Has there ever been a more dangerous (not to mention ground-breaking) Crowdsourced venture than Wikileaks? The stakes are high and the risks involved for Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder, and the many groups of people attempting to infiltrate data behind security lines, are enormous.

Forget the conspiracy theories wheeled out by the likes of 24, The West Wing and The Event, Wikileaks deals with reality- real data, real dossiers, real armies, real politicians, real people- real life. And death.  Wikileaks and their Crowd are exposing illegalities of war which the general public would otherwise be unaware of.

Wikileaks, established in 2007, has uncovered many alleged government cover-ups from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. According to the Wikileaks website: “[We provide an] innovative, secure and anonymous way for sources to leak information to our journalists (our electronic drop box). One of our most important activities is to publish original source material alongside our news stories, so readers and historians alike can see evidence of the truth.”

Their revelations have been filtered to many of the world’s leading press, including the Guardian, New York Times and Le Monde. And unless you’ve been hiding underneath a rock for the past few weeks, it’s been almost impossible to ignore the Wikileaks’ public release of almost 400,000 secret US military logs, which suggest US commanders have ignored evidence of torture by the Iraqi authorities since the beginning of the 2003 war. The logs also allege the U.S. military have in fact kept a record of civilian deaths, despite previously denying doing so (of 109,000 deaths, a reported figure of 66,081 are thought to be civilians). The Wikileaks war logs can be found here.

However, it’s the Crowdsourcing tools that have proved to be the site’s real power base. In terms of media, the Crowdsourced system designed by OWNI, a French digital journalism news site, has helped their readers decipher long classified documents, and encourage the identification of crucial pieces of information. The Guardian have also compiled Crowdsourced data, in order to produce a spreadsheet of the Wikileaks war logs from Afghanistan (back in July this year)- including the statistics regarding attacks on civilians and accounts of friendly fire.

Through Cloud technology, Wikileaks make the best use of Google docs (where users view information anonymously) to provide transcripts of their press conferences and further access to their findings. Their July London press conference can be found in this Google doc. Like all Google docs, the Wikileaks data can be changed ‘live’ by permitted users.  

This, of course, is the crux of Wikileaks. It’s a global effort and stems from a desire to uncover truth hidden behind propaganda and to track down conveniently withheld data. Those who want to expose the realities of war often have to risk their own lives and freedoms to do so.

“[To] keep our sources safe, we have had to spread assets, encrypt everything, and move telecommunications and people around the world to activate protective laws in different national jurisdictions,” said Assange in a BBC interview earlier this year.

“We’ve become good at it, and never lost a case, or a source, but we can’t expect everyone to go through the extraordinary efforts that we do.”

Whether the truth is worth risking further lives of servicemen and women is another ethical dilemma altogether.