Wikileaks organization costs have increased more than 13 times the level at which there were only six months ago, said the vice president of the organization that deals with financial management of the site, Hendrik Fulda. From a modest level of only $ 38,000 per month during the period October 2009 – July 2010, Wikileaks has now reached approximately $ 100,000 per month.
The new charges come, according to statements of Fulda, from paying the employees of WikiLeaks. This move is a new one for the website, which until this year was based on a very small permanent staff of only a few people, plus hundreds of volunteers who help keeping the website. There still have not been released data on the number of employees or the wages, but the foundation WAU Holland, who handles the finances of the site, promised a detailed report before the end of the year.
The German Foundation, WAU Holland, has several connections with the group of hackers declared Chaos Computer Club (CCC), one of the oldest in the world with uninterrupted activity since 1981. WAU Holland is the name of one of the cofounders of the group of hackers.
In a recent interview, Fulda said the organization received in the period October 2009 – December 2010 approximately 1.2 million dollars in donations, of which $ 495,000 was spent in the last five months.
Only $ 20,000 was provided by Wikileaks to defend Bradley Manning, who has put at the disposal of the site 250,000 telegrams which put the diplomatic world on fire in recent weeks, plus hundreds of thousands of military documents about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The amount is much smaller than promised by Julian Assange, who pledged to contribute half of Manning’s defense costs, estimated at $ 100,000.
There still have not been made public the costs of cyber attacks and its successful move across multiple servers.
Currently Wikileaks can not receive donations through any one of the main channels used so far (Paypal, Visa and Mastercard), and the impact this will have on site’s capacity to operate in the future is unknown.