The WikiLeaks website says their goal 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.”
Another of the organisation’s goals is to ensure that whistleblowers and journalists are not jailed for emailing sensitive or classified documents. The online “drop box” (currently not functioning) was designed to “provide an innovative, secure and anonymous way for sources to leak information to our journalists.”
In an interview on The Colbert Report, Assange discussed the limit to the freedom of speech, saying, “[it is] not an ultimate freedom, however free speech is what regulates government and regulates law. That is why in the US Constitution the Bill of Rights says that Congress is to make no such law abridging the freedom of the press. It is to take the rights of the press outside the rights of the law because those rights are superior to the law because in fact they create the law. Every constitution, every bit of legislation is derived from the flow of information. Similarly every government is elected as a result of people understanding things”.[33]