Defectors from WikiLeaks Are Setting Up Competing Website OpenLeaks
A new whistleblower website, competing to WikiLeaks, is about to be launched by former staffers of Julian Assange’s, who is in prison in Britain and is expecting to be indicted by the United States on top of the Swedish indictment for alleged sexual crimes.
The new site is supposed to be called OpenLeaks, and will be headed by Daniel Domscheit-Berg, former right hand of Assange’s, who left the team in September after quarreling over the autocratic ways of the Australian editor-in-chief.
OpenLeaks will be a little different than WikiLeaks, being designed to accept the leaks in a secured and anonymous way, without publishing them itself.
OpenLeaks will also cooperate with newspapers and journals all over the world, who will assess whether the texts are worthy of being published, and will also edit and redact them the way they seem fit before they release them.
By that, OpenLeaks hopes to solve a problem over which WikiLeaks has been repeatedly accused: that of avoiding publishing the documents indiscriminately, with no regard for the safety of the people mentioned in the document.
WikiLeaks came under heavy criticism after the release of numerous documents about the war in Afghanistan, when names and addresses were disclosed. President of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai protested on that occasion that the names of Afghan collaborators with the U.S. Army were made public, thus placing their lives in danger.
In an open session at the time of the release of the documents about Afghanistan, Daniel Domscheit-Berg accused Assange of acting like an “emperor and slave trader.”
This concern for the safety of those mentioned in the leaks is one of the most important arguments defectors from WikiLeaks are invoking in setting up OpenLeaks.
Even though now, as the “Cablegate” is under way, WikiLeaks is still under intense fire, it looks like Assange’s team learnt from the prior mistakes and did not publish the documents as recklessly as it had done before.
The message OpenLeaks is trying to convey is that though WikiLeaks may be shut down, other leakers are waiting to take its place.
