The secret-spilling website WikiLeaks appears to be a frugal spender, tapping less than 5 percent of the funds received through two of its three donation methods, according to the third-party foundation that manages those contributions.
WikiLeaks has received 640,000 euros (U.S. $800,000) through PayPal or bank money transfers* since late December, and spent only 30,000 euros (U.S. $38,000) from that funding, says Hendrik Fulda, vice president of the Berlin-based Wau Holland Foundation.
The money has gone to pay the travel expenses of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and spokesman Daniel Schmitt, as well as to cover the costs of computer hardware, such as servers, and leasing data lines, says Fulda. WikiLeaks does not currently pay a salary to Assange or other volunteers from this funding, though there have been discussions about doing so in the future, Fulda adds. The details have not yet been worked out.
"If you are drawing from volunteers who are basically doing stuff for free and if you start paying money, the question is to whom, and to whom not, do you pay, and how much?" Fulda said. "It's almost a moral question: How much money do you pay?"
The spending figures were first reported by the German paper Der Freitag, after a series of anonymous posts circulated online accusing WikiLeaks of misusing donor funds. The posts were authored by an anonymous person who claimed to be a WikiLeaks insider, and appeared on Cryptome.org, a competing transparency site.
The limited financial disclosure by the Wau Holland Foundation this week offers the first look at how WikiLeaks spends some of its money. WikiLeaks does not publish such figures itself, but has claimed to have $200,000 a year in operating costs, and to have raised about $1 million in total.
Fulda said Assange and Schmitt travel coach when they fly on behalf of WikiLeaks, and that they have focused expenses on building and maintaining the site's infrastructure, submitting original receipts to the foundation whenever WikiLeaks needs expenses reimbursed. Fulda would not provide a more detailed breakdown of all the money paid out so far, but says his foundation is producing a report that will be available in August that should provide more transparency.
The foundation manages donations sent to WikiLeaks from people around the world through PayPal and wire transfers directed to a bank account controlled by the foundation. It does not handle donations submitted through Moneybookers, a PayPal-like service, that WikiLeaks also lists on its website as a method for donating.
Fulda says WikiLeaks may have other sources of funding -- perhaps from private donors and other foundations -- but he has no knowledge of them.
"But I believe we are taking in the majority of the donations that are coming in through Europe and elsewhere," he said.
WikiLeaks' Assange declined to discuss the organization's budget with Threat Level.
The Wau Holland Foundation is named after Herwart Holland-Moritz, also known as Wau Holland. He founded the Chaos Computer Club, a hacker club in Germany that has been at the forefront of the hacking community since its establishment in 1981.
WikiLeaks approached the foundation last year to manage its donations because of its reputation in supporting the concept of freedom of information. Although the foundation is run by unpaid volunteers, Fulda said its advantage is that it has a more formal structure to manage funds than does WikiLeaks.
Wau Holland began handling donations for the site beginning last October. The foundation adheres to Germany's rules for accountability.
"We have certain responsibilities for this money, and we are taking this seriously," Fulda says.
WikiLeaks went offline last December after running out of money, and pleaded for donations. Fulda said the foundation had received only about 5,000 euros (U.S. $6,000) in donations on behalf of the whistleblowing site at the time. WikiLeaks tweeted on December 24 that it would be down until at least January 6, but that period stretched to five months, during most of which the site's archive was unavailable.
The site didn't come back online until May, and even then, its support for encrypted downloading was absent, as was its Tor Hidden Service -- previously the most secure way to leak documents to the website. Its secure submission webpage stopped working in mid-June. Though there's been no announcement on the website explaining the limited functionality, Assange has since said that the site's infrastructure is being re-tooled to handle the increased load that media attention has brought it.
Donations began pouring in once people saw in January that the site needed help, Fulda said. WikiLeaks' plea for donations indicated the site needed to raise at least $200,000 to cover a year's worth of operating expenses, increased to at least $600,000 if its volunteers were to be paid.
"Just asking for money [before this] didn’t really work," Fulda said. "There was nothing coming in. But when the website had to go down because of lack of funds, then money was coming in."
The site got another boost in donations in April after it published the controversial video showing a 2007 U.S. Army helicopter attack in Baghdad. WikiLeaks claimed it raised more than $150,000 in less than a week after the release of the video. A U.S. Army intelligence analyst named Bradley Manning was since arrested and charged with being WikiLeaks' source for the video. Assange and other WikiLeaks volunteers have claimed that the organization commissioned lawyers to defend Manning, and the group has campaigned for more donations from the public to cover the legal expenses.
Fulda said that no money handled by the foundation has gone to pay expenses for Manning's defense. He didn't know if WikiLeaks obtained money from other sources for the purpose. He said, however, that his foundation would have no problem in principle paying such legal expenses.
"Defending whistleblowers is one of the objectives of WikiLeaks," he said. "So I don't see an issue with that in theory. How this would work in practice would need to be sorted out."
Donations channeled through the foundation did not pay for WikiLeaks' editing and production costs behind the Iraq video, he said. A recent New Yorker profile of WikiLeaks indicated that Dutch hacker and businessman Rop Gonggrijp stepped in to cover those expenses, advancing about 10,000 euros to finance it.
The 640,000 euros that WikiLeaks raised this year is enough to sustain it through the first quarter of next year, Fulda said, covering the costs of a more robust infrastructure that Assange and others are currently working to build.
But the surge of donations has since slowed to a trickle -- about 2,000 euros a month, Fulda said.
"The volume of money coming in is way, way down since the website went back up," he said. "I think people get the message that if the website is down there is not enough money. As long as the website is up, [people think] there seems to be enough money."
Fulda said WikiLeaks can't depend indefinitely on drastic measures, such as taking down the site, to raise funds. Nor can it depend on receiving a constant stream of high-profile submissions, like the Iraq video, to bring it attention and entice donations. Ultimately, it will need to find a new model for funding to sustain itself.
"Handing out something big like the Iraq video works, but I don't think this is sustainable," Fulda said. "A big hit is a good thing, but a website like WikiLeaks is mostly not about the big hits, but about a lot of interesting small hits. Our advice to them is to build something that is sustainable without the big hits."
*Update August 4, 2010: A previous version of this story indicated that WikiLeaks had received $500,000 from both Paypal and direct money transfers. Fulda has since clarified that the $500,000 referred only to donations received via PayPal. An additional 240,000 euros (U.S. $300,000) was received through direct bank money transfers.
See Also:
- With World Watching, Wikileaks Falls Into Disrepair
- U.S. Intelligence Analyst Arrested in Wikileaks Video Probe
- Secret Document Calls Wikileaks 'Threat' to U.S. Army
- Wikileaks Was Launched With Documents Intercepted From Tor
- Wikileaks Closes Operations Temporarily Due to Budget Woes
- Immune to Critics, Secret-Spilling Wikileaks Plans to Save Journalism
