IDG News Service — Wikileaks has turned back on its system that allows whistleblowers to securely submit documents to the site after it was down for maintenance, according to the organization's blog.

Users can upload documents to the Web site using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), as it now has a new certificate. People can also use TOR (The Onion Router), a worldwide network of servers used to help anonymize people's Web traffic. Wikileaks plans to use SSL for other services such as Web sites but that feature is not available yet.

The organization said it also added "additional means of protection" to its Web-based IRC client, which allows people to chat with Wikileaks staff.

The archive has also been reactivated although Wikileaks is still improving it. "The most visible changes so far are the support for torrents and magnet links for files referenced in the archive, a facelift of the design, content cleanup," according to the blog. "Public edits are still disabled but will be enabled again. Public comments will be disabled until we have an appropriate solution in place."

Wikileaks also said it undertook steps to hide the identities of users working on its wiki and protecting the identity of people who visit the site. Accounts that were unused for more than a year were also deleted. Wikileaks staff could not be immediately reached for comment on the changes.

Started in 2006, Wikileaks has broken big news stories via submissions, including startling footage released on April 5 of an Apache (APA) helicopter attack in Iraq in 2007 that killed up to a dozen civilians, including two employers of the Reuters news service.

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