The domain wikileaks.org was registered on October 4, 2006. Its first public post, a manifesto titled "How to Bypass Censorship," was technical and dry. The site described itself as "an uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking." That same day, it published its first two leaks: a decision by a Somali rebel leader and a manual for operating procedures at a detention facility run by the United States at Guantanamo Bay.
The founding group included Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians, and technologists. Their core innovation was a cryptographic submission system designed to protect both the source and the intermediary. The intent was to shift power by making secrecy harder to maintain. The Guantanamo manual, while not classified, revealed the bureaucratic framework of the camp, detailing everything from interrogation rules to the price of phone calls.
Many assume WikiLeaks began with Chelsea Manning or Julian Assange's celebrity. Its origins were more academic and collective. The initial vision was of a stateless, automated library, not a media outlet run by a charismatic figure. The tension between those two models—platform versus publisher—would define its controversies.
The launch created the architecture for modern whistleblowing. It proved a market for classified information existed and that the internet could serve as a global distribution network. The model was immediately replicated by organizations like GlobalLeaks and inspired media partnerships like The Intercept's SecureDrop. WikiLeaks did not invent leaking, but it engineered the first reliable, anonymous pipeline from insider to public, permanently altering the calculus of institutional secrecy.