In 2010, governments that ruled in secret faced a new enemy: WikiLeaks. Set up by the Australian hacker Julian Assange, the once-fringe whistle-blowing website shot to world fame with a string of monumental ‘document dumps’, in what was called the largest government leak in history. Philosophically opposed to state secrecy, the Internet-based watchdog organisation first grabbed the headlines in April 2010 when it posted harrowing video footage of US Apache helicopter pilots killing a dozen men in Baghdad in 2007, including two unarmed employees of the Reuters news agency. In July, it published 75,000 battlefield reports, spanning six years, from the US military in Afghanistan. The huge cache of documents, which were made available to the Guardian, Der Spiegel and the New York Times, painted a devastating picture of the failing war in the country, revealing unreported civilian casualties, soaring Taliban attacks, and the fear among NATO commanders that the neighbouring states of Iran and Pakistan were aiding the insurgency. Three months later, a further 400,000 war logs were published, this time about the conflict in Iraq. With simultaneous coverage again provided by the newspapers, the documents detailed the deaths of thousands of Iraqi civilians, and suggested that the US military had ignored evidence of torture committed by Iraqi security forces against suspected insurgents. The White House condemned the website, with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proposing that the releases put the work and even lives of coalition forces at risk. Hawks branded Assange a ‘cyber-terrorist’ and called for his arrest, trial and possible execution. Unbowed, in late November he began unleashing a torrent of some 250,000 diplomatic cables from US embassies and consulates around the world, providing an unprecedented look at the hidden world of backstage international relations. The material contained brutally candid, and often unflattering, assessments of foreign statesmen, with British officials among those targeted. Cables revealed that President Obama, no less, thought Prime Minister David Cameron (then in opposition) a ‘political lightweight’ after their first meeting in 2008.