WikiLeaks, in John Kiriakou’s account, is best understood not as the work of one man but as a system — a durable piece of infrastructure for whistleblower protection that outlasted any single leak, and one substantial enough to merit its own history separate from Julian Assange personally. Kiriakou made the point explicitly: whatever comes next from WikiLeaks, “maybe… the next iteration of WikiLeaks that comes across, there’s not a person. It’s, you know, it’s a system.”[1]
Origins and the 2010 turning point
WikiLeaks began publishing material in 2007, starting with U.S. military documents from Afghanistan and Iraq, but its defining moment came in 2010 with the release of military and diplomatic cables sourced from Chelsea Manning.[2]
A whistleblower-protection system
Kiriakou describes WikiLeaks, in practice, as a protective mechanism for sources: “We used to tell people all the time, if you really want to leak national security information for the purpose of blowing the whistle on waste, fraud, abuse, illegality, or threats to the public health or public safety, you got to do it through WikiLeaks because they’re the only ones who are going to protect your identity.”[3] He ties the need for that protection directly to the Whistleblower Protection Act’s exemption for national-security employees, which leaves the press — and outlets like WikiLeaks — as the only remaining option. Elsewhere he has made the same point more simply: WikiLeaks, he says, has never burned a source.[4]
He credits WikiLeaks with a broader cultural effect: before 2010, he says, the word “whistleblower” was barely part of his vocabulary — “I may have heard it once in my lifetime before WikiLeaks” — but afterward it entered everyday conversation, including inside the secret spaces where he worked.[5]
Credited impact: the Arab Spring
WikiLeaks is, per the same discussion Kiriakou took part in, attributed as a contributing source for the Arab Spring, its revelations feeding into the wave of protests and uprisings that followed.[5]
The NGO option Assange refused
At the same 2026 Berlin panel, a fellow panelist — not Kiriakou — argued that after 2010, WikiLeaks faced a fork in its institutional path: it could have become an NGO accepting American government financing, which would have made it “a lame operation.” That panelist credited Julian Assange personally with steering WikiLeaks away from that outcome and keeping it an organization willing to openly violate the conventions safer, government-funded operations would not.[6][7]
Public opinion and the 2016 election
At the same 2026 Berlin panel, an audience member — not Kiriakou or any panelist — raised the concern that WikiLeaks’ revelations may not move public opinion even when they succeed as journalism, noting of the 2010 cable releases: “the effect… is that then Trump got elected. I think the fact that it didn’t really change the mind of people that when we are whistleblowing, coming out with… scoops, we see that that doesn’t affect the public opinion.”[8]
Years of confinement before Belmarsh
At the same 2026 Berlin panel, another speaker noted that the persecution of Assange was not limited to his time in Belmarsh Prison — much of his life had already been spent in some form of confinement before Belmarsh and before his years in the Ecuadorian embassy.[9]