That certainly didn’t take long. The former number two at Wikileaks, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, has said that he will launch the next-generation of leaking software (I guess you’d call it software) in the “coming months.” It’s to be called Openleaks, previously covered here, and it will try to fix some of the problems associated with the Wikileaks model, namely centralization.
Unlike Wikileaks, Openleaks will be a “conduit” of information rather than a publisher of information (it “aims to provide the technological means to organizations and other entities around the world to be able to accept anonymous submissions in the forms of documents or other information,” said Domscheit-Berg. Whereas Wikileaks receives information, vets it, then released it on its site, Openleaks will simply exist to pass information along. It’ll be up to other organizations, like NGOs and “other interested entities,” not to mention traditional news outlets, to vet everything.
One of the big things that Openleaks will do away with is any sort of person becoming synonymous with it. When you think of Wikileaks you naturally think of Julian Assange, which is not how Openleaks wants to go about doing things. It doesn’t want a public “face” lest ego get involved, nor does it want any perceptible single point of failure.
That’s why Domscheit-Berg and others originally left Wikileaks, that it became too much about Wikileaks itself (and Assange, as it were) than about the information the site was publishing.
Openleaks will establish some sort of foundation in Germany to help build its legitimacy.
In other Wikileaks news, The Guardian, which is pretty much the go-to place for English-language Wikileaks news, has a lengthy story about the people behind the denial of service attacks against companies like Amazon and MasterCard. Worth a read if you have a minute. (And lol at The Guardian for using Colloquy for IRC—real men use X-Chat.)
