Fighting legal cases across five countries -- $1 million

Upkeep of servers in over 40 countries -- $200,000

Donations lost due to banking blockades -- $15 million

Added cost due to house arrest -- $500,000

Watching the world change as a result of your work -- priceless

Shadow and Light

Much of Assange's work at WikiLeaks was done with the help of German computer scientist Daniel Domscheit-Berg.

For more than a year he has been at the helm of a project anticipated by some as WikiLeaks' heir apparent. Domscheit-Berg registered the domain for OpenLeaks.org in 2010, two days after he resigned from WikiLeaks.

Domscheit-Berg wrote in his memoir that he could no longer work with Assange or accomplish what he felt was WikiLeaks' goal since the massive 2010 leaks began. He wrote that Assange was a "megalomaniac" and that he could run a more transparent and focused site.

OpenLeaks is now live, but it doesn't publish any leaks. It doesn't edit or release documents, but enables third parties to publish them.

For example, if someone had information that revealed something untoward was happening in higher education, he or she could send that to an education organization without OpenLeaks even having access to it. Have a story and documents for a news organization? Use OpenLeaks to send it securely, the group says.

Watch a video that describes how OpenLeaks works.

Other sites touted last year as WikiLeaks 2.0 don't appear to have taken off. Websites don't work, and it's unclear who is running what organization anymore, if they still exist. There's a general opaqueness in online leaking, which isn't surprising, given all the stresses involved in the practice.

One site mentioned sometimes by hackers and others is wikispooks.com. The site "invites 'whistleblower' type material through an anonymous upload facility which can be utilized in as secure a fashion as is possible on the vast spying machine that is today's World Wide Web."

CNN e-mailed an address on the Wikispooks site -- the only way it provides to communicate. CNN received a reply declining to talk about WikiSpooks. But the writer, whose identity CNN cannot verify, provided three links: The first describes what WikiSpooks is; the others address its "rationale" and "Anonymous Uploads."

There are other organizations happy to discuss their efforts to facilitate leaks online.

One of them is 100Reporters, which launched in October. The brainchild of former New York Times reporters relies on a network of experienced journalists who report stories focused on global corruption.

The site's "Whistleblower Alley" allows users to anonymously upload information and tips, said founder Diana Schemo. When a message is sent, it is automatically encrypted. Schemo receives a notice alerting her to the message. Only she possesses a code that can unscramble the encryption, Schemo explained.

The site isn't designed to receive large caches of documents, so someone sending a message would have to write that they have documents they'd like to send, and then 100Reporters decides whether to provide that person access to transmit those documents. The site explains in detail the various measures the group takes to help ensure security.

The idea for 100Reporters was conceived in 2010, the same year WikiLeaks became internationally famous for leaking the Afghan War Log and the Iraq War Diary, and the Arab Spring began to take root.