My name is Andrew Frank. I grew up in a small town in the Okanagan valley of British Columbia. My granddad taught me how to fish. My father was a well-respected lawyer known for his unwavering integrity, and my mother was a favourite kindergarten teacher. Both have always impressed upon me the importance of telling the truth.

Today, I am taking the extraordinary step of risking my career, my reputation and my personal friendships, to act as a whistleblower and expose the undemocratic and potentially illegal pressure the Harper government has apparently applied to silence critics of the Enbridge Northern Gateway oil tanker-pipeline plan.

In January 2011, Al Jazeera launched its WikiLeaks-inspired Al Jazeera Transparency Unit (AJTU). The aim of the AJTU initiative is to promote tranparency in government and corporate practices.

Essentially, AJTU encourages whistleblowers to anonymously submit content for review by Al Jazeera's editorial department. Content submitted for evaluation may include documents, photography, audio and video clips, etc. Submissions deemed to be of merit may be featured on Al Jazeera broadcasts.

http://www.ajtransparency.com/

WikiLeaks is a whistleblower organization that publishes anonymously contributed confidential government and corporate documents on its website for public scrutiny. This non-profit media organization's aim is to expose oppressive regimes and unethical corporate practices via document dumps.

Within one year of its 2006 launch, WikiLeaks claimed a database of over 1.2 million classified documents.

Since its conception, WikiLeaks has inspired a number of spinoff organizations based on the original WikiLeaks model. Such spinoffs include: OpenLeaks, Balkan Leaks, Brussels Leaks, Indoleaks, RuLeaks, and TradeLeaks.

http://wikileaks.org

http://wikileaks.ch/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks