If you woke up today thinking this would finally be the day you would leak that top secret document, you might want to hold off for another day. Wikileaks, the Internet home for whisteblowers world-wide, has temporarily shut its doors to concentrate on fundraising.
"We protect the world", it now says on the front page, "--but will you protect us?"
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The front page now hosts a statement about the site's current status and a plea for donations. According to the statement, the site is currently overloaded by the number of readers. It says that, while the site has raised $130,000 to date, it needs $200,000 to continue its operations, and $600,000 if it were to pay all of its staff.
"We have received hundreds of thousands of pages from corrupt banks, the US detainee system, the Iraq war, China, the UN and many others that we do not currently have the resources to release," the statement reads.
Wikileaks has been host to a number of influential leaks, including operating procedures for Guantanamo Bay and the contents of Sarah Palin's hacked email account during the 2008 election. Last November, it released 570,000 pager messages sent on September 11, 2001, many of which sent by police and fire officials.
The site may have first come into the general public's eye in February 2008, when a California judge tried to shut it down, but only succeeded in pulling the DNS entry for the site in the U.S. A number of mirrors across the world quickly popped up and the judge later reversed his own decision weeks later.
In its statement today, the site makes it clear that while it has won a number of awards, they will not pay the bills and neither can it "accept government or corporate funding and maintain our absolute integrity. It is your strong support alone that preserves our continued independence and strength."
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