WikiLeaks-style website yields 24 tip-offs including elephant poaching, tiger killing, illegal fishery and forest destruction
theguardian.com, Thursday 12 June 2014 13.27 BST
A new WikiLeaks-style website targeting the kingpins of wildlife crime has attracted serious leads on elephant, tiger, fishery and forest destruction across the globe in its first three months.
The WildLeaks website, which uses Tor technology to ensure anonymity, has been set up by Andrea Crosta, a security consultant who first revealed how the al-Shabaab terrorist group in Somalia generated funds via ivory smuggling.
The slaughter of elephants, rhinos, tigers and other species has surged in the last decade, part of an illicit wildlife trade worth $10-20bn a year according to Interpol. Only drugs, people and arms trafficking earn more for criminals and the corruption and violence accompanying wildlife crimetakes a heavy toll on local communities.
“We had our first tip within 24 hours and the response has been beyond our wildest imagination,” said Crosta, now executive director of theElephant Action League. He said the pervasive corruption means that whistleblowers frequently fear that contacting local law enforcement could put their lives in danger. “You can’t, for example, export containers full of ivory from Mombasa without bribing people left, right and centre,” Crosta told the Guardian. “We definitely feel we are filling a gap.”
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