Following on from my previous 3 posts in the Wikileaks Week series I shall be looking at some of the people and organizations that have relentlessly supported Wikileaks since its inception, because without these supporters they wouldn't be where they are today.

Over the years Wikileaks have had to fight off some of the greatest modern day injustices with the help of some of the brightest minds and smartest technological organizations. Below are just a few of the many groups and individuals that have risked life and reputation to help bring true democracy and transparency to the world.

^{“Open government is strongly correlated to quality of life. Open government answers injustice rather than causing it (plans which cause injustice are revealed and opposed before implementation). Open government exposes, and so corrects, corruption. Historically, the most resilient form of open government is one where leaking and publication is easy. Public leaking, being an act of ethical defection to the majority, is by its nature a democratising force. Hence a system enables everyone to leak safely to a ready audience is the most cost effective means of promoting good government -- in health and medicine, in food supply, in human rights, in arms controls and democratic institutions.”}

^{Jeremy Lewish, Professor of Political Science, Huntington University}

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^{The world needs truthtellers. They need Courage.}

The Courage Foundation was set up as a trust in August of 2013 by Wikileaks for the purpose of legally and financially supporting whistleblowers and journalists. The foundations board of advisors include some very notable and well respected people. Among some of the high profile advisors of the organization are former MI5 officer and whistleblower Annie Machon, NSA whistleblowers William Binney, and Thomas Drake, Pentagon Papers legend Daniel Ellsburg, and former CIA analysts Ray McGovern and John Kiriakou. These poeple risk their lives, liberty and freedom on a daily basis to help keep the flow of information free and uncensored. Below is a small exert from their about page:

The Courage Foundation is an international organisation that supports those who risk life or liberty to make significant contributions to the historical record. We fundraise for the legal and public defence of specific individuals who fit these criteria and are subject to serious prosecution or persecution. We also campaign for the protection of truthtellers and the public’s right to know generally.

^{When powerful institutions retreat into secrecy, they prevent proper accountability and oversight. Whistleblowers become the public’s regulators of last resort.}

https://www.couragefound.org

https://twitter.com/couragefound

YOU CAN DONATE TO THE COURAGE FOUNDATION HERE

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^{Support transparency journalism, open source tools, and combat financial censorship.}

The Freedom of the Press Foundation is a free speech and free press advocate. Its founding in 2012 was inspired by the financial blockade imposed on Wikileaks by all the major credit card and payment processing companies back in 2010. Since it's launch it has crowd-sourced and funded hundreds of thousands of dollars to support journalists around the world. It has also played a major part in the funding and promotion of various open source security tools used by journalists and whistleblowers. They also provide digital security training and education to news organizations, freelance and citizen journalists and other at-risk groups willing to put their freedom and life on the line.

One of their biggest achievements was raising over $300,000 to help support Chelsea Manning during her long and secretive trial. Some of the other people and organizations the Foundation has supported over the years have been MuckRock, the National Security Archive, The UpTake, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the Center for Public Integrity, Truthout, the LEAP Encryption Access Project, Open Whisper Systems, Tails, and the Tor Project.

One of the most important journalism tools the foundation has been involved in developing and funding is the whistleblower submission system Secure Drop, first developed by the programing genius Aaron Swartz. SecureDrop is an open-source software platform that allows secure communication between journalists and whistleblowers. The privacy platform is now used by many of the major news organizations including The Guardian, The Intercept, New Yorker, ProPublica, Gawker, and The Washington Post. Other security tools they have helped to develop and fund are Secure The News and the secure messaging app Signal.

The organizations board of directors is made up of whistleblowers, celebrities and journalists, some of which include John Perry Barlow, John Cusack, Daniel Ellsberg, Glenn Greenwald, Xeni Jardin, Laura Poitras, Edward Snowden, Trevor Timm, and Rainey Reitman.

Press Freedom Advocacy for the 21st Century

As technology continues to change journalism, it also challenges the rights of journalists around the world. Freedom of the Press Foundation is committed to advocating for the rights of all journalists in the digital world—whether it's in the public sphere, the courtroom, and wherever necessary.

Government secrecy runs rampant, whistleblowers are stifled, and journalists are increasingly under threat. We call all governments to account for trampling on the rights of journalists and whistleblowers of all stripes, and using the Freedom of Information Act, digital security technology, and advocacy for an adversarial press, we strive to make government as open and transparent as possible.

https://freedom.press

https://twitter.com/FreedomofPress

YOU CAN DONATE TO THE FREEDOM OF PRESS HERE

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Sarah Harrison

^{“Whistleblowing and publishing should not be seen as a crime, and certainly not as terrorism.”}

Sarah Harrison is a journalist and section editor at Wikileaks. She also a close advisor to Julian Assange and works closely with Wikileaks legal defense team. Sarah Harrison is propably best known for courageously accompanying Edward Snowden during his escape from the USA after he leaked 1000s of top secret NSA documents in 2013.

In 2009 before joining Wikileaks she worked as an intern as a researcher at the Centre for Investigative Journalism. She later went on to became a junior researcher at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism before graduating in english from City University in London. She first became involved with Wikileaks after being assigned to Julian Assange by the Centre for Investigative Journalism just before the Afghan War Diaries were published. Miss Harrison has worked on important investigative projects and has uncovered serious human rights violations and has exposed many aspects of the global surveillance industry during her time as a journalist and section editor for WikiLeaks.

“The greatest unaccountable power of today [is] the United States and our Western democracies.”

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Baltasar Garzon

^{“The state of law is equal for all people. It cannot depend on electoral politics.”}

Baltasar Garzón is a Spanish jurist, human rights judge, law academic, lawyer and the head of Julian Assange's legal defense team after joining the organization in 2012. He has worked at Spain's central criminal court, the highest court in the land, on major criminal cases including terrorism, organized crime, government corruption, and money laundering cases in Spain. Further a field he's worked on international cases involving Chilean President Augusto Pinochet and Guantanamo bay detainees. He also attempted to bring charges against 6 Bush administration employees for their justification of torture.

“He [Assange] is satisfied, but, in his own words, the war only begins now. We understood that Sweden was merely a tool in the fight against the freedom of speech. This [role] is the main occupation of the US,”

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John Pilger

^{“Orwell is almost our litmus test. Some of his satirical writing looks like reality these days.”}

John Pilger is award-winning investigative journalist, documentary film maker, and a long time trusted supporter of Wikileaks and Juslian Assange. In 2010 he was among several people to post more than $300,000 bail money for Julian Assange after his arrest. That money was eventually forfeited by a judge after Julian Assange seeked political asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy. Over the years he has been very outspoken about the unlawful treatment and criticism from both journalist and governments of Julian Assange and Wikileaks stating that "WikiLeaks is a rare truth-teller. Smearing Julian Assange is shameful". Below is an exert from an interview with democracy now in 2010.

JOHN PILGER: Well, what Julian Assange and WikiLeaks is doing is what journalists should have been doing. I mean, I think you mention the reaction to him. Some of the hostility, especially in the United States, from some of those very highly paid journalists at the top has been quite instructive, because I think that they are shamed by WikiLeaks. They are shamed by the founder of WikiLeaks, who is prepared to say that the public has a right to know the secrets of governments that impinge on our democratic rights. WikiLeaks is doing something very Jeffersonian. It was Jefferson who said that information is the currency of democracy. And here you have a lot of these famous journalists in America are rather looking down their noses, at best, and saying some quite defamatory things about Assange and WikiLeaks, when in fact they should have been exploiting their First Amendment privilege and letting people know just how government has lied to us, lied to us in the run-up to the Iraq war and lied to us in so many other circumstances. And I think that’s really been the value of all this. People have been given a glimpse of how big power operates. And they’re — it’s coming from a facilitator, it’s coming from these very brave whistleblowers. And in my film, Julian Assange goes out of his way to celebrate the people within the system who he describes as the equivalent of conscientious objectors during the First World War, these extraordinarily courageous people who were prepared to speak out against that slaughter. All the Bradley Mannings and others are absolutely heroic figures. There’s no question about that.

Probably his most famous piece of work relating to Wikileaks is The War You Don't See, a documentary about the media's role in the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel and Palestine he produced in 2010. Below is an clip from the documentary.

“That mindset that only authority can really determine the 'truth' on the news, that's a form of embedding that really now has to change.”

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Noam Chomsky

^{“Wikileaks is a democratizing force. Its giving individuals access to decisions and thinking by their representatives and in a democracy that ought to be reflexive.”}

Probably the most well known of all the political activist and supporter of Wikileaks the American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, and social critic, Noam Chomsky. In an interview in 2016 he explains the difference in the role Wikileaks plays in protecting and encouraging privacy and freedom of speech compared to the American government:

WikiLeaks is a democratizing force. It’s giving individuals access to decisions and thinking by their representatives. In a democracy that ought to be reflexive. But on the contrary. WikiLeaks is under heavy attack by the government, and corporations are participating in that by closing down their websites. But Julian Assange shouldn’t be the subject of grand jury hearings. He should be given a medal. He’s contributing to democracy.

“Governments will use whatever technology is available to them to combat their own enemy - their own population”

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WikiLeaks has published over 10 million documents. Each publication has shared genuine official information about how governments, political parties, the UN, corporations, banks, cults, private security companies, war planners and the media actually operate when they think no one is looking. Above are just some of the organizations and people that over the years have been brave enough to put their reputation and lives on the line for us for the sake of a real democratic and free world. As everyday citizens of this world we owe it to these people and organizations to uphold them as the true last bastions of truth, peace and transparency.

YOU CAN DONATE TO WIKILEAKS HERE

Previous Wikileaks Week Posts:

WIKILEAKS WEEK DAY 1 | The Leaks

WIKILEAKS WEEK DAY 2 | Vault 7

WIKILEAKS WEEK DAY 3 | A Year In The Life Of Wikileaks

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