Wikileaks Goes Down Temporarily Due to Lack of Funding

The Internet has been a real liberator but even online some of the harsh realities of life are as present as ever. Making information available is the cheapest it has ever been but it's not free. Wikipedia knows this, which is why it struggles every year to raise the money needed to operate. A wiki of another nature is finding this out the hard way as whistleblower hub Wikileaks has shut down temporarily to raise the funds needed to operate.

"To concentrate on raising the funds necessary to keep us alive into 2010, we have reluctantly suspended all other operations, but will be back soon," the website now reads. "We have received hundreds of thousands of pages from corrupt banks, the US detainee system, the Iraq war, China, the UN and many others that we do not currently have the resources to release. You can change that and by doing so, change the world. Even $10 will pay to put one of these reports into another ten thousand hands and $1000, a million."

The site launched two years ago and has been a constant source of problems for governments and companies around the world who might have liked to keep their affairs a bit more private. Over time, it has released hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents, some of them very controversial.

But where high paid lawyers and influential governments have failed, the simple rules of economics prevailed as hosting all those documents and making them available is proving too costly for the site run by non-profit organization Sunshine Press.

The site claims it has raised $130,000 in funding for this year but it needs a total of $200,000 to keep going. The issue is exacerbated by the fact that the group says it cannot accept funding or donations from corporations or governments so as to keep its integrity. This leaves it with regular users and other non-profit organizations as the only acceptable source of income for the site. Hopefully, the site will resolve its financial issues and go back online soon enough.