IT has proclaimed itself the “intelligence service of the people” and plans to have more agents than the CIA. They will be you and me.

WikiLeaks is a long way from that goal, but this week it staked its claim to be the dead drop of choice for whistle-blowers after releasing video the Pentagon claimed to have lost of US helicopter crews excitedly killing Iraqis on a Baghdad street in 2007. The dead included two Reuters news agency staff. The release of the shocking footage prompted an unusual degree of hand-wringing in a country weary of the Iraq war, and garnered WikiLeaks more than $150,000 in donations to keep its cash-starved operation on the road.

It also drew fresh attention to a largely anonymous group that has outpaced the competition in just a few short years by releasing to the world more than a million confidential documents from highly classified military secrets to Sarah Palin's hacked emails. WikiLeaks has posted the controversial correspondence between researchers at East Anglia University's Climatic Research Unit and text messages of those killed in the 9/11 attacks.

WikiLeaks has promised to change the world by abolishing official secrecy. In Britain it is helping to erode the use of the courts to suppress information. Its softly spoken Australian director, Julian Assange, was recently in Iceland, offering advice to legislators on new laws to protect whistle-blowers.

Assange, who describes what he does as a mix of hi-tech investigative journalism and advocacy, foresees a day when any confidential document, from secret orders that allow our own governments to spy on us down to the bossy letters from your children's school, will be posted on WikiLeaks for the whole world to see. And that, Assange believes, will change everything.

But there are those who fear that WikiLeaks is more like an intelligence service than it would care to admit — a shadowy, unaccountable organisation that tramples on individual privacy and other rights. And like so many others who have claimed to be acting in the name of the people, there are those who fear it risks oppressing them.

Assange has a shock of white hair and an air of conspiracy about him. He doesn't discuss his age or background, although it is known that he was raised in Melbourne and convicted as a teenager of hacking in to official and corporate websites. He appears to be perpetually on the move but when he stops for any length of time it is in Kenya. Almost nothing is said about anyone else involved with the project.

WikiLeaks was born in late 2006. Its founders, who WikiLeaks says comprised mostly Chinese dissidents, hackers, computer programmers and journalists, laid out their ambitions in emails inviting an array of figures with experience dealing with secret documents to join WikiLeak's board of advisers. Among those approached was the inspiration for the project, Daniel Ellsberg, the US military analyst who leaked the Pentagon papers about the Vietnam war to the New York Times four decades ago.

But the group ran into problems even before WikiLeaks was launched. The organisers approached John Young, who ran another website that posted leaked documents, Cryptome, and asked him to register the WikiLeaks website in his name. Young obliged but when the organisers announced their intention to try and raise $5m he questioned their motives, saying that kind of money could only come from the CIA or George Soros. Then he walked away. “WikiLeaks is a fraud,” he wrote in an email when he quit. Despite this sticky start, WikiLeaks soon began making a name for itself with a swathe of documents.

— The Guardian, London