WikiLeaks launches archive of US diplomatic documents

Julian Assange's controversial website WikiLeaks, known for baring secret government documents, on Sunday night announced the launch of Plus D, or the Public Library of United States Diplomacy, an effort to digitise both secret and formerly secret documents from US diplomatic history.

''Over 2 million US diplomatic docs now fully searchable in many ways: text, map, grid and graph at PlusD,'' WikiLeaks tweeted. This would make it the world's largest searchable archive of such documents. The search engine is available at http://wikileaks.org/plusd/.

The site says: ''In this library, as in the hearts of the people, the truth is enshrined forever''.

The group has started with a searchable archive that includes the 250,000 leaked State Department memos it had previously titled Cablegate and added to them 1.7 million files from the State Department during the 1973 to 1976 tenure of Henry Kissinger as Secretary of State. In total, the archive includes about a billion words.

''The collection covers US involvements in and diplomatic or intelligence reporting on, every country on earth,'' WikiLeaks describes the documents on its website. ''It is the single most significant body of geopolitical material ever published.''

Wikileaks founder Assange said the documents revealed the "vast range and scope" of US activity around the world.

The largely historical project represents a marked change for WikiLeaks, which until now has primarily focused on publishing leaked secret material with contemporary news value. The 1970s State Department files WikiLeaks has included in Plus D were already declassified, and most of them were previously available in the databases of the National Archives and Records Agency.

But Kristinn Hrafnsson, a spokesperson for WikiLeaks, said in a phone interview with Forbes magazine that the group hasn't strayed from its mission. ''These are hidden treasures, and very hard for the general public to get access to,'' he says. ''One form of secrecy is complexity. That's the reason why we decided to merge these files with our existing cables and put a lot of effort into making a user-friendly and accessible database.''

WikiLeaks spent months converting the nearly 2 million NARA files from PDF documents to text files, correcting typographic errors and adding metadata to make the files more easily searchable. Aside from having been stored in a difficult-to-access format by NARA, WikiLeaks notes that many of the files were corrupted by technical errors made the US State Department, leaving weeks- and months-long gaps in the data in places. All top secret declassified documents were excluded, too, because no digital versions of them were made available.

Plus D isn't the first release from WikiLeaks to show the group's increasing historic focus. Its last publication was the 'Detainee Policies', a collection of standard operating procedure manuals from the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay from 2002 to 2004.

The shift towards older documents may be a result in part of WikiLeaks' lack of an anonymous submission system since late 2010. Since then, the majority of WikiLeaks' new material, such as emails stolen from the private intelligence firm Stratfor and from the Syrian government, has reportedly been given to WikiLeaks by the hacker group Anonymous.

WikiLeaks' Hrafnsson emphasized Plus D's importance regardless of the fact that the material wasn't leaked to WikiLeaks. '' Our projects are varied,'' he says. ''This is a public service that should have been in the hands of the government.''

Hrafnsson noted that the US government has in some cases attempted to reclassify documents, and WikiLeaks' press release refers to a 2006 study by the US National Security Archives that found that 55,000 pages of declassified documents had later been made secret again. ''In many ways,'' Hrafnsson added, ''the government can't be trusted with its own archives.''