Secrets are safe as WikiLeaks, starved of funds, halts operations

"Lives were undoubtedly put in jeopardy by those [identities] that got out," Mr. Brenner writes. "Far more significant is whether WikiLeaks is, as Assange claims, 'an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis,' beyond the reach of public authorities everywhere, democratic or otherwise."

Squeezing the financial spigots on data-dumping organizations such as WikiLeaks may be the way of the future, say observers.

"It may be technically possible to block access to one or even a few sites on the Internet, but it's not easy," says Steven Bellovin, professor of computer science and expert on Internet security and privacy at Columbia University. "Even China has trouble. [Therefore,] it's the old line of 'follow the money,' because it's so hard in a democratic society to block content. The idea is to choke the money flow instead."

Moreover, banks are wary that doing business with the likes of WikiLeaks may threaten their relationships with Uncle Sam. "Financial institutions have so much at stake in their relationship with the government," writes Zachary O'Leary, an Internet governance researcher at the University of Edinburgh, in an e-mail. "Private institutions are being forced to think in terms of their own well-being when they should actually be deciding whether or not they support a certain level of freedom of information."

Even so, WikiLeaks has undeniably poisoned its reputation among those who might ordinarily be sympathetic to it – such as free-speech groups and media outlets.

In one of the first independent reviews of WikiLeaks, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation evaluated, and then rejected, a grant application by WikiLeaks, the Federation of American Scientists reported last year in its newsletter Secrecy News.

The Knight Foundation was "actively looking for grantees who could promote innovative uses of digital technology in support of the future development of journalism," wrote Steven Aftergood, who heads the federation's project on government secrecy. In the end, the Knight Foundation awarded some $2.7 million to 12 recipients, but WikiLeaks was not among them, he wrote.

Besides publishing names of people the Taliban would be likely to target, WikiLeaks has published the "secret ritual" of a college sorority called Alpha Sigma Tau. Like several other sororities "exposed" by WikiLeaks, Apha Sigma Tau is "not known to have engaged in any form of misconduct, and WikiLeaks does not allege that it has," Mr. Aftergood's Secrecy News reported.

WikiLeaks published the group's confidential ritual "just because it could." It was not whistleblowing or journalism, but "a kind of information vandalism."

And the Knight Foundation?

"Every year some applications that are popular among advisers don't make the cut after Knight staff conducts due diligence," Knight Foundation spokesman Marc Fest, told Yahoo News at the time. "WikiLeaks was not recommended by Knight staff to the board."

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