WikiLeaks defector details new whistleblowing model, OpenLeaks

Berlin, Germany -- Whistleblower sites like WikiLeaks and Cryptome.org haven't proliferated on the Internet because of fear, an "immense lack of knowledge" and the technical know-how to keep these organizations in operation, Daniel Domscheit-berg, Julian Assange's former right-hand man at WikiLeaks, said to an audience of 300 activists and hackers at an unannounced talk and the most detailed release of his project to date at the 27th Chaos Communication Congress, an annual political and technology conference in Berlin on Dec. 30.

Domscheit-berg, who broke away from WikiLeaks with half a dozen other defectors to start his own whistleblowing site, OpenLeaks.org, due to be fully operational in the summer of 2011, said that he hopes that his organization, through a better division of labor, will avoid the concentration of power that WikiLeaks experienced in the hands of founder Julian Assange, who is now under house arrest after allegations of sexual misconduct.

The process by which leaks are released to the public is a complex process involving multiple steps from receiving submissions, to decrypting and anonymizing them to remove all identifiable origins, to reviewing leaks for publication, said Domscheit-berg. "If somewhere in the chain you do not have enough manpower, the whole process will be impacted, and you experience bottlenecks," he said, "Getting rid of those bottlenecks is part of the process we have to achieve."

The organization also hopes to avoid the political backlash WikiLeaks has faced from the release of controversial and ideologically-spun leaks such as video footage of U.S. military helicopter attack in Iraq entitled "Collateral Murder."

Instead it will serve as an interface between leakers and media platforms, a way of "distributing sources from people to people with an interest in distributing those materials," said Domscheit-berg. Under the OpenLeaks model, leakers can anonymously submit documents, identify which media outlets they would like these leaks channeled to, and specify the amount of time journalists should have to review these documents. If these leaks are not published by the chosen platforms in the allotted time, they will be distributed between all media organizations affiliated with the website.

"The only person that should have an opinion on this is the source," said Domscheit-berg, "As a service provider you need to be neutral."

OpenLeaks website was reportedly slated to go up in December 2010, but "we decided not to rush into a project we were not ready for yet," Domscheit-berg told me in a separate interview.

Openleaks will begin a testing phase in January with five independent media organizations and non-governmental organizations before going into beta testing around May, so that it can "build the final tools we need for launching" in summer, said Domscheit-berg. The organization also hopes to build up a database on the legal protections afforded the press in different countries for publishing sensitive material.

The legal landscape around the publication of large amounts of such material is changing, said Tiffany Rad, a D.C.-based lawyer and hacker affiliated with the nonprofit ProjectDOD, a censorship resistant hosting provider, during a concurrent talk at 27C3.

Organizations that host or publish sensitive information have caught on with "jurisdiction hopping," the practice of moving servers across international waters to countries that can offer stronger protection or have legal frameworks that are more difficult to define.

A legislative proposal, called the Icelandic Multimedia Initiative, or IMMI, could give protection to whistleblowers, investigative journalists and sensitive data hosted on servers based in Iceland.

"IMMI, if it is enacted, will change the way information is shared in the sense that data will be protected in Iceland - regardless of the citizenship of the whistleblower or requirement of a connection with a journalistic source," Rad said in an informal interview after the conference.

Domscheit-berg's announcement, in the wake of harsh criticism of WikiLeaks from the Obama Administration and the Pentagon top brass, comes at a time when relations between federal agencies and the U.S. hacking community are delicately poised. Law enforcement officials are in the midst of issuing search warrants to collect evidence for a wave of arrests of those connected with the decryption and release of classified leaks, said two people familiar with the matter.

"As a result of WikiLeaks, authorities the world over will probably try even harder to clamp down on internet freedom," Rop Gronggrijp, a Dutch hacker involved in the release of "Collateral Murder," said during his keynote address at 27C3 on Dec. 27, "so organizations resisting this will have to work harder also."