiLeaks' top past releases:
- November 28, 2010: In a new release dubbed "Cablegate," WikiLeaks starts publishing some 251,287 cables -- 15,652 of which are classified -- from 274 US embassies around the world. The New York Times, Britain's The Guardian, Germany's Der Spiegel, France's Le Monde and Germany's Der Spiegel published revelations from the documents on November 28, saying more would keep coming. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs described those behind the leaks as "criminals, first and foremost" who had committed a "serious" offence.
- October 22, 2010: WikiLeaks publishes the so-called "Iraq war logs," described as one of the biggest military leaks of all time. The 391,832 "SIGACT" (Significant Action) reports, written by US soldiers during the war in Iraq, date from January 2004 to the end of 2009. The logs detail cases of abuse and torture and 66,081 civilian deaths of which WikiLeaks claimed 15,000 were previously unknown. WikiLeaks made the files available several weeks ahead of time to The New York Times, The Guardian, Der Spiegel and pan-Arab television network Al-Jazeera and invited other journalists for a three-hour lock-in preview in London hours before the documents went online.
- July 25, 2010: WikiLeaks releases nearly 77,000 classified US military documents -- Pentagon files and field reports spanning from 2004 to 2010 -- on the war in Afghanistan and said it would soon publish another 15,000. The documents reveal details of civilian victims and supposed links between Pakistan and the Taliban insurgents, infuriating the Pentagon and shining the spotlight on WikiLeaks. The documents were released to The New York Times, Britain's Guardian newspaper and Germany's Der Spiegel news weekly.
- April 5, 2010: WikiLeaks releases a video of a US military Apache helicopter strike in Baghdad three years ago which killed two Reuters employees and a number of other people. The gun camera footage included audio conversations between Apache pilots and ground controllers in which they identify the men in a Baghdad street as armed insurgents and ask for permission to open fire. WikiLeaks said it obtained and decrypted the video "from a number of military whistleblowers" but did not provide any further information about how it got hold of the footage.
- 2009: WikiLeaks is among the websites to publish controversial documents and email exchanges between researchers at the Climate Research Unit at Britain's University of East Anglia, one of the world's leading climate centres. The leak was seized upon by climate change sceptics who said the emails supported their cause, sparking a global row later dubbed "climategate." An inquiry later cleared the researchers of any wrongdoing.
- 2009: In November, the site begins publishing what it says are hundreds of thousands of pager messages from the day of the September 11, 2001 attacks
on New York and Washington. WikiLeaks does not reveal how it obtained the pager messages purportedly from telecommunications companies, but technology blogs said at the time they appeared to be genuine.
- 2008: WikiLeaks posts on its website a list of more than 10,000 names -- including addresses, telephone numbers and occupations -- of members of Britain's British National Party (BNP). At least one police officer was fired as a result of the leak, as British police and prison officers were banned from joining the BNP in 2004. The party threatened legal action against whoever had published the list.
- 2008: In September, during the 2008 US presidential campaign, the content of Sarah Palin's personal email account is hacked and some email screenshots posted on WikiLeaks. The manager of the McCain-Palin campaign, Rick Davis, called the leak "a shocking invasion of the governor's privacy and a violation of law" in a statement.
2007: The site publishes "Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures," a 238-page US Army instruction manual from 2003 for the prison at Guantanamo Bay. The detailed manual, which states rolls of toilet paper, among other things, could be given to detainees as rewards, was criticised by rights groups.
- 2007: WikiLeaks officially launches after being founded the year before.
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