Inside WikiLeaks

by Daniel Domscheit-Berg

  The Australian police have meanwhile suspended the investigations concerning WL, having been unable to find any violation of Australian law. The situation is different in the United States, however, where efforts are still being made to drag WL and its supporters in front of the courts and hinder further publications. American legal experts differ as to whether American laws allow for charges to be brought in this regard, and whether, if that is the case, the United States would also have to charge the periodicals that published WL material. The latter would appear to contradict the guarantee of freedom of speech in the First Amendment to the Constitution.

  Ironically, Julian could potentially be charged under the Espionage Act he was so fond of quoting to us. In order for that to happen, though, the US attorney general would have to show that Julian intentionally acted in such a way as to damage the United States. I can’t imagine how this could be proven. I’m no legal expert, but I think any resulting trial would be both absurd and undemocratic.

  At present, American prosecutors are concentrating on showing that Julian actively solicited certain information, which would mean he could be charged as an accomplice to our sources. That might benefit Bradley Manning, the man who may or may not have been the source behind the leaked military documents. If Julian did play an active role in soliciting this leak, he would have violated one of WikiLeaks’s core principles.

  On the other hand, I am fundamentally opposed to anyone facing legal sanction for making information public. Instituting legal protections to this end, which is the basic idea of the IMMI, is a cause that all journalists, publishers, politicians, and concerned citizens should support. Moreover, I remain in favor of publishing the cables. The decision to do so was both correct and important, and I would leap to the defense of anyone involved in the publication.

  A lot has been written, especially in newspapers that are not privileged partners of WL, that the cables contained no real information. That makes me ask what people think is important other than sports scores and celebrity gossip. Is it really so totally uninteresting that a Lebanese defense minister would hope for Israel to bomb his country so his government could move against Hezbollah? I think it’s also worth knowing that in addition to undermining the political authority of the United Nations, the United States also systematically spies on UN members. That Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asked her diplomats to collect information on top UN figures, including their e-mail passwords, health information, and credit card numbers. Or that a former vice president of Afghanistan was caught with a suitcase containing $52 million in Dubai but got off scot-free. I find this interesting—not least because I ask myself how the man managed to fit so much money in a suitcase to begin with.

  As a German citizen, I’m also interested in the fact that Helmut Metzner, a high-ranking official in the Free Democrats’ party headquarters, was passing on information to Washington. God knows, I’ve read a lot more pointless stuff in newspapers. People who say that everyone knows politicians lie and deceive and spy and bribe are only giving themselves an excuse for not getting involved in politics. Do people refuse to watch the nightly news just because everybody knows that wars are going on all over the world, or that people often aren’t very nice to one another?

  I have even less sympathy for those backward-looking defenders of nontransparency who are always telling the world that some things need to be kept secret. We in the West have a long and unworthy tradition of choking off attempts at public discussion with reference to some “greater good” that needs to be protected. I have yet to hear a convincing argument for why this should be the case. I am convinced that citizens not only can, but must be burdened with the truth. Why shouldn’t the German public, for instance, be aware that their nation’s military is involved in a number of wars around the world? Why should people be protected from knowing about global machinations and problems? Arguments to the contrary are paternalistic, elitist bullshit, and I think it’s very reasonable to fight for increased transparency and equal access to knowledge for all.

  Nonetheless, I do have a couple of problems with how the cables are being published. The first concerns the role of WL’s exclusive media partners. Writer and professor of political theory Herfried Münkler published an article in Der Spiegel criticizing the fact that they appeared at all. I don’t agree with much that Münkler wrote, but on one important point he was right: Someone who criticizes the fact that secrets always remain in the hands of a chosen few with power must answer the question of whether his publishing strategy truly makes them accessible to everyone. Is it not the case, as Münkler asked, that with the cables only the guardians of the secrets are being replaced?

  Confidential information once kept under wraps by the US State Department and the American military is now in the hands of five large media companies and Julian Assange. They decide what is of public interest and what is not. The recent Cablegate publications are a far cry from the original ideas behind WikiLeaks. I think they stray much too far from those basic principles.

  What’s more, people are now apparently traveling the world offering unreleased dispatches to other media outlets. One of these people is Johannes Wahlström from Sweden. Wahlström is the son of Israel Shamir, a notorious anti-Semite and Holocaust denier of Russian-Israeli extraction. Kristinn Hrafnsson, WL’s new official spokesman, has described both Wahlström and Shamir as belonging to WL. I think Julian is aware of the sort of people he’s associating himself with—there’s been contact with Shamir, at least, for years. When Julian first learned about Shamir’s political background, he considered whether he might be able to work for WikiLeaks under a pseudonym. Once, he described to me things Shamir had written as “very clever really.” This is not to say Julian is anti-Semitic. In my experience, he was critical of Israel, but his criticism was always directed solely at the Israeli government. So I have no clue why he tolerates a notorious anti-Semite in his immediate environment.

  From the outside, it looks as through Wahlström has passed on the cables to various media outlets in Scandinavia while his father has assumed responsibility for the Russian market. Although WL’s five chosen media partners have repeatedly denied buying access to the leaks, the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten outright admitted to paying for a look at the cables. All the other newspapers, including some Russian ones, have refused to provide any information about possible deals with WL.

  What I find even worse than exchanging money for leaks, though, is the possibility that someone could use them for non-journalistic purposes. Or the chance that someone could purchase exclusive access to documents with the express intent of ensuring that they never see the light of day. It wouldn’t be the first time documents were kept under lock and key because someone feared what they had to say.

  THE architect and I registered the domain for our new project on September 17, 2010, two days after we left WikiLeaks. We had long been thinking about how the whistle-blower platform of the future should be, the kind of things it should be capable of. It was one of the things I had worked on, for example, with one of our supporters for our application to the Knight Foundation.

  We had kept Julian regularly informed, but he hadn’t seemed all that interested. Julian had his own ideas about how WL should develop. He wanted to release one leak after another, as aggressively as possible, and generate a maximum of conflict. He seemed to have no interest in content or further technological development. Probably he was just not the sort of person who plans for the long-term future.

  The real problem with WikiLeaks is that it tried to do too many things at once. WL encompassed the entire whistle-blowing process. The sources uploaded the documents; WL members erased the metadata, verified the submissions, and provided the context in additional texts. In the end, everything was put on the WL site.

  At some point, it became impossible to do all these jobs adequately. There were simply too many documents coming in. That would have taken hundreds of deeply involved volunteers. So we were compelled to ma
ke choices. Which leaks should see the light of day, and which ones would lie unpublished on servers spread across the world? We were overwhelmed. This was no doubt very disappointing for would-be whistle-blowers who are still waiting to see the rewards of their courage and hoping for changes that would gradually improve our society.

  Every selection process involves a kind of censorship, and every instance of censorship has a political component. It begins with the people involved agreeing to solicit public attention for a certain topic. And no one would deny anymore that WL attracts public attention. Because one person, Julian Assange, held too many of the strings, WikiLeaks became a global political player—something it was never intended to be. That spelled the end of our pledge to maintain strict neutrality—one of WL’s most important principles.

  At some point, we all realized that we would have to find partners. But Julian alone wanted to decide which media outlets we cooperated with. By all indications, he also later tried to cut out publications when he didn’t like what they reported. It was an indirect attempt to force journalists to write positive things about WikiLeaks. The conflicts with journalists have left behind a lot of scorched earth. It shows clearly that this sort of approach doesn’t work.

  For a long time I had asked myself whether any single platform could ever meet the needs of all the various people concerned. WL received documents from all over the world about the most diverse subjects; everything from American foreign policy to East Timor and Kenya on down to a building-permits office in a small town. Was the solution really to have a single platform for all of this? We had become a five-and-dime store or, even worse, a giant supermarket for secret documents. But in terms of our expertise and resources we were more like a small specialty IT firm.

  It was much wiser to concentrate on strengths. Our new approach is to offer only the technical infrastructure for whistle-blowers. That also reduces the likelihood that any one individual has too much power within the system.

  At OL, we’re taking a new path, sharing responsibility and distributing the burden to many shoulders—ideally using the people best suited for the particular task.

  Separating the receipt and publication of documents would not only solve the problem of centralization, it would also prevent OpenLeaks from beginning to exert political influence of its own. The information and the decisions about what to do with it should be in the hands of those who have experience in these areas.

  The media could take over the publication of documents leaked to OL, but so too could NGOs, trade unions, or other organizations devoted to making things publicly transparent. They all had experience with documents that were kept under lock and key. They knew how to deal with them, could evaluate them professionally and decide what should be published in what form—either as a report or a complete collection of documents.

  We have also uncovered decisions about which potential OpenLeaks partners should receive documents from external influences. For us there is only one person who could legitimately make this decision: the source.

  At OpenLeaks, if sources think that something is best suited to the local press, they have the right to see that this happens. If they believe Amnesty International is the best recipient, OL will honor their decision. This idea had been one of the central points of our application to the Knight Foundation. At OL we put it into practice. And this will ensure that information gets to wherever it can have an effect. Depending on the material in question, that might be a news outlet, a specialized NGO, or a trade union. Who knows better than the sources themselves? That was the only way that leaks of regional significance—for example, poisonous food supplies—could attract attention alongside more spectacular documents with global import. At OpenLeaks we don’t have to choose between lots of small leaks and a few big ones. There’s a place in the system for them all.

  Unlike WikiLeaks, OpenLeaks is not a publishing platform. It concentrates entirely on the first half of the whistle-blowing process, ensuring that documents can be submitted securely and that those they are addressed to can work with them. Like WL, OpenLeaks does this via a kind of protected mailbox into which the whistle-blower can deposit documents intended for specific recipients. We will be offering a whole series of such digital mailboxes—for every one of our partners.

  The source can not only choose a recipient from the partners with OL mailboxes, he or she can also decide how long the recipient has exclusive access to the documents. After that interval has expired, if the source so desires, the submission is opened up to other OpenLeaks participants. This mechanism guarantees that a submission can’t be simply suppressed.

  It would be naive to think that newspapers, most of which are financed largely by advertising, are fully free in their decisions about what to publish. There are enough examples of companies yanking ads if they don’t like an article about their products or management. We hope that by enlisting the broadest possible pool of participants, there will always be someone to publish important information. The interest among our potential partner organizations has been great. They include those publications that have worked together closely with WL in the past. And there are also a lot of sources who want to entrust us with their documents.

  We hope a broad base will have a protective effect on the entire OpenLeaks community. A large network of partners—media outlets, NGOs, trade unions, journalism schools, and other independent organizations—would be a strong bulwark against attacks on the principle of digital mailboxes. The right to receive information and documents from anonymous sources should apply just as much to the digital world as to the traditional mail.

  If a lot of strong partners from various segments of society and the media are involved, it will be very advantageous. Together they will do everything they can to prevent the enemies of digital whistle-blowing from derailing this principle.

  At the start, we intend to work with only a handful of media outlets and then expand our circle of partners one by one. We want to take our time so that we can analyze how our construct works in practice and optimize it. The first tests are planned for the first half of 2011. We don’t want to take off like a rocket. We want to take the time to do things right.

  OpenLeaks is not a rival to WikiLeaks. We’re not going to publish anything ourselves. We’re not going to touch the several thousands of documents submitted to WL that we are keeping in a safe environment. At most, we’ll appeal to sources who are still waiting for their documents to be published to submit them to one of our partners.

  As far as we’re concerned, WikiLeaks should continue to publish material, to grow, and to flourish. But we also think that WL should not be the only platform of its type for global whistle-blowing in the digital age. There’s enough injustice in the world to occupy more than one platform.

  Thankfully, there’s no “founder” at OpenLeaks. I never want to have to discuss this issue again. A lot of people have contributed to the development of the idea, and they are all originators. The same applies to everyone who is now helping to establish OL. Along with the architect and Herbert, a couple of old friends from WL have now joined OpenLeaks. People from around the world are getting in touch, offering to share their expertise with the project. The community is wide-awake and eager to work for a good cause. And that’s the way it should be!

  Of course, not everyone at OpenLeaks always agrees, and there are a lot of discussions. A lot of the people working for OL have strong personalities. It is clear we will need more established internal structures to determine who will decide what, and who is responsible for which areas. Are we going to end up playing rock, paper, scissors to remain able to act, if we don’t manage to reach a consensus on an especially controversial question? Even if we start out trying to do without hard-and-fast rules, we learned at WL that you can’t put off the issue indefinitely. And though it may not sound all that spectacular, what I really enjoy is seeing that everyone compromises sometimes when we encounter internal disagreements.

  In 2011 we also plan
to help set up a charitable foundation, intended not just to promote OL but to support other work as well. We are presently experiencing a cultural transformation; we’ve barely left the cradle in terms of freedom of information and whistle-blowing on the Internet. The foundation will address the questions that arise and develop future-oriented models for the digital revelation of secrets. We hope to convince experts from a variety of areas—politics, society, and science—to serve on the foundation’s board of advisors. And the foundation itself will also be transparent. Transparency needs a strong lobby.

  In addition we want to share our knowledge—this is probably the most important part of the undertaking. We intend to record our experiences and deposit them in a public database and hope to enlist volunteers from around the world. The database will hopefully contain information about laws concerning whistle-blower protection as well as legal precedents in various countries. This information should allow whistle-blowers or group initiatives to protect themselves as much as possible. Anyone interested in promoting transparency from the bottom up will be able to get needed information.

  WikiLeaks’s prominence—which was due mostly to Julian, but also to all our hard work—made the topic of whistle-blowing socially acceptable. Questions about people’s right to keep secrets and reveal confidential information have become part of mainstream society. The hype surrounding WikiLeaks made a significant contribution to this. But we need to get beyond the hype and tackle the real issues and underlying questions. We shouldn’t fixate on vivid magazine stories or bold-print headlines. A lot of worthy stories about the leaks remain obscured behind reports focused on sleazy personal connections.