title: Sunni Islam

text: During the Middle Ages, the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt delineated the acceptable Sunni schools as only Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i and Hanbali, excluding the Ẓāhirī school. The Ottoman Empire later reaffirmed the official status of four schools as a reaction to the Shiite character of their ideological and political archrival, the Persian Safavids. In the contemporary era, former Prime Minister of Sudan Al-Sadiq al-Mahdi, as well as the Amman Message issued by King Abdullah II of Jordan, recognize the Ẓāhirīs and keep the number of Sunni schools at five.


title: Sunni Islam

text: The doctrines of the Sunnis are recorded in various creeds, which summarize the most important points in the form of a list in the manner of a Catechism. The individual teaching points differ depending on the author's affiliation to a certain teaching tradition. The most important creeds that explicitly claim to represent the teachings of the Sunnis ("ahl as-sunna wal-jama" or similar) include:


title: Sunni Islam

text: Most of the mentioned branches testify to six principal articles of faith known as the six pillars of "imān" (Arabic for "faith"), which are believed to be essential. These six articles are common that present-day Sunnis agree on, from those who adhere to traditional Sunnism to those who adhere to latter-day movements. Additionally, classical Sunni Islam also outlined numerous other cardinal doctrines since the 8th century, such as the Creed of Tahāwi. Traditionally, these Sunni articles of faith have included the following:


title: Sunni Islam

text: At the center of the Sunni creed is Tawhid, the belief in the oneness of God. God is a single ("fard") God, besides whom there is no other deity. He is single ("munfarid"), has no partner ("šarīk"), no opposite ("nidd"), no counterpart ("maṯīl") and no adversary ("ḍidd"). He has neither taken a companion nor children, neither conceived nor is he conceived.


title: Sunni Islam

text: God created everything, the years and times, day and night, light and darkness, the heavens and the earth, all kinds of creatures that are on it, the land and the sea, and everything living, dead and solid. Before he created all of this, he was completely alone, with nothing with him. In contrast to his creation, God has a timeless nature. He is beginningless ("azalī") because he has existed for all eternity and nothing precedes him, and he is endless ("abadī") because he continues to exist without interruption for all eternity. He is the first and the last, as it says in the Quran (Sura 57: 3). God brought forth creation not because he needed it, but to demonstrate his power and as the implement his previous will and his primordial speech. God is creator, but has no needs. He does not need food, does not feel lonely and does not keep company with anyone.


title: Sunni Islam

text: To absolve God of all anthropomorphism, the Qur'anic statements that "God sat on the throne" (istawā ʿalā l-ʿarš; Surah 7:54; 20: 5) receive a lot of the Sunni creeds attention. The creed of al-Qādir emphasizes that God did not set himself up on the throne (ʿarš) "in the manner of the rest of the creatures" and that he created this throne, although he did not need it. Al-Ghazali's knowledge of the faith states that the "sitting down" is free from contact ("mumāssa") with the throne. It is not the throne that carries God, but the throne and its bearers are carried through the grace of his power. According to al-Ashʿari, the Sunnis confess that God is on his throne, but without asking how. Even if God does not need the throne and what is below, because he spatially occupies everything, including what is above him, the throne and stool (" kursī ") are a reality.


title: Sunni Islam

text: The Sunnis confess that the names of God cannot be said to be anything other than God, as Muʿtazilites and Kharijites claim. Rather, they teach that there are correlating attributes (" ṣifāt ") which exist in each of the names of God mentioned in the Quran: God is alive through life (" ḥayāh "), knowing through knowledge ("ʿilm"), mighty through power ("ʿqudra"), wanting through will ("irāda"), hearing through hearing ("samʿ"), seeing through sight ("baṣar") and speaking through Speech ("kalām"). The attributes are not identical to God, nor are they anything different from him. Only those attributes are ascribed to God which he ascribed to himself (in the Quran) or which his prophet ascribed to him. And every attribute that he or his prophet has ascribed to him is a real attribute, not an attribute figuratively.


title: Sunni Islam

text: Sunnis believe in angels. God hid the angels from the vision of humans, thus they can usually not see them. Just in some special occusations God unveils them for individual humans. Like when the archangel Gabrel appeared to the prophet Muhammad one time in his true form with 600 wings, filling the entire horizon and another time when he was among the circles of the Sahaba, in the form of a white clothed traveller.


title: Sunni Islam

text: Angels fulfil duties assigned by God. The angel Gabriel has the mission to transmit God's revelations to chosen Prophets. The angel Michael is assigned over rain and plants. The angel Israfil must blow into the trumpet during thunder and the day of resurrection. Furthermore to the angels belong the recording angels, who supervise humans and the angel of death, who takes the souls (lit. spirits) of the inhabitants of the world.


title: Sunni Islam

text: Unlike the Mutazilites and the Jahmites, the Sunnis believe that Satan whispers doubts to humans and hits them, as the Quran states. But humans, jinn, angels and devils are all created by the power of God and bound to his will. Even if humans, jinn, angels and devils aligned to move or stop one atom, they could not succeed without God's will.


title: Sunni Islam

text: The Sunnis further believe in the books of God, sent to the envoys of God. To them belong the Quran, the Torah, the Gospel and the Psalms


title: Sunni Islam

text: The Quran is according to Sunni views the speech of God. Who listens to it and regards it as human speech is according to Sunni Creed by at-Tahāwī an infidel. The Quran as the speech of God is sent down by the „trustworthy Spirit“ ("ar-rūḥ al-amīn"; surah 26:193) and taught by Muhammad. God sent him down as inspiration ("wahy") on his Messenger. The path of God's speech to the community of Muslims is a multi-stage process: God pronounced it, the angel Gabriel heard it and Mohammed repeated it, Mohammed repeated it to his companions, and the Ummah repeated them.


title: Sunni Islam

text: As the speech of God, the Quran is according to Sunnism uncreated. The teachings of the creation of the Quran is rejected by Sunnis. Anyone who takes this teaching is regarded as an unbeliever. The Quran is recited with the tongue, written into books and memorized by the heart, but remains the uncreated speech of God, because it is individable and can not be split by the transmition from heart to paper. At-Tahāwī specifies that the Quran is not created like human speech. Rather, it came from God in an unexplained way as a word (" qaul "). Ibn Taimīya explains that the Quran originated from God and will return (sc. At the end of times) too.


title: Sunni Islam

text: Confessing to the Prophets of God is also part of the Sunni faith. The first of the prophets is Adam. The original contract (" mīṯāq ") that God concluded with him and his descendants according to sura 7:172–173 is a reality according to Sunni belief. God has taken Abraham as a friend (" ḫalīl ") and talked to Moses directly. The last of the prophets is Mohammed from the tribe of the Quraish. The Sunnis do not differentiate between the messengers of God, (By rejecting some of them), but consider everything they have brought to be true.


title: Sunni Islam

text: God called the prophets and presented their truthfulness through obvious miracles. The prophets conveyed God's command and prohibition, his promise and threat, and it is incumbent on people to believe what they have brought to be true. God has given people the act of obedience (" ṭāʿa ") and opposition (" maʿṣiya ") forbidden. God's right to the acts of obedience is not only an obligation for people through the intellect (" bi-muǧarrad al-ʿaql "), but also through it for making it a duty through the oral transmission of his prophets.


title: Sunni Islam

text: Muhammad from the tribe of the Quraish is not only the seal of the prophets ("ḫātam al-anbiyāʾ"), rather, God placed him above all other prophets and made him Lord of men ("saiyid al-bašar"). He is God's chosen servant ("ʿabd"), Messenger, the Imam of the godly (" imām al-atqiyāʾ ") and the beloved of the Lord of the Worlds ("ḥabīb rabb al-ʿālamīn"). He is sent with truth ("ḥaqq"), guidance ("hudā") and light ("nūr"). God has him with his message to Arabs and Non-Arabs as well as sent to the general public of the jinn and humans and with his Sharia, the earlier religious laws abrogated, except that which he has confirmed. Part of the Sunnis path is to follow the traditions ("āṯār") of Muhammad internally and externally. They prefer his guidance to the guidance of anyone else.


title: Sunni Islam

text: Muhammad's prophethood is proven by miracles ("muʿǧizāt") such as the splitting of the moon. The most obvious miracle is the Quran's inimitability. Every claim to prophethood after him is an error or imagination, since Muhammad is the last prophet. Another important point of teaching is the belief in Muhammad's Ascension ("miʿrāǧ").


title: Sunni Islam

text: Accordingly the Prophet went on a nocturnal journey during which his person was transported to heaven while awake and from there to heights, "which God has chosen". God gave him what he had chosen for him and gave him his revelation. God has also blessed him in his life beyond and in this world.


title: Sunni Islam

text: According to Sunni doctrine, people are questioned in their graves by Munkar and Nakir after death. Munkar and Nakīr are two terrifying, huge figures who let the person sit upright in his grave with mind and body and then tell him about the oneness of God and the prophethood of Muhammad. They ask him: "Who is your master? What is your religion? Who is your prophet?". They are the two inspectors of the grave and their questioning is the first test (" fitna ") of humans after death. The believer will answer to this test: "God is my Lord, Islam is my religion and Mohammed is my prophet." The doubter, on the other hand, will answer: "Oh dear, I don't know. I heard people say something, and that's how I said it.” He is then hit with an iron club so that he utters a loud scream that can be heard by everyone except people and jinn. If people heard him, they would lose consciousness. Children are also interviewed by Munkar and Nakīr as well as people who have disappeared, drowned or were eaten by predatory animals. Deceased Muslims receive the supplication said for them, and the Sadaqa spoken in their name are a favor for them.


title: Sunni Islam

text: Another point of belief are the "signs of the hour" ("ašrāṭ as-sāʿa") that precede the day of resurrection. This includes the emergence of the Dajjal, the rising of the sun in the west, the emergence of the Dabba from the earth and the excerpt from Gog and Magog. Jesus, the son of Mary, will descend from heaven and kill the Dajjal.


title: Sunni Islam

text: On Day of the Resurrection the resurrection (" baʿṯ ") and the retribution of the deeds take place. First the bodies of all people, animals and jinn are put back together and revived. The souls are brought back into the body, the people rise from their graves, barefoot, naked and uncircumcised. The sun is approaching them and they are sweating.


title: Sunni Islam

text: A scales are set up to weigh people's deeds. The scales have two scales and one tongue and are as big as several layers of heaven and earth. The weights will have the weight of atoms and mustard seeds in order to realize the accuracy of God's righteousness. The leaves with good deeds ("ḥasanāt") are thrown in a beautiful shape into the scales of light and weigh down the scales by the grace ("faḍl") of God, the leaves with bad deeds (" saiyiʾāt ") are thrown into the scales of darkness in an ugly form and reduce the weight of the scales through the justice ("ʿadl") of God.


title: Sunni Islam

text: The teachings of the Sunnis also include the vision of God ("ruʾyat Allāh") in the hereafter, which has similarities with the "visio beatifica" in the Christian tradition. With this teaching the Sunnis set themselves apart from the Muʿtazilites, the Zaidiyyah and the philosophers who consider the vision of God intellectually impossible.


title: Sunni Islam

text: There are differing views among Sunni scholars about the timing and type of the divine vision. Al-Ashari states that God is seen on the day of resurrection, whereby only the believers see him, the unbelievers not because they are kept away from God. At-Tahāwī, on the other hand, was of the opinion that the vision of God was a reality for the inmates of Paradise. Ibn Taimīya doubles the vision of God: people see God while they are still in the places of the resurrection, and then after entering paradise.


title: Sunni Islam

text: As for the way of seeing God, al-Ash Aari and Ibn Taimiyah emphasized its visual characteristics. Al-Ashari meant that God can be seen with the eyes, just as one sees the moon on the night of the full moon. Ibn Taimīya adds that the vision of God is as one sees the sun on a cloudless day. In the ʿAqīda at-Tahāwīs, the transcendence of God is emphasized: the vision can neither be understood nor described, because none of the creatures are like God. According to al-Ghazālī's creed the pious in the hereafter see the essence of God without substance and accidents. According to the creed of an-Nasafī, God is seen neither in one place nor in any direction or distance. There is also no connection to rays.


title: Sunni Islam

text: According to the Ibn Taimīya's creed, the Umma of Muhammad is the first religious community to enter Paradise, Other religious communities also have the opportunity to get to paradise, because God leads whole peoples through the grace of his mercy ("aqwām") out of hellfire. Ahmad ibn Hanbal and al-Ghazālī declare in their creeds that the monotheist en ("al-muwaḥḥidūn") after being punished. Al-Ghazālī adds that through the grace ("faḍl") of God no monotheist remains in hell for all eternity.


title: Sunni Islam

text: According to at-Tahāwī's creed, this only applies to the serious sinners from Muhammad's ummah: They are in hell, but not forever if they were monotheists at the time of death. What happens to them lies within God: if he wants, he forgives them through his grace ("faḍl"), and if he wants, he punishes them in his justice ("ʿadl") and then brings them through His mercy ("raḥma") and through the intercession of those who obey him out of hell and make them enter the Paradise Garden.


title: Sunni Islam

text: The intercession ("šafāʿa") of the Messenger of God and its effect on those of his ummah who have committed serious sins is a fixed teaching point of the Sunni faith. The Prophet reserved the intercession especially for them. According to al-Ghazālī, the Sunni believer has a total of the intercession of the prophets, then the scholars, then the martyrs, then to believe the other believers in accordance with their dignity and their rank in God. Those of the believers who have no advocate will be brought out of hell by the grace of God.


title: Sunni Islam

text: According to Sunni doctrine, everything that happens happens through God's decision ("qadāʾ") and predestination (Qadar) or his determination ("taqdīr"). Predestination includes the predestination of good and bad, sweet and bitter. God has that The measured ("qadar") of creatures and determined their time of time. He makes his creatures sick and heals them, lets them die and makes them alive, while the creatures themselves have no power over it. God lets die without fear and brings to life without exertion. The one who dies dies on the appointed date, even if he is killed.


title: Sunni Islam

text: God has written the things predestined for the creatures on the well-kept tablet ("al-lauḥ al-maḥfūẓ"). The pen she wrote is the first thing God created. God commanded him to write down what will be until the day of resurrection. The pen has already dried out and the scrolls are rolled up. Everything that was written on it in ancient times is immutable.


title: Sunni Islam

text: God is righteous in his judgments ("aqḍiya"), but his righteousness cannot be decided by analogy with the righteousness of people, because unjust actions for people are only conceivable with regard to someone else's property, but God does not encounter someone else's property anywhere so that he could behave unfairly to him. The principle of predestination is God's mystery with regard to his creatures. No Archangel and no prophet is informed of this. Reflecting on predestination leads to destruction and is a step toward rebellion against God because He has hidden the knowledge about it from people.


title: Sunni Islam

text: It is made easy for everyone for what they were created for. Blessed are whose who are saved by God's judgment ("qaḍāʾ Allāh"), condemned are whose who are condemned by the judgment of God. God created paradise and hell above all else; then he created the people who are worthy of them. He has designated some out of generosity ("faḍlan") for paradise, the others out of justice ("ʿadlan") for hell. God has always known the number of those who go to paradise and the number of those who go to hell. This number is neither increased nor decreased. When God creates the body of the embryo, he sends an angel to him who writes down his livelihood ("rizq"), the hour he dies, his deeds and whether he is a damned ("šaqī") or a blessed ("saʿīd").


title: Sunni Islam

text: The Sunni believer does not doubt his belief. Humans neither know how they are registered by God (whether as believers or unbelievers), nor how it ends with them. God is also the converter of hearts ("muqallib al-qulūb"). Therefore it is recommended to say: ”A believer, if God is willing” or ”I hope that I am a Believer“. Such a way of expression does not make people into doubters, because by that, they only mean that their otherworldly fate and their end are hidden from them. The Sunnis do not speak to any of the people who pray to the Kaaba, to paradise or hell, because of a good deed or a sin he has committed.


title: Sunni Islam

text: The Quran as it exists today in book form was compiled by Muhammad's companions ("Sahabah") within a handful of months of his death, and is accepted by all sects of Islam. Many matters of belief and daily life were not directly prescribed in the Quran, but were actions observed by Muhammad and the early Muslim community. Later generations sought out oral traditions regarding the early history of Islam, and the practices of Muhammad and his first followers, and wrote them down so that they might be preserved. These recorded oral traditions are called hadith. Muslim scholars have through the ages sifted through the hadith and evaluated the chain of narrations of each tradition, scrutinizing the trustworthiness of the narrators and judging the strength of each hadith accordingly.


title: Sunni Islam

text: "Kutub al-Sittah" are six books containing collections of hadiths. Sunni Muslims accept the hadith collections of Bukhari and Muslim as the most authentic ("sahih"), and while accepting all hadiths verified as authentic, grant a slightly lesser status to the collections of other recorders. Four other hadith collections are also held in particular reverence by Sunni Muslims, making a total of six:


title: Sunni Islam

text: There are also other collections of hadith which also contain many authentic hadith and are frequently used by scholars and specialists. Examples of these collections include:


title: Sunni Islam

text: One of the most important teaching institutions of Sunni Islam worldwide is the Azhar in Egypt. Article 32b, paragraph 7 of the Egyptian Azhar Law of 1961 stipulates that the Azhar "follows the path of the Sunnis" ("manhaǧ ahl as-sunna wa-l-jamāʿa"), Umma has agreed to the foundations of the religion and applications of fiqh, with its four disciplines. Only those who stick to the paths of their science and behavior can become a ”Member of the Council of Great Scholars” ("haiʾat kibār al-ʿulamāʾ"), among whom the Grand Imam of al-Azhar is elected. Zitouna University in Tunisia and University of al-Qarawiyyin in Morocco are recognized. They are also mentioned, along with the Azhar, in the final document of the Sunni Conference in Grozny.


title: Sunni Islam

text: Another body that claims to speak on behalf of Sunnism is the Council of Senior Religious Scholars founded in Saudi Arabia in 1971. In the past, the committee has expressed several times on fatwas about the Sunni-membership of certain Islamic groups within. In 1986 it published a fatwa excluding the Ahbāsh community from Sunnism. The Islamic World League in Mecca, also funded by Saudi Arabia, made a resolution from 1987 that it regards Sunnism as the pure teachings at the time of the Messenger and the rightful existence of the Caliphate.


title: Sunni Islam

text: The Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs ("Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı"), follows the religious policy of the Ottoman Empire, providing a Sunni interpretation of Islam. Plans by the Committee of National Unity in the 1960s to convert the Diyanet authority into a non-denominational institution that also integrated the Alevis, failed because of resistance from conservative Sunni clergy inside and outside the Diyanet authority. Since the 1990s, the Diyanet authority has presented itself as an institution that stands above the denominations ("mezhepler üstü") The religious education organized by the authority at the Turkish schools is based exclusively on the Sunni understanding of Islam.


title: Sunni Islam

text: A well-known Hadith, which is to be interpreted as Vaticinium ex eventu, says that the Muslim Umma will split into 73 sects, only one of which will be saved. The Sunnis have the idea that they are this “saved sect” (“firqa nā niya”). For example, Abu Mansur al-Baghdadi (d. 1037) explains at the beginning of his heresiographical work " al-Farq baina l-firaq " ("The difference between the sects" ) that there are 20 Rafiditic, 20 Kharijite, 20 Qadaritic, 3 Murjiite, 3 Nadjāritic, 3 karramitic and furthermore Bakriyya, Dirariyyya and Jahmīya. These are the 72 erring sects. The 73rd sect that is the “saved sect” are the Sunnis ("ahl as-sunna wa-l-jamaʿa"). According to al-Baghdadi, they are composed of two groups, namely the followers of the Ra'y and the followers of the hadith. They agreed on the fundamentals of religion ("uṣūl ad-dīn"). There were only differences in the derivations ("furūʿ") from the norms regarding the question of what permitted and what forbidden is. These differences are not so great that they considered each other to have strayed from the right path.


title: Sunni Islam

text: Later Sunni scholars also present the Sunnis as the center of Muslim community. The idea already appears to some extent in the Ashʿarite ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Baghdādī, who emphasizes on several dogmatic questions that the Sunnis hold a position that lies in the middle between the positions of the other Islamic groups. An example is the question of predestination (Qadar), in which, according to the Kasb theory, you hold exactly the middle between the two extreme positions of the Jabriyya and the Qadariyya.


title: Sunni Islam

text: The Hanbali scholar Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 1328), who was otherwise known for his uncompromising attitude, also adhered to this view. He said that the Sunnis represented "the middle among the sects of the Umma" (" al-wasaṭ fī firaq al-umma "), just as the Islamic Umma is the middle between the other religious communities. He illustrates this with the following examples:


title: Sunni Islam

text: The Hanafi scholar ʿAlī al-Qārī (d. 1606) continued this idea later. In his anti-Shiite pamphlet "Šamm al-alawāriḍ fī ḏamm ar-rawāfiḍ" he quotes a tradition according to which ʿAlī ibn Abī Tālib said: "Two kinds of people perish on me: the exaggerated lover and the exaggerated hater." He notes that the exaggerated lover is the Rafidites and the exaggerated hater is the Kharijit. The Sunni, on the other hand, loves ʿAlī in high esteem and is thus in the balanced middle (" al-wasaṭ allaḏī huwa al-qisṭ "). This relates al-Qari to the Qur'anic sura 2: 143, in which it is said that God made the Muslims a community standing in the middle (" umma wasaṭ "). Since the Sunnis stay away from the exaggeration described in the traditional ʿAlī saying, al-Qārī believes that they are also the actual "Party of ʿAlīs" (" šīʿat ʿAlī ").


title: Sunni Islam

text: ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Baghdādī portrays the Sunnis in his work "al-Farq baina l-firaq" as the actual bearers of Islamic science and culture. Of all the sciences, knowledge and efforts of which Muslims are proud, al-Baghdādī explains that the Sunnis have a major share. In the last chapter of his book, al-Baghdadi also relates this to building activity in Islamic countries. He believes that the Sunnis with their mosques, madrasas, palaces, factories and hospitals have achieved an unattainable position because none of the non-Sunnis have performed such services.


title: Sunni Islam

text: Since the second half of the 20th century, there have been fierce clashes within the Sunni camps between "Ashʿarites" on the one hand and "Salafiyya" on the other, who exclude each other from Sunnism. In Indonesia, the Ashʿarite scholar Sirajuddin Abbas (d. 1980) wrote several books in the 1960s in which he explicitly excluded the "Ahl as-salaf" from Sunnism. Among other things, he argued that there was no Salafi madhhab in the first 300 years of Islam. From this he deduced that those who called other Muslims to obey the Salafi "madhhab", were promoting a "madhhab" which did not even exist. In his view, only the Ashʿarites were real Sunnis. Abbas' books served as the theological basis for anti-Salafist campaigns in Aceh in 2014. During these campaigns, various Salafist schools in Aceh were closed by the provincial government.


title: Sunni Islam

text: Apparently because of doubts about the "Salafīya" affiliation with Sunniism, the "Standing Committee on Scientific Investigation and Fatwa Issuing" in Saudi Arabia issued a fatwa stating that they consider the Salafis as Sunnis. Like many Ashʿarites, the Salafis believe their teachings are the only true form of Sunnism, and hence reject the Asharites and Maturidites as part of Sunnism. An example is the Saudi scholar Muhammad Ibn al-ʿUthaimīn, who in his 2001 published commentary on "Aqīda Wāsiṭīya" by Ibn Taimiyya expressed the opinion that Ash'arites and Māturīdites would not count among the Sunnis, because their doctrine of attributes would be in contrast to the doctrine of the Prophet and his companions. For this reason, the view that three groups belong to Sunnism should also be rejected. Sunnis are only those who are "salaf" in terms of belief.


title: Sunni Islam

text: The accusation by some Wahhabis that the Ashʿarites were not Sunnis was subject of a fatwa by the "Egyptian Fatwa Office" in July 2013. In its fatwa, the office rejected this accusation, affirming that the Ashʿarites still represented the "multitude of scholars" ("jumhūr al-ʿulamāʾ"), and stressed out that they were the ones who in the past rejected the arguments of the atheists ("šubuhāt al-malāḥida"). Anyone who declares them to be unbelieving or who doubts their orthodoxy should fear for their religion. On the same day, the fatwa office made clear in a fatwa that, according to their understanding, the "Ahl as-Sunna wa-l-jama" only refer to those Muslims who are Ashʿarites or Maturidites.


title: Sunni Islam

text: The rivalry between "Ashʿarīyya" and "Salafiyya" became visible again at the two Sunni conferences in 2016, which were directed against the terror of the IS organization. The first conference with the title "Who are the Ahl al-Sunna wa al-jama?" took place in the Chechen capital Grozny in August 2016 under the patronage of Ramzan Kadyrov. Numerous religious figures from Egypt, India, Syria, Yemen and the Russian Federation took part, including Ahmed el-Tayeb, the Grand Imam the Azhar, and Sheikh Aboobacker Ahmed, the Grand Mufti of India who is a member of the Barelvi movement. According to its organizers, the conference should "mark a blessed turning point in efforts to correct the serious and dangerous distortion of religion by those extremists trying to usurp the venerable name of "Ahl al-Sunna wa-al-Jama'a", him to coin exclusively on itself and to exclude its true representatives from it." In the final declaration the Salafis and Islamist groups like Muslim Brotherhood, Hizb ut-Tahrir, etc. and the "Takfiri" organisations like ISIL were excluded from Sunni Islam. In response to this, various prominent "Salafiyya" figures held a counter-conference in Kuwait in November 2016 under the title "The Correct Meaning of Sunnism" ("al-Mafhūm aṣ-ṣaḥīḥ li-ahl as-sunna wa-l-jama"), in which they also distanced themselves from extremist groups, but at the same time insisted that "Salafiyya" was not only part of Sunnism, but represented Sunnism itself. The conference was chaired by Ahmad ibn Murabit, Grand Mufti of Mauritania. A few days later, Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Ahmed el-Tayeb publicly distanced himself from the final declaration of the Grozny conference, reiterating that he had not participated in it and stressed that he naturally viewed the Salafists as Sunnis.


title: Laura Prepon

text: Laura Helene Prepon (born March 7, 1980) is an American actress. She rose to fame with her role as Donna Pinciotti in the Fox sitcom "That '70s Show" (1998–2006). She is also known for portraying Alex Vause in the Netflix comedy-drama series "Orange Is the New Black" (2013–2019). Prepon made her film debut in 2001 with the independent drama "Southlander". Her other films include the romantic drama "Come Early Morning" (2006), the comedy "Lay the Favorite" (2012), the thriller "The Girl on the Train" (2016), and the drama "The Hero" (2017).


title: Laura Prepon

text: Prepon was born in Watchung, New Jersey. She is the youngest of five children of Marjorie (née Coll), a high school teacher and gourmet home chef, and Michael Prepon, an orthopedic surgeon. Prepon's father died during heart surgery in 1993 at age 49; she was 13 at the time. She attended Watchung Hills Regional High School and later studied at the Total Theatre Lab in New York City. Her father was Jewish, of Russian Jewish descent, and her mother has Irish Catholic ancestry. Her maternal great-great-great-grandfather was Union Army General Joseph Bradford Carr.


title: Laura Prepon

text: Prepon appeared in plays such as "A Woman of Property" and "Ascension Day" while in New York. In 1996, she studied drama with acting teacher Caroline Thomas at Thomas' Total Theatre Lab. Later, in September 1997, she premiered on a Levi Strauss-developed show called "They Go On", an Internet-based soap opera. Prepon had also worked as a model and has done photo shoots in Paris, Milan, and Brazil.


title: Laura Prepon

text: Prepon starred as Donna Pinciotti on the Fox sitcom "That '70s Show" from 1998 to 2006. Donna became the girlfriend and next-door neighbor of Eric Forman (Topher Grace). Randy Pearson (Josh Meyers), who was introduced in the eighth and final season of the series, became Donna's third love interest after Grace left the series. Prepon attended film school while she worked on "That '70s Show".


title: Laura Prepon

text: Prepon co-starred in the college comedy "Slackers" (2002), about three best friends who are blackmailed for cheating their way through college. She was nominated for a Teen Choice Award in 2002 for her role in "That '70s Show". In 2001, she made her film debut in Steve Hanft's musical comedy-drama "Southlander" with Beck, Beth Orton and Hank Williams III, where she played Seven=Five, a young TV telepathic. In 2004, Prepon worked on the independent drama film "The Pornographer: A Love Story". The film tells the story of an obsessive relationship between a director and an actress.


title: Laura Prepon

text: Prepon was named one of "Stuff" magazine's "102 Sexiest Women In The World" in 2002 and one of "Maxim" magazine's "Hot 100" in 2005. Prepon had a cameo voice appearance as a United Nations Space Command marine in "Halo 2", which was released in 2004. Her first notable film role came in 2004 with the dark drama "Lightning Bug" with Bret Harrison, Kevin Gage and Ashley Laurence. Branching into other arenas than acting, Prepon also served as executive producer of the film. She also appeared on an episode of "MTV's Cribs" in 2003.


title: Laura Prepon

text: In 2006, Prepon co-starred with Misha Collins in the psychological thriller "Karla", based on the true story of Paul Bernardo and his wife Karla Homolka, a Canadian couple who kidnapped, sexually abused, and murdered three girls, marking a contrast to her usual lighthearted roles. She was also an executive producer of "E! Hollywood Hold'em" the same year. Prepon co-starred with Bryan Greenberg as Hannah Daniels in the ABC drama "October Road", which debuted March 15, 2007. The show was canceled by ABC on May 12, 2008, despite strong ratings and a grassroots campaign from the show's fanbase to keep the show alive. In April 2007, she starred in a dramatic short film "Once Upon a Time". She also appeared in the 2005 Oxygen romantic comedy "Romancing the Bride". She also was the original voice for Hayley Smith on the Fox animated sitcom "American Dad!" and voiced her in an unaired pilot. She appeared as Lauren, the long-lost sister of Mary Shannon (Mary McCormack) in the USA Network mystery drama "In Plain Sight" in the episode "A Frond in Need". On February 5, 2010, it was announced that Prepon signed on to star in "Awkward Situations for Men", a pilot on ABC. In 2009, Prepon appeared in the CBS sitcom "How I Met Your Mother" as Karen, one of the girlfriends of Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor), in the episode "Sorry, Bro". She reprised her role in the episodes "The Front Porch" in 2009 and "Say Cheese" in 2010. She also appeared in the Fox medical drama "House M.D." in the episode "Private Lives".


title: Laura Prepon

text: Prepon had been taking directing classes at the Art Center College of Design. She directed a short film, "Abide with Me", about a 10-year-old boy who, "upon bearing witness to his father's murder, is rendered mute". Prepon stated she plans on making "Abide with Me" into a feature film.


title: Laura Prepon

text: In early 2011, Prepon guest-starred in an episode of the ABC police procedural drama "Castle" as an actress studying for the role of Nikki Heat, a character created by Nathan Fillion's title character. Prepon had been working on a web series, "", which she directed and edited, starring her then-boyfriend Scott Michael Foster. They had sold the series to Comedy Central. In February 2011, she was cast as the title character Chelsea Newman on the NBC sitcom "Are You There, Chelsea?", based on Chelsea Handler's 2008 book "Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea". NBC premiered the show on January 11, 2012, and cancelled it on May 11, 2012. She guest-starred in the TBS sitcom "Men at Work". In mid-2012, Prepon signed on to co-star with Taylor Schilling in the Netflix original comedy-drama series "Orange Is the New Black", based on Piper Kerman's 2010 memoir "". She was cast as Alex Vause, a former drug importer and girlfriend of Piper Chapman (Schilling). The series premiered on July 11, 2013. Prepon was a regular in the first season, but appeared in only four of the 13 episodes in the second season. She returned as a series regular in the third season.


title: Laura Prepon

text: In 2016, Prepon and nutritionist Elizabeth Troy co-wrote "The Stash Plan", a wellness book that draws on Prepon's experiences eating organic foods since she was a child, and her struggles with weight, low energy, and digestive issues. The book debuted at #10 under "Advice, How-To & Miscellaneous" on "The New York Times" Best Seller list. Since publishing "The Stash Plan", Prepon has expanded her cooking career, launching a line of kitchenware products called PrepOn Kitchen and regularly posting instructional videos online.


title: Laura Prepon

text: In 2016, Prepon appeared in the psychological thriller "The Girl on the Train", based on Paula Hawkins' novel of the same name. In 2017, she played Charlotte opposite Sam Elliott in "The Hero". Prepon directed the tenth episode of "Orange Is the New Black"s fifth season, titled "The Reverse Midas Touch". On April 30, 2022, it was announced that Prepon would have a guest appearance in the follow-up sitcom, "That '90s Show".


title: Laura Prepon

text: Prepon was in a relationship with her "That ‘70s Show" co-star's brother Christopher Masterson from 1999 to 2007.


title: Laura Prepon

text: In June 2017, a pregnant Prepon confirmed on "Live with Kelly and Ryan" that she and her fiancé, actor Ben Foster, were expecting a girl. Prepon gave birth to their daughter, Ella, in August 2017. Prepon and Foster married in June 2018. On October 24, 2019, Prepon announced on social media that the couple were expecting their second child. Their child, a son, was born in February 2020.


title: Laura Prepon

text: Prepon became a Scientologist in 1999. In 2021, she revealed that she had not practiced Scientology since 2016 and it was no longer a part of her life.


title: 2022–23 UEFA Europa Conference League

text: The 2022–23 UEFA Europa Conference League is the second season of the UEFA Europa Conference League, Europe's tertiary club football tournament organised by UEFA.


title: 2022–23 UEFA Europa Conference League

text: The final will be played at Fortuna Arena in Prague, Czech Republic. The winners of the 2022–23 UEFA Europa Conference League will automatically qualify for the 2023–24 UEFA Europa League group stage, unless they manage to qualify for the 2023–24 UEFA Champions League group stage.


title: 2022–23 UEFA Europa Conference League

text: As the title holders of the Europa Conference League, Roma, qualified for the 2022–23 UEFA Europa League and subsequently progressed to the knockout phase, they were therefore unable to defend their title.


title: 2022–23 UEFA Europa Conference League

text: A total of 177 teams from 54 of the 55 UEFA member associations (excluding Russia) will participate in the 2022–23 UEFA Europa Conference League. The association ranking based on the UEFA country coefficients is used to determine the number of participating teams for each association:


title: 2022–23 UEFA Europa Conference League

text: For the 2022–23 UEFA Europa Conference League, the associations are allocated places according to their 2021 UEFA country coefficients, which takes into account their performance in European competitions from 2016–17 to 2020–21.


title: 2022–23 UEFA Europa Conference League

text: Apart from the allocation based on the country coefficients, associations may have additional teams participating in the Europa Conference League, as noted below:


title: 2022–23 UEFA Europa Conference League

text: The following is the access list for this season. In the default access list, the title holders of the Europa Conference League qualify for the Europa League group stage.


title: 2022–23 UEFA Europa Conference League

text: Due to the suspension of Russia for the 2022–23 European season, and since some changes have been made in the Europa League access list following the qualification of the Europa Conference League title holders to the Europa League group stage, the following changes to the access list have been made:


title: 2022–23 UEFA Europa Conference League

text: The second qualifying round, third qualifying round and play-off round are divided into Champions Path (CH) and Main Path (MP).


title: 2022–23 UEFA Europa Conference League

text: The schedule of the competition is as follows. Matches are scheduled for Thursdays apart from the final, which takes place on a Wednesday, though exceptionally can take place on Tuesdays or Wednesdays due to scheduling conflicts (especially featuring teams from associations where there are few approved stadiums, such as Gibraltar and Wales). Scheduled kick-off times starting from the group stage are 18:45 and 21:00 CEST/CET, though exceptionally can take place at 16:30 due to geographical reasons.


title: 2022–23 UEFA Europa Conference League

text: As the 2022 FIFA World Cup takes place in Qatar between 20 November and 18 December 2022, the group stage commenced in the first week of September 2022 and concluded in the first week of November 2022 to make way for the World Cup.


title: 2022–23 UEFA Europa Conference League

text: The draws for the qualifying round were held at the UEFA headquarters in Nyon, Switzerland. The group stage draw took place in Istanbul, Turkey.


title: 2022–23 UEFA Europa Conference League

text: The draw for the group stage was held on 26 August 2022. The 32 teams were drawn into eight groups of four. For the draw, the teams were seeded into four pots, each of eight teams, based on their 2022 UEFA club coefficients (CC). Teams from the same association and, for political reasons, teams from Serbia and Kosovo could not be drawn into the same group.


title: 2022–23 UEFA Europa Conference League

text: All teams besides AZ, Basel, CFR Cluj, Gent, Partizan, Slavia Prague and Slovan Bratislava, who competed in last season's group stage, made their debut appearances in the group stage. Ballkani, Djurgårdens IF, Dnipro-1, Pyunik, RFS, Silkeborg, Slovácko, Vaduz and Žalgiris made their debut appearances in a UEFA competition group stage. Ballkani, Vaduz and Žalgiris were the first teams from Kosovo, Liechtenstein and Lithuania, respectively, to play in a UEFA competition group stage.


title: 2022–23 UEFA Europa Conference League

text: In the knockout phase, teams play against each other over two legs on a home-and-away basis, except for the one-match final.


title: WikiLeaks

text: WikiLeaks () is an international non-profit organisation that publishes news leaks and classified media provided by anonymous sources. Its website stated in 2015 that it had released online 10 million documents since beginning in 2006 in Iceland. Julian Assange, an Australian Internet activist, is generally described as its founder and director and is currently fighting extradition to the United States over his work with WikiLeaks. Since September 2018, Kristinn Hrafnsson has served as its editor-in-chief.


title: WikiLeaks

text: The group has released a number of prominent document caches that exposed serious violations of human rights and civil liberties to the US and international public, including the "Collateral Murder" footage from the 12 July 2007 Baghdad airstrike in which Iraqi Reuters journalists were among several civilians killed. WikiLeaks is known for publishing leaks such as diplomatic cables from the United States and Saudi Arabia, emails from the governments of Syria and Turkey, corruption in Kenya and at Samherji, a multinational fishing company based in Iceland. WikiLeaks has also published documents exposing surveillance by the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency and private corporations. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, WikiLeaks released emails from the Democratic National Committee and from Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, showing that the party's national committee favoured Clinton over her rival Bernie Sanders in the primaries. These releases resulted in the resignation of Debbie Wasserman Schultz as chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and caused significant harm to the Clinton campaign. They have been cited as a possible contributing factor in Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in the presidential election. During the campaign, WikiLeaks promoted conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party and the murder of Seth Rich.


title: WikiLeaks

text: WikiLeaks has won a number of awards and has been commended for exposing state and corporate secrets, increasing transparency, assisting freedom of the press, and enhancing democratic discourse while challenging powerful institutions. WikiLeaks and some of its supporters say the organisation's publications have a perfect authenticity record. The group has been the target of campaigns to discredit it, including aborted ones by Palantir and HBGary. WikiLeaks has also had its donation systems disrupted by problems with its payment processors. As a result, the Wau Holland Foundation helps process WikiLeaks' donations.


title: WikiLeaks

text: The organisation has been criticised for inadequately curating its content and violating the personal privacy of individuals. WikiLeaks has, for instance, revealed Social Security numbers, medical information, credit card numbers and details of suicide attempts. Various news organisations, activists, journalists and former members have also criticised the organisation over allegations of anti-semitism, an anti-Clinton and pro-Trump bias, various associations with the Russian government, a history of buying and selling leaks, and a lack of internal transparency. Journalists have also criticised the group for promoting false flag conspiracy theories, and its exaggerated and misleading descriptions of the contents of leaks. The CIA defined the group as a "non-state hostile intelligence service" after the release of Vault 7.


title: WikiLeaks

text: The inspiration for WikiLeaks was Daniel Ellsberg's release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Assange built WikiLeaks to shorten the time between a leak and its coverage by the media. WikiLeaks was established in Australia but its servers were soon moved to Sweden and other countries that provided more legal protection for the media.


title: WikiLeaks

text: The "wikileaks.org" domain name was registered on 4 October 2006. The website was established and published its first document in December 2006. Before his arrest, WikiLeaks was usually represented in public by Julian Assange, who has been described as "the heart and soul of this organisation, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organiser, financier, and all the rest". Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Sarah Harrison, Kristinn Hrafnsson and Joseph Farrell are other notable associates of Assange who have been involved in the project. Harrison is also a member of Sunshine Press Productions along with Assange and Ingi Ragnar Ingason. Gavin MacFadyen was acknowledged by Assange as a ″beloved director of WikiLeaks″ shortly after his death in 2016.


title: WikiLeaks

text: Assange formed an advisory board in the early days of WikiLeaks, filling it with journalists, political activists and computer specialists. Most of the members told Wired that they hadn't done much advising and had little involvement with WikiLeaks. Several members said they didn't know they were mentioned on the site, or how they got there. Computer security expert Ben Laurie said he had been a member of the board "since before the beginning", but he wasn't "really sure what the advisory board means." Former board member Phillip Adams criticised the board, saying that Assange "has never asked for advice. The advisory board was pretty clearly window dressing, so he went for people identified with progressive policies around the place." Assange responded by calling the advisory board "pretty informal".


title: WikiLeaks

text: The initial tranche of WikiLeaks' documents came from a WikiLeaks' activist who owned a server that was a node in the Tor network. After they noticed that Chinese hackers used the network to gather information from foreign governments, the activist began recording the information. This let Assange show potential contributors that WikiLeaks was viable and say they had "received over one million documents from thirteen countries".


title: WikiLeaks

text: WikiLeaks originally used a "wiki" communal publication method, which ended by May 2010. Its founders and early volunteers were once described as a mixture of Asian dissidents, journalists, mathematicians, and start-up company technologists from the United States, Taiwan, Europe, Australia, and South Africa. , the website had more than 1,200 registered volunteers.


title: WikiLeaks

text: Despite some public confusion, related to the fact both sites use the "wiki" name and website design template, WikiLeaks and Wikipedia are not affiliated. Wikia, a for-profit corporation affiliated loosely with the Wikimedia Foundation, purchased several WikiLeaks-related domain names as a "protective brand measure" in 2007.


title: WikiLeaks

text: On 26 September 2018, it was announced that Julian Assange had appointed Kristinn Hrafnsson as editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks with Assange continuing as its publisher. His access to the internet was cut off by Ecuador in March 2018 after he tweeted that Britain was about to conduct a propaganda war against Russia relating to the Poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal. Ecuador said he had broken a commitment "not to issue messages that might interfere with other states" and Assange said he was "exercising his right to free speech".


title: WikiLeaks

text: According to WikiLeaks, the goal of the organisation is "to bring important news and information to the public … 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." It also seeks to ensure that journalists and whistleblowers are not prosecuted for emailing sensitive or classified documents. The online "drop box" is described by the WikiLeaks website as "an innovative, secure and anonymous way for sources to leak information to [WikiLeaks] journalists".


title: WikiLeaks

text: In a 2013 resolution, the International Federation of Journalists, a trade union of journalists, called WikiLeaks a "new breed of media organisation" that "offers important opportunities for media organisations". Harvard professor Yochai Benkler praised WikiLeaks as a new form of journalistic enterprise, testifying at the court-martial of Chelsea Manning that "WikiLeaks did serve a particular journalistic function," and that the "range of the journalist's privilege" is "a hard line to draw".


title: WikiLeaks

text: Others do not consider WikiLeaks to be journalistic in nature. Media ethicist Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies wrote in 2011: "WikiLeaks might grow into a journalist endeavor. But it's not there yet." Bill Keller of "The New York Times" considers WikiLeaks to be a "complicated source" rather than a journalistic partner. Prominent First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams writes that WikiLeaks is not a journalistic group, but instead "an organization of political activists; … a source for journalists; and … a conduit of leaked information to the press and the public". In support of his opinion, referring to Assange's statements that WikiLeaks reads only a small fraction of information before deciding to publish it, Abrams wrote: "No journalistic entity I have ever heard of—none—simply releases to the world an elephantine amount of material it has not read."


title: WikiLeaks

text: According to a January 2010 interview, the WikiLeaks team then consisted of five people working full-time and about 800 people who worked occasionally, none of whom were compensated. WikiLeaks does not have any official headquarters.


title: WikiLeaks

text: WikiLeaks describes itself as "an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking". In 2010, the website was available on multiple servers, different domain names and had an official dark web version (available on the Tor Network) as a result of a number of denial-of-service attacks and its elimination from different Domain Name System (DNS) providers.


title: WikiLeaks

text: Until August 2010, WikiLeaks was hosted by PRQ, a company based in Sweden providing "highly secure, no-questions-asked hosting services". PRQ was reported by "The Register" website to have "almost no information about its clientele and maintains few if any of its own logs". Later, WikiLeaks was hosted mainly by the Swedish Internet service provider Bahnhof in the Pionen facility, a former nuclear bunker in Sweden. Other servers are spread around the world with the main server located in Sweden. Julian Assange has said that the servers are located in Sweden and the other countries "specifically because those nations offer legal protection to the disclosures made on the site". He talks about the Swedish constitution, which gives the information–providers total legal protection. It is forbidden, according to Swedish law, for any administrative authority to make inquiries about the sources of any type of newspaper. These laws, and the hosting by PRQ, make it difficult for any authority to eliminate WikiLeaks; they place a burden of proof upon any complainant whose suit would circumscribe WikiLeaks' liberty. Furthermore, "WikiLeaks maintains its own servers at undisclosed locations, keeps no logs and uses military-grade encryption to protect sources and other confidential information." Such arrangements have been called "bulletproof hosting".


title: WikiLeaks

text: After the site became the target of a denial-of-service attack on its old servers, WikiLeaks moved its website to Amazon's servers. Amazon later removed the website from its servers. In a public statement, Amazon said that WikiLeaks was not following its terms of service. The company stated: "There were several parts they were violating. For example, our terms of service state that 'you represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content ... that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity.' It's clear that WikiLeaks doesn't own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content." WikiLeaks was then moved to servers at OVH, a private web-hosting service in France. After criticism from the French government, a judge ruled that there was no need for OVH to cease hosting WikiLeaks.


title: WikiLeaks

text: WikiLeaks used EveryDNS, but was dropped by the company after distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against WikiLeaks hurt the quality of service for its other customers. Supporters of WikiLeaks waged verbal and DDoS attacks on EveryDNS. Because of a typographical error in blogs mistaking EveryDNS for competitor "EasyDNS", the sizeable Internet backlash hit EasyDNS. Despite that, EasyDNS began providing WikiLeaks with DNS service on "two 'battle hardened' servers" to protect the quality of service for its other customers.


title: WikiLeaks

text: WikiLeaks restructured its process for contributions after its first document leaks did not gain much attention. Assange stated this was part of an attempt to take the voluntary effort typically seen in Wiki projects and "redirect it to ... material that has real potential for change". As of February 2007 the Wikileaks FAQ, under "How will Wikileaks operate?", read:


title: WikiLeaks

text: WikiLeaks established an editorial policy that accepted only documents that were "of political, diplomatic, historical or ethical interest" (and excluded "material that is already publicly available"). This coincided with early criticism that having no editorial policy would drive out good material with spam and promote "automated or indiscriminate publication of confidential records". The original FAQ is no longer in effect, and no one can post or edit documents on WikiLeaks. Now, submissions to WikiLeaks are reviewed by anonymous WikiLeaks reviewers, and documents that do not meet the editorial criteria are rejected. By 2008, the revised FAQ stated: "Anybody can post comments to it. [ ... ] Users can publicly discuss documents and analyse their credibility and veracity." After the 2010 reorganisation, posting new comments on leaks was no longer possible.


title: WikiLeaks

text: In 2010 Assange said WikiLeaks received some submissions through the postal mail. During the 2010 reorganisation, the site's submission system went offline. While it was offline, WikiLeaks announced they were building a state-of-the-art secure submission system. The launch of the new system was delayed by security concerns in 2011. The new submission system did not launch until four and a half years later, in May 2015. According to "The Washington Post", Andy Müller-Maguhn and a colleague administered the submission server in 2016, though Müller-Maguhn denies this. By October 2021, WikiLeaks' secure chat stopped working and by February 2022, WikiLeaks' submission system and email server were offline. In July 2022, a broken version of the submission system briefly relaunched with expired PGP keys and went offline after it was reported on by "The Daily Dot".


title: WikiLeaks

text: In November 2022, many of WikiLeaks releases disappeared from the website, bringing the number of documents from around 10 million to around 3,000. Other reported issues with the site included the websites search ability not working and a broken submission page.


title: WikiLeaks

text: The legal status of WikiLeaks is complex. In 2010, WikiLeaks set up a private limited company in Iceland for administrative purposes, according to a long-time spokesman and later editor-in-chief. The organisation was also creating legal entities in France and Sweden, and operated in Australia.


title: WikiLeaks

text: Assange considers WikiLeaks a protection intermediary. Rather than leaking directly to the press, and fearing exposure and retribution, whistleblowers can leak to WikiLeaks, which then leaks to the press for them.


title: WikiLeaks

text: The US Justice Department began a criminal investigation of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange soon after the leak of diplomatic cables in 2010 began. "The Washington Post" reported that the department was considering charges under the Espionage Act of 1917, an action which former prosecutors characterised as "difficult" because of First Amendment protections for the press. Several Supreme Court cases (e.g. "Bartnicki v. Vopper") have established previously that the American Constitution protects the re-publication of illegally gained information provided the publishers did not themselves violate any laws in acquiring it.


title: WikiLeaks

text: Regarding legal threats against WikiLeaks and Assange, legal expert Ben Saul said that Assange is the target of a global smear campaign to demonise him as a criminal or as a terrorist, without any legal basis. The US Center for Constitutional Rights issued a statement expressing alarm at the "multiple examples of legal overreach and irregularities" in his arrest.


title: WikiLeaks

text: In 2011, Google was served with search warrants for the contents of two WikiLeaks volunteers' email accounts.


title: WikiLeaks

text: In 2015, it was revealed that Google had been served with search warrants for the contents of three WikiLeaks staff members' email accounts as part of a criminal investigation with alleged offences including espionage, conspiracy to commit espionage, the theft or conversion of property belonging to the United States government, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and criminal conspiracy.


title: WikiLeaks

text: In April 2017, CIA director Mike Pompeo called WikiLeaks "a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia". The official designation of Wikileaks and Julian Assange as a non-state hostile intelligence service was discussed in mid-2017 during preparation of the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2018. It was eventually incorporated into the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020 that became law in December 2019. The Act says "It is the sense of Congress that WikiLeaks and the senior leadership of WikiLeaks resemble a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors and should be treated as such a service by the United States." In the opinion of some sources, the effect of the designation was to allow the CIA to launch and plan operations that did not require presidential approval or congressional notice.


title: WikiLeaks

text: In November 2018, an accidental filing with Assange's name was seen to indicate there were undisclosed charges against him. On 11 April 2019, Assange was charged in a computer hacking conspiracy. On 23 May, a superseding indictment was filed with charges of Conspiracy to Receive National Defense Information, Obtaining National Defense Information, Disclosure of National Defense Information, and Conspiracy to Commit Computer Intrusion. On 24 June 2020, another superseding indictment was filed which added to the allegations but not the charges.


title: WikiLeaks

text: In April 2011, the US Department of Justice warned military lawyers acting for Guantanamo Bay detainees against clicking of links on sites such as "The New York Times" that might lead to classified files published by WikiLeaks. In June 2011, the US Department of Justice ruled that attorneys acting for Guantanamo Bay detainees could cite documents published by WikiLeaks. The use of the documents was subject to restrictions.


title: WikiLeaks

text: On 8 February 2018, the UK Supreme Court unanimously allowed a document that had been leaked through WikiLeaks to be admitted as evidence. The cable had been excluded from use in an earlier part of the case before the Administrative Court based on the fact that it was a diplomatic communication, which enjoy "inviolable" protections that prevent them from being used in court outside of exceptional circumstances. The Supreme Court ruled that since the document had already been widely disseminated, it had lost any protections it might have had. The hearing was considered an important test of the Vienna Convention in relation to WikiLeaks documents.


title: WikiLeaks

text: On 20 April 2018, the Democratic National Committee filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit in federal district court in Manhattan against Russia, the Trump campaign, WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, alleging a conspiracy to disrupt the 2016 United States presidential election in Trump's favour. The suit was dismissed with prejudice on 30 July 2019. In his judgement, Judge John Koeltl said that WikiLeaks "did not participate in any wrongdoing in obtaining the materials in the first place" and therefore was within the law in publishing the information. The federal judge also wrote "The DNC's interest in keeping 'donor lists' and 'fundraising strategies' secret is dwarfed by the newsworthiness of the documents as a whole...If WikiLeaks could be held liable for publishing documents concerning the DNC's political financial and voter-engagement strategies simply because the DNC labels them 'secret' and trade secrets, then so could any newspaper or other media outlet".


title: WikiLeaks

text: WikiLeaks is a self-described not-for-profit organisation, funded largely by volunteers, and is dependent on private donations, exclusivity contracts and concessions from their media partners. Its main financing methods include conventional bank transfers and online payment systems. According to Assange, WikiLeaks' lawyers often work pro bono. Assange has said that in some cases legal aid has been donated by media organisations such as the Associated Press, the "Los Angeles Times", and the National Newspaper Publishers Association. Assange said in early 2010 that WikiLeaks' only revenue consists of donations, but it has considered other options including auctioning early access to documents. In September 2010, Assange said that WikiLeaks received millions of dollars in media partnerships, explaining they "win concessions in relation to the number of journalists that will be put on it and how big they'll run with it."


title: WikiLeaks

text: In 2010, Assange said the organisation was registered as a library in Australia, a foundation in France, and a newspaper in Sweden, and that it also used two United States-based non-profit 501c3 organisations for funding purposes.


title: WikiLeaks

text: In January 2010, WikiLeaks temporarily shut down its website while management appealed for donations. Previously published material was no longer available, although some could still be accessed on unofficial mirror websites. WikiLeaks stated that it would resume full operation once the operational costs were paid. WikiLeaks saw this as a kind of work stoppage "to ensure that everyone who is involved stops normal work and actually spends time raising revenue". While the organisation initially planned for funds to be secured by 6 January 2010, it was not until 3 February 2010 that WikiLeaks announced that its minimum fundraising goal had been achieved.


title: WikiLeaks

text: The Wau Holland Foundation, one of the WikiLeaks' main funding channels, stated that they received more than €900,000 in public donations between October 2009 and December 2010, of which €370,000 has been passed on to WikiLeaks. Hendrik Fulda, vice-president of the Wau Holland Foundation, said that every new WikiLeaks publication brought "a wave of support", and that donations were strongest in the weeks after WikiLeaks started publishing leaked diplomatic cables. According to Assange, WikiLeaks' media partnerships for the cables earned them almost $2 million three months after they started publishing.


title: WikiLeaks

text: In December 2010, the Wau Holland Foundation stated that four permanent employees, including Julian Assange, had begun to receive salaries.


title: WikiLeaks

text: During 2010, WikiLeaks received over $1.9 million in donations. About $930,000 came through PayPal donations, with the rest coming through bank transfers. In 2011, donations dropped sharply and WikiLeaks received only around $180,000 in donations, while their expenses increased from $519,000 to $850,000. In 2012, WikiLeaks raised only $68,000 through the Wau Holland Foundation and had expenses more than $507,000. Between January and May 2013, Wau Holland Foundation was only able to cover $47,000 in essential infrastructure for WikiLeaks, but not an additional $400,000 that was submitted "to cover publishing campaigns and logistics in 2012".


title: WikiLeaks

text: By October 2017, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said the group had made a 50,000% return on Bitcoin. By that December, they had raised at least $25 million in Bitcoin.


title: WikiLeaks

text: On 22 January 2010, the Internet payment intermediary PayPal suspended WikiLeaks' donation account and froze its assets. WikiLeaks said that this had happened before, and was done for "no obvious reason". In December 2010, PayPal suspended WikiLeaks' account, thereby stopping donations through PayPal. PayPal said it had taken action after the US State Department sent a letter to Wikileaks stating that Wikileaks' activities were illegal in the US. Hendrik Fulda, vice-president of the Wau Holland Foundation, said that the Foundation had been receiving twice as many donations through PayPal as through normal banks before PayPal's decision to suspend WikiLeaks' account. Mastercard and Visa Europe also decided to stop accepting payments to WikiLeaks. Bank of America, Amazon and Swiss bank PostFinance had previously stopped dealing with WikiLeaks. Datacell, the IT company that enabled WikiLeaks to accept credit and debit card donations, threatened Mastercard and Visa with legal action to enforce the resumption of payments to WikiLeaks. Datacell said Visa's action was the result of political pressure.


title: WikiLeaks

text: Assange noted that the financial blockade by Bank of America, Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and Western Union, had cost WikiLeaks ninety-five per cent of its revenue. In July 2011, WikiLeaks filed a complaint against Visa and MasterCard with the European Commission. In 2012, an Icelandic district court ruled that Valitor, the Icelandic partner of Visa and MasterCard, was violating the law when it stopped accepting credit card donations to WikiLeaks. The court ruled that donations to WikiLeaks must resume within 14 days or Valitor would be fined US$6,000 a day.


title: WikiLeaks

text: In response to the financial blockade of Wikileaks, Glenn Greenwald and others created the Freedom of the Press Foundation in order "to block the US government from ever again being able to attack and suffocate an independent journalistic enterprise the way it did with WikiLeaks".


title: WikiLeaks

text: Wikileaks started accepting bitcoin in 2011 as a currency which could not be blocked by financial intuitions or a government.


title: WikiLeaks

text: In mid-February 2010, WikiLeaks received a leaked diplomatic cable from the United States Embassy in Reykjavik relating to the Icesave scandal, which they published on 18 February. The cable, known as Reykjavik 13, was the first of the classified documents WikiLeaks published among those allegedly provided to them by United States Army Private Chelsea Manning. In March 2010, WikiLeaks released a secret 32-page US Department of Defense Counterintelligence Analysis Report written in March 2008 discussing the leaking of material by WikiLeaks and how it could be deterred.


title: WikiLeaks

text: In April, a classified video of the 12 July 2007 Baghdad airstrike was released, showing two Reuters employees being fired at, after the pilots mistakenly thought the men were carrying weapons, which were in fact cameras. After the men were killed, the video shows US forces firing on a family van that stopped to pick up the bodies. Press reports of the number killed in the attacks vary from 12 to "over 18". Among the dead were two journalists and two children were also wounded.


title: WikiLeaks

text: In June 2010, Manning was arrested after alleged chat logs were given to United States authorities by former hacker Adrian Lamo, in whom she had confided. Manning reportedly told Lamo she had leaked the "Collateral Murder" video, in addition to a video of the Granai airstrike and about 260,000 diplomatic cables, to WikiLeaks.


title: WikiLeaks

text: In July, WikiLeaks released 92,000 documents related to the war in Afghanistan between 2004 and the end of 2009 to the publications "The Guardian", "The New York Times" and "Der Spiegel". The documents detail individual incidents including "friendly fire" and civilian casualties. WikiLeaks asked the Pentagon and human-rights groups to help remove names from the documents to reduce the potential harm caused by their release, but did not receive assistance.


title: WikiLeaks

text: After the Love Parade stampede in Duisburg, Germany, on 24 July 2010, a local resident published internal documents of the city administration regarding the planning of Love Parade. The city government reacted by securing a court order on 16 August forcing the removal of the documents from the website on which it was hosted. On 20 August 2010, WikiLeaks released a publication entitled "Loveparade 2010 Duisburg planning documents, 2007–2010", which consisted of 43 internal documents regarding the Love Parade 2010.


title: WikiLeaks

text: After the leak of information concerning the Afghan War, in October 2010, around 400,000 documents relating to the Iraq War were released. The BBC quoted the US Department of Defense referring to the Iraq War Logs as "the largest leak of classified documents in its history". Media coverage of the leaked documents emphasised claims that the US government had ignored reports of torture by the Iraqi authorities during the period after the 2003 war.


title: WikiLeaks

text: On 29 July 2010 WikiLeaks added an "Insurance file" to the Afghan War Diary page. The file is AES encrypted. There has been speculation that it was intended to serve as insurance in case the WikiLeaks website or its spokesman Julian Assange are incapacitated, upon which the passphrase could be published. After the first few days' release of the US diplomatic cables starting 28 November 2010, the US television broadcasting company CBS predicted that "If anything happens to Assange or the website, a key will go out to unlock the files. There would then be no way to stop the information from spreading like wildfire because so many people already have copies." CBS correspondent Declan McCullagh stated, "What most folks are speculating is that the insurance file contains unreleased information that would be especially embarrassing to the US government if it were released."


title: WikiLeaks

text: On 28 November 2010, WikiLeaks and five major newspapers from Spain ("El País"), France ("Le Monde"), Germany ("Der Spiegel"), the United Kingdom ("The Guardian"), and the United States ("The New York Times") started simultaneously to publish the first 220 of 251,287 leaked documents labelled confidential – but not top-secret – and dated from 28 December 1966 to 28 February 2010.


title: WikiLeaks

text: Assange wrote "What makes the revelations of secret communications potent is that we were not supposed to read them. Diplomatic cables are not produced in order to manipulate the public, but are aimed at elements of the rest of the US state apparatus, and are therefore relatively free from the distorting influence of public relations".


title: WikiLeaks

text: The contents of the diplomatic cables include numerous unguarded comments and revelations regarding: US diplomats gathering personal information about Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations, and other top UN officials; critiques and praises about the host countries of various United States embassies; political manoeuvring regarding climate change; discussion and resolutions towards ending ongoing tension in the Middle East; efforts and resistance towards nuclear disarmament; actions in the War on Terror; assessments of other threats around the world; dealings between various countries; United States intelligence and counterintelligence efforts; and other diplomatic actions. Reactions to the United States diplomatic cables leak varied. On 14 December 2010 the United States Department of Justice issued a subpoena directing Twitter to provide information for accounts registered to or associated with WikiLeaks. Twitter decided to notify its users. The overthrow of the presidency in Tunisia of 2011 has been attributed partly to reaction against the corruption revealed by leaked cables.


title: WikiLeaks

text: On 29 August, WikiLeaks published over 130,000 unredacted cables. On 31 August, WikiLeaks tweeted a link to a torrent of the encrypted data. On 1 September 2011, it became public that an encrypted version of WikiLeaks' huge archive of un-redacted US State Department cables had been available via BitTorrent for months and that the decryption key (similar to a password) was available to those who knew where to find it. "Guardian" newspaper editor David Leigh and journalist Luke Harding published the decryption key in their book, "," so the files were now publicly available to anyone including intelligence services. WikiLeaks decided to publish the entire, unredacted archive in searchable form on its website on 2 September. According to Assange, Wikileaks did this so that possible targets could be informed and better defend themseles, and also to provide a reliable source for the leaks. The website Cryptome published the unredacted cables on 1 September, a day before Wikileaks, and they remain on the Cryptome site. According to the website owner and operator they have never been asked by US authorities to remove them. Wikileaks commenced pre-litigation action against "The Guardian" for the publication of the decryption key in the book by Leigh and Harding.


title: WikiLeaks

text: WikiLeaks' media partners strongly criticised the organisation's decision to release the uncensored archive of diplomatic cables in a searchable format. According to The Guardian, several thousand files in the archive were marked "strictly protect" which indicated officials thought sources could be endangered by their release. In a joint statement, The Guardian, El Pais, New York Times and Der Spiegel said they "deplore the decision of WikiLeaks to publish the unredacted state department cables, which may put sources at risk" and "we cannot defend the needless publication of the complete data - indeed, we are united in condemning it." Le Monde told the Associated Press it would also sign the statement. In response, WikiLeaks accused The Guardian of false statements and nepotism. Out of concern for those involved, Reporters Without Borders temporarily suspended their WikiLeaks mirror.


title: WikiLeaks

text: In late April 2011, files related to the Guantanamo prison were released. In December 2011, WikiLeaks started to release the "Spy Files". On 27 February 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing more than five million emails from the Texas-headquartered "global intelligence" company Stratfor. On 5 July 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing the Syria Files (emails from Syrian political figures 2006–2012). On 25 October 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing The Detainee Policies, files covering the rules and procedures for detainees in US military custody. In April 2013 WikiLeaks published more than 1.7 million US diplomatic and intelligence documents from the 1970s, including the Kissinger cables.


title: WikiLeaks

text: In 2013, the organisation assisted Edward Snowden (who is responsible for the 2013 mass surveillance disclosures) in leaving Hong Kong. Sarah Harrison, a WikiLeaks activist, accompanied Snowden on the flight. Scott Shane of "The New York Times" stated that the WikiLeaks involvement "shows that despite its shoestring staff, limited fund-raising from a boycott by major financial firms, and defections prompted by Mr. Assange's personal troubles and abrasive style, it remains a force to be reckoned with on the global stage."


title: WikiLeaks

text: In September 2013, WikiLeaks published "Spy Files 3", 250 documents from more than 90 surveillance companies. On 13 November 2013, a draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership's Intellectual Property Rights chapter was published by WikiLeaks. On 10 June 2015, WikiLeaks published the draft on the Trans-Pacific Partnership's Transparency for Healthcare Annex, along with each country's negotiating position. On 19 June 2015 WikiLeaks began publishing The Saudi Cables: more than half a million cables and other documents from the Saudi Foreign Ministry that contain secret communications from various Saudi Embassies around the world.


title: WikiLeaks

text: On 23 June 2015, WikiLeaks published documents under the name of "Espionnage Élysée", which showed that NSA spied on the French government, including but not limited to then President Francois Hollande and his predecessors Nicolas Sarkozy and Jacques Chirac. On 29 June 2015, WikiLeaks published more NSA top secrets intercepts regarding France, detailing an economic espionage against French companies and associations. In July 2015, WikiLeaks published documents which showed that the NSA had tapped the telephones of many German federal ministries, including that of the Chancellor Angela Merkel, for years since the 1990s. On 4 July 2015, WikiLeaks published documents which showed that 29 Brazilian government numbers were selected for secret espionage by the NSA. Among the targets were then-President Dilma Rousseff, many assistants and advisors, her presidential jet and other key figures in the Brazilian government.


title: WikiLeaks

text: On 29 July 2015, WikiLeaks published a top secret letter from the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) Ministerial Meeting in December 2013 which illustrated the position of negotiating countries on "state-owned enterprises" (SOEs). On 31 July 2015, WikiLeaks published secret intercepts and the related target list showing that the NSA spied on the Japanese government, including the Cabinet and Japanese companies such as Mitsubishi and Mitsui. The documents revealed that United States espionage against Japan concerned broad sections of communications about the US-Japan diplomatic relationship and Japan's position on climate change issues, other than an extensive monitoring of the Japanese economy. On 21 October 2015 WikiLeaks published some of John O. Brennan's emails, including a draft security clearance application which contained personal information.


title: WikiLeaks

text: During the 2016 US Democratic Party presidential primaries, WikiLeaks hosted emails sent or received by presidential candidate Hillary Clinton from her personal mail server while she was Secretary of State. The emails had been released by the US State Department under a Freedom of information request in February 2016. WikiLeaks also created a search engine to allow the public to search through Clinton's emails. The emails were selected in terms of their relevance to the Iraq War and were apparently timed to precede the release of the UK government's Iraq Inquiry report. The emails were a major point of discussion during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, requiring an FBI investigation which decided that Clinton had been "extremely careless" but recommended that no charges be filed against her.


title: WikiLeaks

text: On 19 July 2016, in response to the Turkish government's purges that followed the coup attempt, WikiLeaks released 294,548 emails from Turkey's ruling Justice and Development party (AKP). According to WikiLeaks, the material, which they claim to be the first batch from the "AKP Emails", was obtained a week before the attempted coup in the country and "is not connected, in any way, to the elements behind the attempted coup, or to a rival political party or state". After WikiLeaks announced that they would release the emails, the organisation was for over 24 hours under a "sustained attack". Following the leak, the Turkish government ordered the site to be blocked nationwide.


title: WikiLeaks

text: Fisher asked WikiLeaks not to publish the AKP emails as she was still access files on the AKP network. After WikiLeaks published the emails, the AKP shut down its internal network and Fisher lost access. Most experts and commentators agree that Phineas Fisher was behind the leak. Fisher said WikiLeaks had told her that the emails were "all spam and crap."


title: WikiLeaks

text: WikiLeaks had also tweeted a link to a database which contained sensitive information, such as the Turkish Identification Number, of approximately 50 million Turkish citizens, including nearly every female voter in Turkey. The information first appeared online in April of the same year and was not in the files uploaded by WikiLeaks, but in files described by WikiLeaks as "the full data for the Turkey AKP emails and more" which was archived by Emma Best, who then removed it when the personal data was discovered.


title: WikiLeaks

text: On 22 July 2016, WikiLeaks released approximately 20,000 emails and 8,000 files sent from or received by Democratic National Committee (DNC) personnel. Some of the emails contained personal information of donors, including home addresses and Social Security numbers. Other emails appeared to criticise Bernie Sanders or showed favouritism towards Clinton during the primaries. Emails showed that the DNC shared debate questions with Clinton in advance. In July 2016, Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned as chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) because the emails released by WikiLeaks showed that the DNC was "effectively an arm of Mrs. Clinton's campaign" and had conspired to sabotage Bernie Sanders's campaign.


title: WikiLeaks

text: On 7 October 2016, WikiLeaks started releasing series of emails and documents sent from or received by Hillary Clinton campaign manager, John Podesta, including Hillary Clinton's paid speeches to banks, including Goldman Sachs. The BBC reported that the release "is unlikely to allay fears among liberal Democrats that she is too cosy with Wall Street". According to a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, "By dribbling these out every day WikiLeaks is proving they are nothing but a propaganda arm of the Kremlin with a political agenda doing Vladimir Putin's dirty work to help elect Donald Trump." "The New York Times" reported that when asked, President Vladimir Putin replied that Russia was being falsely accused. "The hysteria is merely caused by the fact that somebody needs to divert the attention of the American people from the essence of what was exposed by the hackers."


title: WikiLeaks

text: On 17 October 2016, WikiLeaks announced that a "state party" had severed the Internet connection of Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy. WikiLeaks blamed United States Secretary of State John Kerry of pressuring the Ecuadorian government in severing Assange's Internet, an accusation which the United States State Department denied. The Ecuadorian government stated that it had "temporarily" severed Assange's Internet connection because of WikiLeaks' release of documents "impacting on the U.S. election campaign," although it also stated that this was not meant to prevent WikiLeaks from operating.


title: WikiLeaks

text: On 25 November 2016, WikiLeaks released emails and internal documents that provided details on the US military operations in Yemen from 2009 to March 2015. In a statement accompanying the release of the "Yemen Files", Assange said about the US involvement in the Yemen war: "The war in Yemen has produced 3.15 million internally displaced persons. Although the United States government has provided most of the bombs and is deeply involved in the conduct of the war itself reportage on the war in English is conspicuously rare".


title: WikiLeaks

text: In December 2016, WikiLeaks published over 57,000 emails from Erdogan's son-in-law, Berat Albayrak, who was Turkey's Minister of Energy and Natural Resources. The emails show the inner workings of the Turkish government. According to WikiLeaks, the emails had been first released by Redhack.


title: WikiLeaks

text: On 16 February 2017, WikiLeaks released a purported report on CIA espionage orders (marked as NOFORN) for the 2012 French presidential election. The order called for details of party funding, internal rivalries and future attitudes toward the United States. The Associated Press noted that "the orders seemed to represent standard intelligence-gathering."


title: WikiLeaks

text: On 7 March 2017, WikiLeaks started publishing content code-named "Vault 7", describing it as containing CIA internal documentation of their "massive arsenal" of hacking tools including malware, viruses, weaponised "zero day" exploits and remote control systems. Leaked documents, dated from 2013 to 2016, detail the capabilities of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to perform electronic surveillance and cyber warfare, such as the ability to compromise cars, smart TVs, web browsers (including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera Software ASA), and the operating systems of most smartphones (including Apple's iOS and Google's Android), as well as other operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux. In September 2021, Yahoo! News reported that in 2017 in the wake of the Vault 7 leaks, the CIA planned to spy on associates of WikiLeaks, sow discord among its members, and steal their electronic devices. "[T]op intelligence officials lobbied the White House" to designate Wikileaks as an "information broker" to allow for more investigative tools against it, "potentially paving the way" for its prosecution. Laura Poitras described attempts to classify herself and Assange as "information brokers" rather than journalists as "bone-chilling and a threat to journalists worldwide". Former CIA Director Mike Pompeo stated that the US officials who had spoken to Yahoo should be prosecuted for exposing CIA activities.


title: WikiLeaks

text: On 5 May 2017, WikiLeaks posted links to e-mails purported to be from Emmanuel Macron's campaign in the French 2017 presidential election. The documents were first relayed on the 4chan forum and by pro-Trump Twitter accounts, and then by WikiLeaks, who indicated they did not author the leaks. Some experts have said that the WikiLeaks Twitter account played a key role in publicising the leaks through the hashtag #MacronLeaks just some three-and-a-half hours after the first tweet with the hashtag appeared. The campaign stated that false documents were mixed in with real ones, and that "the ambition of the authors of this leak is obviously to harm the movement En Marche! in the final hours before the second round of the French presidential election." France's Electoral Commission described the action as a "massive and coordinated piracy action." France's Electoral Commission urged journalists not to report on the contents of the leaks, but to heed "the sense of responsibility they must demonstrate, as at stake are the free expression of voters and the sincerity of the election." Cybersecurity experts initially believed that groups linked to Russia were involved in this attack. The Kremlin denied any involvement. The head of the French cyber-security agency, ANSSI, later said that they did not have evidence connecting the hack with Russia, saying that the attack was so simple, that "we can imagine that it was a person who did this alone. They could be in any country."


title: WikiLeaks

text: In September 2017, WikiLeaks released "Spy Files Russia," revealing "how a St. Petersburg-based technology company called Peter-Service helped state entities gather detailed data on Russian cellphone users, part of a national system of online surveillance called System for Operative Investigative Activities (SORM)." Andrei Soldatov, a Russian journalist specializing in digital surveillance and Russian intelligence said he didn't think it was a real expose but "I decided that I need to praise this release, because it’s more than nothing. At least we got some hint about the data exchange interface between telecoms and secret services." According to Moscow-based journalist Fred Weir, "experts say it casts a timely spotlight on the vast surveillance operations mounted by Russian security services." Some suggested that Spy Files Russia was an approved release by the Russian government meant to shield them from criticism of collusion with WikiLeaks after the 2016 US presidential election. James Andrew Lewis, a vice president at Center for Strategic and International Studies, said they were "tricks that the Russians were willing to give up."


title: WikiLeaks

text: In November 2019, WikiLeaks released an email from an unnamed investigator from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) team investigating the 2018 chemical attack in Douma (Syria). The investigator accused the OPCW of covering up discrepancies. Robert Fisk said that documents released by WikiLeaks indicated that the OPCW "suppressed or failed to publish, or simply preferred to ignore, the conclusions of up to 20 other members of its staff who became so upset at what they regarded as the misleading conclusions of the final report that they officially sought to have it changed in order to represent the truth". The head of OPCW, Fernando Arias, described the leak as containing "subjective views" and stood by the original conclusions.


title: WikiLeaks

text: On 12 November 2019, WikiLeaks began publishing what it called the Fishrot Files ("Icelandic: Samherjaskjölin"), a collection of thousands of documents and email communication by employees of one of Iceland's largest fish industry companies, Samherji, that indicated that the company had paid hundreds of millions Icelandic króna to high ranking politicians and officials in Namibia with the objective of acquiring the country's coveted fishing quota.


title: WikiLeaks

text: In 2021, WikiLeaks made a searchable database of 17,000 publicly available documents, which it called "The Intolerance Network", from the ultra-conservative Spanish Catholic organisation Hazte Oir and its international arm, CitizenGo. The documents reveal the internal workings of the organisations, their network of donors and their relationship with the Vatican. The release also includes documents from the secret Catholic organisation El Yunque. The editor of WikiLeaks, Kristinn Hrafnsson, said "As ultra right-wing political groups have gained strength in recent years, with increasing attacks on women's and LGBT rights, it is valuable to have access to documents from those who have lobbied for those changes on a global basis". According to WikiLeaks, the documents were first released in 2017.


title: WikiLeaks

text: According to Wired in 2009, a "whistleblower" submitted fabricated documents to WikiLeaks. The documents were published and flagged as potential fakes. WikiLeaks stated in 2010 that it has never released a misattributed document and that documents are assessed before release. In response to concerns about the possibility of misleading or fraudulent leaks, WikiLeaks has stated that misleading leaks "are already well-placed in the mainstream media. WikiLeaks is of no additional assistance." The FAQ states that: "The simplest and most effective countermeasure is a worldwide community of informed users and editors who can scrutinise and discuss leaked documents." According to statements by Assange in 2010, submitted documents were vetted by five reviewers with expertise in different topics such as language or programming, who also investigated the leaker's identity if known. Assange had the final say in document assessment.


title: WikiLeaks

text: Columnist Eric Zorn wrote in 2016 "So far, it's possible, even likely, that every stolen email WikiLeaks has posted has been authentic," but cautioned against assuming that future releases would be equally authentic. Writer Glenn Greenwald stated in 2016 that WikiLeaks has a "perfect, long-standing record of only publishing authentic documents." Cybersecurity experts have said that it would be easy for a person to fabricate an email or alter it, as by changing headers and metadata.


title: WikiLeaks

text: Some of the releases, including many of the Podesta emails, contain DKIM headers. This allows them to be verified as genuine to some degree of certainty.


title: WikiLeaks

text: In July 2016, the Aspen Institute's Homeland Security Group, a bipartisan counterterrorism organisation, warned that hackers who stole authentic data might "salt the files they release with plausible forgeries." According to Douglas Perry, Russian intelligence agencies have frequently used disinformation tactics. He wrote in 2016 that "carefully faked emails might be included in the WikiLeaks dumps. After all, the best way to make false information believable is to mix it in with true information."


title: WikiLeaks

text: Writing for The Guardian in 2010, Nick Davies said there were low-level attempts to smear WikiLeaks, including online accusations against Assange. In 2010, Wikileaks published a US military document containing a plan to "destroy the center of gravity" of Wikileaks by attacking its trustworthiness. It suggests the identification and exposure of WikiLeaks' sources to "deter others from using WikiLeaks".


title: WikiLeaks

text: In 2010 the Bank of America employed the services of a collection of information security firms, known as Team Themis, when the bank became concerned about information that WikiLeaks held about it and was planning to release. Team Themis included private intelligence and security firms HBGary Federal, Palantir Technologies and Berico Technologies. In 2011 hacktivist group Anonymous released emails it had obtained from HBGary Federal. Among other things, the emails revealed that Team Themis had planned to sabotage and discredit WikiLeaks. One plan was to attack WikiLeaks servers and obtain information about document submitters to "kill the project". Another was to submit fake documents to WikiLeaks and then call out the error. A further plan involved pressuring supporters of WikiLeaks such as journalist Glenn Greenwald. The plans were not implemented and, after the emails were published, Palantir CEO Alex Karp issued a public apology for his company's role.


title: WikiLeaks

text: WikiLeaks promoted conspiracy theories about the murder of Seth Rich. Unfounded conspiracy theories, spread by some right-wing figures and media outlets, hold that Rich was the source of leaked emails and was killed for working with WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks fuelled such theories when it offered a $20,000 reward for information on Rich's killer and when Assange implied that Rich was the source of the DNC leaks, although no evidence supports that claim. Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report into Russian interference in the 2016 election said that Assange "implied falsely" that Rich was the source in order to obscure that Russia was the actual source.


title: WikiLeaks

text: WikiLeaks popularised conspiracy theories about the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton, such as tweeting articles which suggested Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta engaged in satanic rituals, implying that the Democratic Party had Seth Rich killed, claiming that Hillary Clinton wanted to drone strike Assange, suggesting that Clinton wore earpieces to debates and interviews, promoting conspiracy theories about Clinton's health, and promoting a conspiracy theory from a Donald Trump-related Internet community tying the Clinton campaign to child kidnapper Laura Silsby.


title: WikiLeaks

text: On the day the Vault 7 documents were first released, WikiLeaks described UMBRAGE as "a substantial library of attack techniques 'stolen' from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation," and tweeted, "CIA steals other groups virus and malware facilitating false flag attacks." A conspiracy theory soon emerged alleging that the CIA framed the Russian government for interfering in the 2016 U.S. elections. Conservative commentators such as Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter speculated about this possibility on Twitter, and Rush Limbaugh discussed it on his radio show. Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said that Vault 7 showed that "the CIA could get access to such 'fingerprints' and then use them."


title: WikiLeaks

text: Cybersecurity writers, such as Ben Buchanan and Kevin Poulsen, were sceptical of those theories. Poulsen wrote, "The leaked catalog isn't organized by country of origin, and the specific malware used by the Russian DNC hackers is nowhere on the list."