Ethics

Wiki Leaks is an international, online, non-profit, journalistic organisation which publishes secret information, news leaks, and classified media from anonymous sources.

Julian Assange
He is the editor and chief of the website wiki Leaks, which he co-founded in 2006 after an earlier career in hacking and programming. He achieved particular prominence in 2010 when he published U.S. military and diplomatic documents leaked by Chelsea Manning onto Wiki Leaks. Assange has been under investigation in the United States since that time. In the same year, the Swedish Director of Public Prosecution opened an investigation into sexual offences that Assange is alleged to have committed. In 2012, facing extradition to Sweden, he was granted political asylum by Ecudor and took refuge at theEmbassy of Ecuador in London. 

Chelsea Manning
Chelsea Elizabeth Manning (born Bradley Edward Manning, December 17, 1987) is a United States Army soldier who was convicted in July 2013 of violations of the Espionage Act and other offenses, after releasing the largest set of classified documents ever to be leaked to the public. Manning was sentenced in August 2013 to 35 years' imprisonment, with the possibility of parole in the eighth year, and to be dishonaorably discharged from the Army. Manning is a trans woman who, in a statement the day after sentencing, said she had felt female since childhood, wanted to be known as Chelsea, and desired to begin hormone replacement therapy. From early life and through much of her Army life, Manning was known as Bradley; she was diagnosed with gender identity disorder while in the Army.

Assigned in 2009 to an Army unit in Iraq as an intelligence analyst, Manning had access to classified databases. In early 2010, she leaked classified information to WikiLeaks and confided this to Adrian Lamo, an online acquaintance. Lamo informed Army Courterintelligence, and Manning was arrested in May that same year. The material included videos of the July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike, and the 2009 Granai airstrike in Afghanistan; 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables; and 500,000 Army reports that came to be known as the Iraq War logs and Afghan War logs. Much of the material was published by WikiLeaks or its media partners between April and November 2010.

Manning was ultimately charged with 22 offenses, including aiding the enemy, which was the most serious charge and could have resulted in a death sentence. She was held at the Marine Corps Brig, Quantico in Virginia, from July 2010 to April 2011 under Prevention of Injury status—which entailed de facto solitary confinement and other restrictions that caused domestic and international concern—before being transferred to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where she could interact with other detainees. She pleaded guilty in February 2013 to 10 of the charges. The trial on the remaining charges began on June 3, 2013, and on July 30 she was convicted of 17 of the original charges and amended versions of four others, but was acquitted of aiding the enemy. She is serving her sentence at the maximum-security U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth.

Edward Snowden
Edward Joseph "Ed" Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is an American computer professional who leaked classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA), starting in June 2013. A former system administrator for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and a counterintelligence trainer at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), he later worked for the private intelligence contractor Dellinside an NSA outpost in Japan. In March 2013, he joined the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton inside the NSA center in Hawaii. In June 2013, he came to international attention after disclosing to several media outlets thousands of classified documents that he acquired while working as an NSA contractor for Dell and Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden's leaked documents revealed numerous global surveillance programs, many of them run by the NSA and the Five Eyes with the cooperation of telecommunication companies and European governments. A subject of controversy, Snowden has been variously called a hero, awhistleblower, a dissident, a patriot,and a traitor. His disclosures have fueled debates overmass surveillance, government secrecy, and the balance between national security and information privacy. Two court rulings since the initial leaks have split on the constitutionality of the NSA's bulk collection of telephone metadata.

On May 20, 2013, Snowden flew from Hawaii to Hong Kong, where in early June he revealed numerous classified NSA documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, both of whom he had summoned to Hong Kong for that purpose. On June 9, four days after the press first exposed a secret NSA program based on his leaks, Snowden made his identity public. On June 14 the U.S. Department of Justice charged him with two counts of violating the Espionage Act and theft of government property, punishable by up to 30 years in prison. The U.S. Department of State revoked his passport on June 22. According to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Snowden met with Russian diplomats while in Hong Kong. On June 23, Snowden—who later said he had been ticketed for onward travel via Havana, Cuba—flew to Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport. ABC News reported that Snowden "could not enter Russia because he did not have a Russian visa and he could not travel to safe haven opportunities in Latin America because the United States had canceled his passport." Snowden remained in the airport transit zone for 39 days, during which time he applied for asylum in 21 countries. On August 1, 2013, Russian authorities granted him a one-year temporary asylum. A year later, Russia issued Snowden a three-year residency permit allowing him to travel freely within the country and to go abroad for not longer than three months. He lives in an undisclosed location in Russia and is seeking asylum in the European Union.