WikiLeaks transformed the relationship between governments, whistleblowers and the public by publishing primary-source documents on wars, surveillance, diplomacy and intelligence operations. Twenty years later, its legacy is inseparable from Julian Assange's prosecution and a question democracies have still not resolved: when classified information exposes wrongdoing, who should be punished, those who reveal it or those responsible for what it reveals?
INR Report: Based on reporting by RT HERE
Twenty years ago, on 4 October 2006, the WikiLeaks.org domain was registered.
Few could have anticipated what followed.
WikiLeaks would eventually publish millions of documents involving governments, wars, intelligence agencies, corporations, banks and diplomatic communications. Some exposed information of enormous public interest. Others generated intense arguments about national security, source protection and whether publishing classified information without traditional editorial controls could endanger individuals.
At the centre of it all was Australian publisher Julian Assange.
By 2010, WikiLeaks had become one of the most controversial publishing organisations in the world.
Fourteen years later, Assange would walk out of Belmarsh Prison after pleading guilty to a single felony charge under the US Espionage Act.
The organisation survived.
But the implications of what happened to its founder extend far beyond WikiLeaks.
The Video That Changed Everything
WikiLeaks had already published significant material before 2010.
Its early releases included documents concerning Guantanamo Bay detention procedures, banking records and internal Church of Scientology material.
Then came Collateral Murder.
Published in April 2010, the classified US military video showed a 2007 Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad.
Among those killed were Reuters employees Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh.
The footage was extraordinary partly because the public could see and hear the event directly.
Instead of reading a journalist's description of a classified military incident, viewers were confronted with the source material itself.
That became central to the WikiLeaks model.
Publish the documents.
Let people examine the evidence.
The War Logs
The scale increased dramatically.
WikiLeaks published more than 91,000 records concerning the Afghanistan war and subsequently almost 400,000 US military field reports from Iraq.
The disclosures provided an extraordinary documentary record of two wars that had already cost hundreds of thousands of lives and enormous amounts of public money.
The Iraq War Logs included reports of previously undocumented civilian deaths, detainee abuse and other incidents.
The Afghan War Diary exposed military reports describing operations, casualties and the realities confronting coalition forces.
These were not opinion columns.
They were records produced within the military and government systems conducting the wars.
That distinction made WikiLeaks unusually disruptive.
Governments could dispute the interpretation of leaked documents.
It was considerably harder to argue that their own documents did not exist.
Then Came the Diplomatic Cables
WikiLeaks next turned to diplomacy.
Beginning in late 2010, it published a vast archive of US diplomatic cables obtained by US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning.
The cables exposed candid assessments made by American diplomats about foreign governments, political leaders, corruption, negotiations and international relationships.
Some disclosures were embarrassing.
Others were politically significant.
The release also triggered one of the strongest criticisms of WikiLeaks.
Governments and critics argued that indiscriminate publication of classified information could expose confidential sources and potentially place lives at risk.
That criticism deserves serious consideration.
Journalism does not cease to carry responsibilities merely because leaked information is authentic.
Protecting vulnerable sources, intelligence contacts and individuals operating in dangerous environments can be a legitimate reason to redact information.
The question is whether those risks justified the extraordinary prosecution that eventually followed.
Surveillance of America's Allies
WikiLeaks continued publishing.
In 2015, documents indicated that the US National Security Agency had monitored senior French political leaders, including presidents Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande.
The disclosures were politically uncomfortable because France was not an American adversary.
It was an ally.
The documents reinforced an uncomfortable reality of intelligence gathering: surveillance does not necessarily stop at the borders of alliances.
WikiLeaks had again changed the nature of the debate.
Governments could no longer discuss mass surveillance purely in abstract terms.
Documents allowed the public to examine specific targets and operations.
Vault 7
Then, in 2017, came one of WikiLeaks' largest intelligence disclosures.
The Vault 7 collection revealed documents describing CIA cyber capabilities.
They detailed tools and techniques designed to compromise computers, smartphones and other internet-connected devices.
The significance went beyond the CIA.
Modern societies were rapidly connecting homes, businesses, communications and personal lives to digital networks.
WikiLeaks provided a glimpse into the parallel development of government capabilities designed to exploit those systems.
The debate over surveillance was no longer simply about telephone interception.
The digital devices surrounding ordinary people had themselves become potential intelligence targets.
Assange Becomes the Story
As WikiLeaks became more powerful, Assange increasingly became the story.
In 2012, after losing his legal battle against extradition to Sweden over a sexual-assault investigation, he entered Ecuador's embassy in London.
Ecuador granted him asylum.
He remained there for almost seven years.
The Swedish investigation was ultimately discontinued.
In April 2019, Ecuador withdrew his asylum and British police arrested him.
Assange was subsequently imprisoned at Belmarsh while the United States sought his extradition.
Washington charged him under the Espionage Act over WikiLeaks' acquisition and publication of classified material.
The potential sentence arising from the original US charges was enormous.
His supporters argued that prosecuting a publisher under espionage legislation for obtaining and publishing classified information represented an unprecedented attack on press freedom.
The US Government presented a different case.
The Case Against Assange
It is important not to erase the government's argument.
The US Department of Justice maintained that Assange had not merely received leaked information.
Prosecutors alleged that he conspired with Chelsea Manning to unlawfully obtain classified national-defence documents.
In June 2024, Assange pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose classified national-defence information under the Espionage Act.
He was sentenced to the 62 months he had already spent imprisoned in Britain while fighting extradition and returned to Australia.
That guilty plea ended the prosecution.
It did not end the argument.
"I Pleaded Guilty to Journalism"
Four months after leaving Belmarsh, Assange appeared before the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.
His description of what had happened was stark.
He said he had pleaded guilty to journalism.
Legally, that was not the wording of the offence.
He had pleaded guilty to a conspiracy offence under the Espionage Act.
But the Council of Europe subsequently reached conclusions remarkably close to Assange's broader argument.
In Resolution 2571, adopted on 2 October 2024, its Parliamentary Assembly said Assange had essentially been punished for activities journalists routinely perform: obtaining leaked information from sources and publishing it where it provides credible evidence of wrongdoing.
The Assembly described his treatment as disproportionately harsh and warned that his conviction created a dangerous chilling effect for journalists, publishers and whistleblowers.
It went further.
The Assembly concluded that the circumstances warranted designating Assange a political prisoner.
That finding deserves to be remembered alongside the US prosecution.
The Question Nobody Could Make Disappear
The Assange case produced a profound contradiction.
WikiLeaks published material providing evidence of alleged misconduct, civilian deaths, surveillance and abuses of state power.
Yet the person subjected to years of imprisonment and the threat of an extraordinary sentence was the publisher.
The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe drew attention to precisely this imbalance.
It called for investigations into alleged war crimes and human-rights violations revealed through WikiLeaks and warned about the consequences of prosecuting those who publish evidence of state wrongdoing.
That does not mean every WikiLeaks editorial decision was correct.
Nor does it establish that governments have no legitimate secrets.
Military operations, intelligence sources, diplomatic negotiations and the identities of vulnerable individuals can require confidentiality.
The challenge lies in determining where legitimate secrecy ends and concealment of wrongdoing begins.
Journalism Has Always Depended on Leaks
Some of the most consequential journalism in democratic history has depended upon information governments did not want published.
The Pentagon Papers exposed internal US government assessments of the Vietnam War.
Watergate depended heavily upon confidential sources.
Investigative journalism routinely relies upon insiders prepared to reveal information organisations would prefer remained secret.
Digital technology changed the scale.
A whistleblower no longer needed to photocopy a handful of documents.
Enormous archives could be copied onto small storage devices and distributed globally within minutes.
WikiLeaks was built for that new reality.
Governments were not.
The Power of Primary Documents
Perhaps WikiLeaks' most enduring contribution was methodological.
It demonstrated the power of publishing source documents alongside reporting.
Readers did not necessarily have to trust WikiLeaks' interpretation.
They could examine the underlying material.
That approach has since become common across investigative journalism.
Court documents, government reports, emails, contracts, leaked databases and primary-source records increasingly accompany major investigations.
The principle is straightforward.
Show the evidence.
That does not eliminate bias or misinformation.
Documents can be selectively released.
Authentic records can be presented without context.
A leak can itself be part of an intelligence or political operation.
But access to primary material gives readers something valuable.
The ability to examine the evidence themselves.
Does This Affect New Zealand?
Very much so.
New Zealand is a member of the Five Eyes intelligence partnership alongside the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and Canada.
Our security institutions operate within the same technological environment WikiLeaks helped expose.
New Zealand also depends upon a functioning free press to scrutinise government decisions, public expenditure, intelligence powers and military commitments.
The Assange precedent therefore matters here.
If receiving and publishing classified information in the public interest can expose a publisher to espionage prosecution by a foreign state, the implications are not confined to WikiLeaks.
They reach investigative journalists everywhere.
That does not mean journalists have an unlimited right to publish anything they obtain.
Questions involving personal safety, operational military information and intelligence sources require judgement.
But governments should not be able to convert the classification system into a mechanism for concealing misconduct from citizens.
The distinction is fundamental.
Who Watches the Watchers?
The WikiLeaks story is ultimately about information and power.
Governments require secrecy to perform legitimate functions.
Intelligence agencies cannot publish their operations in advance.
Military commanders cannot disclose battle plans.
Diplomats need confidential conversations.
But secrecy also creates opportunity for abuse.
When decisions are hidden from public scrutiny, citizens must rely upon internal accountability systems functioning correctly.
Sometimes they do.
Sometimes they do not.
Whistleblowers and investigative journalists exist partly because institutions can fail to police themselves.
That makes the question of who controls classified information inseparable from the question of democratic accountability.
Twenty Years Later
WikiLeaks is 20 years old.
Its history contains triumphs, controversies, questionable editorial decisions, extraordinary disclosures and one of the most consequential press-freedom battles of the internet age.
Its critics will continue arguing that some releases were reckless.
Its defenders will continue pointing to the misconduct its publications exposed.
Both arguments deserve examination.
But one fact is difficult to escape.
WikiLeaks demonstrated what happens when citizens gain access to the documents governments use internally to describe their own actions.
The resulting picture was sometimes very different from the public narrative.
That is why the Assange case matters long after his release.
A democracy cannot function if every government secret is automatically published.
But neither can it function properly if governments alone decide which evidence of their own wrongdoing the public is permitted to see.
Twenty years after WikiLeaks appeared, that tension remains unresolved.
And as governments acquire increasingly powerful surveillance technologies and the ability to classify, collect and analyse unprecedented quantities of information, the question WikiLeaks forced into public view becomes more important, not less:
Who watches those with the power to watch everyone else?
Independent reporting. Original context. Credited sources.
Sources
RT, 4 October 2026: WikiLeaks at 20: The leaks that shook the world
WikiLeaks: WikiLeaks publication timeline
US Department of Justice, 25 June 2024: WikiLeaks Founder Pleads Guilty and Is Sentenced
US Department of Justice: Julian Assange Plea Agreement
Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, 2 October 2024: Resolution 2571: The detention and conviction of Julian Assange
Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, 1 October 2024: Julian Assange: "I pleaded guilty to journalism"