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IPFS News Link • Conspiracies

WikiLeaks Donations Topped $1.9 Million in 2010

• Kim Zetter via WIRED.com

A German nonprofit that processes most of the donations submitted to the secret-spilling site WikiLeaks has finally made good on a nearly year-old promise to release a report detailing how those donations are spent — though the report remains silent on how much money was paid to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

The Berlin-based Wau Holland Foundation, which accepted donations for WikiLeaks via PayPal and bank account transfers, quietly released the report on its website (.pdf) April 16.

According to the report, the foundation received about $1.9 million on behalf of WikiLeaks in 2010. More than half of that amount, or $700,000, came in November and December, after WikiLeaks and several newspapers began publishing a trove of U.S. diplomatic cables allegedly received from Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning.

A $15,100 contribution WikiLeaks made to Manning’s defense in January of this year is not reflected in the report, which only covers expenses and contributions through December of 2010.

Of the total money received, the Wau Holland Foundation distributed about $585,000 to WikiLeaks to cover expenses. A little more than $200,000 of this went to WikiLeaks for the cost of processing submissions, such as “reviewing and editing incoming material, video authoring, analyzing and arranging a large number of documents … anonymisation and much more.” The sum also includes the “involvement of external experts like journalists.”

In 2010, WikiLeaks sent two Swedish journalists to Iraq to locate and interview two children who were injured in an Army Apache attack, a battle that featured in the now-famous Iraq “Collateral Murder” video that WikiLeaks published in April of last year.

According to the Wau Holland report, an additional $152,000 was paid to “a few heads of project and activists,” for services invoiced. This appears to reference salaries paid to staffers, though the report doesn’t specify how that expense differs from the expenses attributed to processing submissions.

 

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