US bleeding due to Wikileaks!

Forget Osama Bin Laden. US latest obsession must be Julian Assange, the man behind Wikileaks, who with a handful of others is day by day putting online more records and information depicting the hollowness of the claims made by the powerful leaders of the world, with the major target being the US.

US is running for cover since a massive leak of more than 92,000 top secret documents titled- "Afghan War Log" containing day to day reporting of the soldiers and intelligence reports. But now US is trying to show a bold face, telling the world that they had nothing to hide and all the info contained in those leaked documents was already shared with the concerned countries including India. But what they are failing to explain is why billions are poured into Pakistan when they have sufficient proof that ISI is funding Taliban or why civilian causalities were reported as enemy deaths. The documents clearly show the failing US led NATO forces there and why the war was not merited from the beginning.

But the world attention is also on Julian Assange, a former computer hacker from Australia who decided that he wanted to do his best to make all secrets public. His special attention is on US, but their website has also revealed documents about the toxic materials being thrown in the oceans alongside African coasts, affecting elections in Kenya by exposing corruption among many other projects.

How Wikileaks operates

WikiLeaks, which runs on funding from donors, has been rather secretive about how it operates. But essentially the idea behind the site is this: People who have access to controversial or classified documents can send them to the site, either through the internet or through the mail. Then a group of volunteer editors for the site decides what information is authoritative, what information is important, and publishes it accordingly. In this way, the site differs from traditional "wikis," such as Wikipedia, which can be edited and changed by anyone at any time. Only approved information ends up on the WikiLeaks site, but anyone is free to submit documents he or she believes should be made public. WikiLeaks offers these whistle-blowers anonymity and, to a degree, legal protection.

Technical backbone

Since WikiLeaks is in the business of publishing information that governments and multinational corporations want kept secret, the site employs some technical tricks that aim to keep it from crashing or being hacked.

The site keeps servers on multiple continents, and its sensitive information passes through countries -- such as Sweden, Iceland and Belgium -- that have offered WikiLeaks a degree of legal protection.

"We use this state-of-the-art encryption to bounce stuff around the internet to hide trails -- pass it through legal jurisdictions like Sweden and Belgium to enact those legal protections," Julian Assange said. The fact that WikiLeaks' servers and volunteers are all over the globe makes it, in effect, the "world's first stateless news organization." This is key to the site's ability to protect itself.

"WikiLeaks is organized so that if the crackdown comes in one country, the servers can be switched on in another," he writes. "This is meant to put it beyond the reach of any government or legal system." Assange reportedly has spent his life developing the tech skills needed to set up such a system.  "As a teenager in Melbourne, Australia, he belonged to a hacker collective called the International Subversives."  He eventually pleaded guilty to multiple counts "of breaking into Australian government and commercial websites to test their security gaps, but was released on bond for good behavior."

Julian Assange is on a mission and world is waiting to see his next revelations. But what should be also noticed here is the continuous failure of successive US govts to achieve their slated targets- capturing Osama, eradicating Taliban from Afghanistan, finding nukes or chemical weapons from Iraq, or now getting hands on Julian Assange. It seems their bad luck is just not stopping.