Julian Assange, the Australian founder of WikiLeaks. Picture by Getty Images

WIKILEAKS, which champions openness when leaking classified or confidential documents, is protecting a secret of its own - funding.

Some governments and corporations, angered by the publication of such documents by the controversial website, have already sued WikiLeaks or blocked access to it.

The reaction to the website’s work has escalated to the extent that the group now fears its money and infrastructure could be targeted further, founder Julian Assange said.

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Mr Assange was speaking in a London interview shortly after publishing 76,000 classified US documents about the war in Afghanistan in July. The move sparked international controversy and put WikiLeaks in the spotlight.

In response, the site has established a complex system for collecting and disbursing its donations to obscure their origin and use, Mr Assange said. Anchoring the system is a foundation in Germany that was established in memory of a computer hacker who died in 2001.

WikiLeaks’ financial stability has waxed and waned during its short history. The site shut down briefly late last year, citing a lack of funds, but Mr Assange said the group has raised about $US1 million ($1.1m) since the start of 2010.

The web organisation’s lack of financial transparency stands in contrast to the total transparency it seeks from governments and corporations.

“It's very hard work to run an organisation, let alone one that's constantly being spied upon and sued,” Mr Assange said in the interview. “Judicial decisions can have an effect on an organisation's operation. We can't have our cash flow constrained entirely,” he said.

One of the legal wrangles WikiLeaks has faced involves Swiss bank Julius Baer & Co.

In 2008, Julius Baer sued for damages in the federal court in California, alleging that the site had published stolen bank documents. The court ordered the disabling of the wikileaks.org domain name, but the bank withdrew its lawsuit after civil-rights advocates protested.

Though Mr Assange declined to name donors or certain companies through which donations flow, he provided some insight into the funding structure that allows the group to operate.

The linchpin of WikiLeaks's financial network is Germany's Wau Holland Foundation.

WikiLeaks encourages donors to contribute to its account at the foundation, which under German law can’t publicly disclose the names of donors. Due to the fact that the foundation “is not an operational concern, it can't be sued for doing anything”, Mr Assange said. “So the donors' money is protected, in other words, from lawsuits.”

The German foundation is only one piece of the WikiLeaks network.

“We're registered as a library in Australia, we're registered as a foundation in France, we're registered as a newspaper in Sweden,” Mr Assange said. WikiLeaks has two tax-exempt charitable organisations in the US, known as 501C3s, that “act as a front” for the website, he said. He declined to give their names, saying they could “lose some of their grant money because of political sensitivities”.

Mr Assange said WikiLeaks gets about half its money from modest donations processed by its website, and the other half from “personal contacts”, including “people with some millions who approach us and say, ‘I'll give you 60,000 or 10,000’,” he said, without specifying a currency.

Retrieving money from the Wau Holland Foundation is a complicated task, according to Mr Assange. WikiLeaks must submit receipts to the foundation, which issues grants to reimburse them. German law requires the foundation to publicly disclose its expenditures, and so WikiLeaks uses “other foundations” to aggregate its bills and send them to Wau Holland, so that some of the companies WikiLeaks does business with remain anonymous, Mr Assange said. This prevents anyone from seeing whom, for example, WikiLeaks pays for its internet infrastructure, or where that infrastructure is located.

To operate, the website needs several powerful computers linked to high-speed internet connections. WikiLeaks particularly tries to obscure payments for “basic infrastructure that could be attacked”, for “servers that are engaged in source protection”, and for “security engineers”, Mr Assange said.

So far, Wau Holland has distributed €50,000 ($71,400) to a WikiLeaks account in Germany, strictly in exchange for receipts, according to Daniel Schmitt, spokesman at WikiLeaks, and Hendrik Fulda, deputy board chairman of the foundation. Mr Schmitt controls the account.

The average donation to WikiLeaks via the Wau Holland Foundation is about €20, Mr Fulda said. The largest donation through the foundation - €10,000 - arrived from a German donor after the publication of the Afghan war documents, he said, declining to reveal further details.

Mr Schmitt said WikiLeaks needs about $US200,000 a year to cover its operating expenses - mainly network fees, rent and storage costs for the sites where the servers are, and some hardware and travel expenses. Should it decide to pay salaries to its five staff members, as it is now considering, it would need about €600,000 ($857,500) a year, he said.

Paying salaries is a “sensitive subject”, he said, noting that outsiders might question the need for them.

Mr Fulda of the foundation said WikiLeaks needs €10,000 to €15,000 a month to maintain its web presence. Late last year, when donors were contributing only €2000 to €3000 per month, WikiLeaks was struggling to survive, he said. So it shut down its website in December, leaving up only an appeal for donors to transfer money to the group via the Wau Holland Foundation. Soon, donations per month increased 20-fold.

WikiLeaks reopened its website in May, but “within days … donations dropped back to near their former level”, Mr Fulda said.

The fluctuation caught the attention of Wau Holland's banking partners including eBay's PayPal, which demanded explanations for the surge and fall in donations. “I explained it wasn't money laundering, just WikiLeaks donations,” Mr Fulda said.

A PayPal official said the company is “still processing payments for WikiLeaks”. She said that she couldn't comment further on a specific account but that in general, PayPal is required by anti-money-laundering laws and its own anti-fraud regulations to investigate accounts when they exceed certain limits.

WikiLeaks has tried to diversify away from PayPal by adding other payment options to its site, including Flattr.com, a payment system based in Sweden, and Moneybookers, a system based in the UK.

An official for Moneybookers said the company used to provide services to WikiLeaks, but “as they don't adhere to Moneybookers' standards, the agreement was terminated”. She declined to comment further. Flattr didn't respond to a request for comment.

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