OpenLeaks, a more transparent alternative to WikiLeaks

After all the hoopla that WikiLeaks went through along with Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, it was a wonderment as to what would happen to the online whistle-blowing fraternity. Well, there seems no respite yet for the fraternity cause former deputy to Assange, Daniel Domscheit-Berg along with a few more ex-WikiLeaks employees has launched OpenLeaks which promises to be more transparent, better and bigger than WikiLeaks.

The website will be functional from the summer of 2011, but the site right now is live only with the OpenLeaks logo and he phrase “Coming soon!”. Speaking about the non-proliferation of WikiLeaks and Cryptome on the internet Daniel Domscheit-Berg said “the fear of an immense lack of knowledge and the technical know-how to keep these organizations in operation has lead them to failure.” He also spoke in detail of his project while he was at the 27th Chaos Communication Congress, an annual political and technology conference in Berlin on December 30, to an audience of 300 activists and hackers.

According to the founder, OpenLeaks will have a better division of labour than WikiLeaks with the avoidance of concentration of power that lead Julian Assange’s firm to go down and out (Assange is now under house arrest as he faces allegations of sexual misconduct). Daniel has surely taken a leap out of WikiLeaks mistakes and hence has vowed to keep the online whistle-blowing trend perpetual. It is a complex process by which leaks are released that involves a number of steps like receiving submissions, decrypting and anonymizing them, removing all identifiable origins, and reviewing leaks for publication. All these steps would require the availability of reliable manpower and the absence of this would ruin the entire process.

In a detailed interview with Daniel when he was asked what OpenLeaks actually was, he gave a defined and informative answer - “The OpenLeaks project aims at providing technology to parties all around the world to enable these parties to receive documents from anonymous sources. This will regard documents or any other kind of information that people would like to relay to news media organizations, to labor unions, to NGOs, or to whoever else with an interest in running a post drop in the digital world to get in touch with sources of material.”

As far as political pressure and backlash is concerned which WikiLeaks faced due to the release of a very controversial video footage of of U.S. military helicopter attack in Iraq entitled “Collateral Murder”, OpenLeaks can only hope that it does not have to face the same predicament. The site was supposed to go live and start functioning from December 2010, but the team of 10 are keen on not rushing things and drive things from the 2011, along with their ambition of turning to bigger media at a later period. So, here is wishing their team a very Happy New Year, 2011 and hope all their Leakages work well.