An online whistleblowing group has circulated online classified U.S. military video showing a 2007 attack by Apache helicopters that killed a dozen people in Baghdad, including two Reuters news staff. The group, Wikileaks.org, told a news conference at the National Press Club that it acquired encrypted video of the July 12, 2007, attack from military whistleblowers and had been able to view and investigate it after breaking the encryption code, Reuters reported.

The video, linked here shows an aerial view of the scene of and includes audio from the Apache helicopter pilots engaged in the attack. It includes graphic images and disturbing language.

A U.S. defense official confirmed that the video and audio were authentic, according to Reuters. Our colleagues in the NYT’s Baghdad bureau report today that the family of one of the Reuters staff wept as they watched the footage.

Wikileaks.org, a nonprofit group, was created in the spring of 2007, and its disclosure of classified military information is not an unprecedented move for the group. The group’s online whistleblowing has riled the military and corporations in the past. In March, as our colleague, Stephanie Strom wrote about the group’s release of an internal Pentagon report.

The Pentagon concluded that “WikiLeaks.org represents a potential force protection, counterintelligence, OPSEC and INFOSEC threat to the U.S. Army” — or, in plain English, a threat to Army operations and information.

On its behalf, Wikileaks.org describes itself as “an intelligence agency of the people.”

Our colleague Elisabeth Bumiller has more details on the release of the video in a story appearing in Tuesday’s New York Times.

In an interview from Germany last night, Daniel Schmitt, a spokesman for Wikileaks, said he: “From my human point of view, I couldn’t believe it would be so easy to wreak that kind of havoc on the city, when they can’t see what is really go on there.”

He said the organization has been working for months to find and deploy powerful computers to de-encrypt the military videos, beginning with a request via Twitter in January that Wikileaks “needed supercomputer time.”

He said that the effort is ongoing. “There are more videos than just that one video,” Mr. Schmitt said.

Wikileaks was created in the spring of 2007 as “an intelligence agency of the people.” The idea was to take advantage of the global reach of the Internet and to bring to light hidden information about governments and multinational corporations.

By being everywhere and no one exact place, Wikileaks is, in effect, beyond the reach of any government that hopes to silence it. And there have been many that have tried, starting with a United States district court judge in California. In 2008, Judge Jeffrey S. White ordered the American version of the site shut down after it published confidential documents concerning a subsidiary of the Swiss bank. Two weeks later he reversed himself, in part recognizing that the order had little effect since the same material could be accessed on a number of other “mirror sites.”

In Britain, Wikileaks has been used a number of times to evade injunctions on publication by courts who ruled that the material would violate the privacy of the people involved. These courts, too, reversed themselves when they discovered how ineffectual their rulings were.