A look back at how WikiLeaks shook the world
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00:00 With me here on set is France 24's Delano de Souza. Delano, we heard a lot there from
00:04 Benedict's about why this is so controversial. Sum it up a little bit more for us and give us
00:09 a bit more of a flavour and detail, can you? That's right. As Benedict said, this is really
00:13 good news for Julian Assange because right since the company was almost founded, there has been
00:19 this controversy around it. Now, Wikileaks, Stuart says, it specialises in the analysis and publication
00:26 of large data sets. Now, this typically isn't a big deal, except when the documents involve war,
00:35 spying and corruption. Since it was founded in 2006, the company has published some 10
00:41 million documents. In an interview with The Spiegel magazine in 2015, Julian Assange sort
00:49 of summed up what Wikileaks is when he said, "Wikileaks is a giant library of the world's
00:54 most persecuted documents. We give asylum to these documents, we analyse them, we promote them and
01:00 we obtain more." So that's basically the crux of what they do. Now, Wikileaks does have global
01:06 partners, global media partners right around the world and these include media organisations right
01:12 from the Associated Press in the United States to El Pais in Spain, Le Monde here in France,
01:17 Libération Media Part, as well as English dailies, including The Guardian and The New York Times. Now,
01:24 Wikileaks really came into the spotlight in 2010. That's four years after the company was founded,
01:31 when they released video from a US military helicopter and it basically showed civilians
01:38 being killed from this military helicopter. Then, of course, that same year we had the leaks from
01:44 the US intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. This involved thousands of leaked documents
01:52 and they showed that hundreds of civilians had been killed at the hands of the US military
01:56 in unreported incidents during the US invasion of Afghanistan. So, naturally, these are leaks
02:02 which cast the army of the most powerful country in the world in a very negative spotlight.
02:08 Assange and many journalists around the world would argue that they were simply shedding a light
02:15 on abuses by the United States. However, lawyers for the Department of Justice didn't see it that
02:22 way. They called the leaks the largest compromises of classified information in US history.