equally secure and anonymous channel for leaking important documents to journalists and other recipients. However, it also aims to avoid the “cult of personality” that has arisen around WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and the various controversies and legal pressures that his leadership has attracted, by placing editorial control of leaks in the hands of established journalists, rather than acting as a publisher itself.

New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen says the latter may not be a good thing since Assange’s personality may be part of what draws sources to release documents to WikiLeaks. He says WikiLeaks’ success is based on an implied contract it has with sources that it will provide them with a secure, anonymous channel for submitting documents and will then make sure their submissions are published and seen.

“We don’t know how much of the power in that promise is in fact a result of Assange and his public advocacy and the very strong stands that he sometimes takes,” Rosen told Threat Level. “It’s possible that OpenLeaks won’t be as attractive to sources. On the other hand, it might be more so. The sources will decide what method is more effective.”

OpenLeaks is headed by a group of former WikiLeaks members, including ex-spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg.

Unlike WikiLeaks, OpenLeaks will not publish documents itself. Instead, it will operate as an online dropbox, creating an infrastructure to deliver documents securely and anonymously directly to journalists and any other outlets — such as human rights organizations, labor unions, non-governmental oversight groups — that choose to participate. Sources will not be able to submit documents directly through the OpenLeaks web site. Instead, participating media outlets and others will be able to include links on their websites for submissions that will be delivered through the OpenLeaks-designed architecture.

The plan is similar to a failed proposal that WikiLeaks had submitted to the Knight Foundation News Challenge grant in 2009. WikiLeaks had sought $530,000 from the foundation to build an anonymous submission system that would be linked through local newspaper web sites, allowing sources to submit documents related to local issues. The receiving newspaper would have exclusive access to the documents for a period of time before WikiLeaks published the documents on its own web site. The Knight Foundation rejected the application.

OpenLeaks plans to expand this concept beyond local newspapers and will give the recipient an unspecified amount of time to research the document and write a story. If that time passes without a story, OpenLeaks will be able to pass the documents to another recipient specified by the source to ensure that documents don’t sit in a drawer or become buried due to pressure from a government. OpenLeaks will then publish links to any stories produced from the documents, avoiding legal repercussions that might come from publishing the documents themselves.

Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said the setup would make OpenLeaks more of an internet service provider than a publisher.

“They obviously have good lawyers who have told them that this is the way to do it to avoid liability,” she said.

OpenLeaks will be backed by a whistleblowing foundation that will be launched in Germany and will make decisions about how the site operates, avoiding the autocratic nature that has characterized Assange’s governance of WikiLeaks. That management style created internal strife with other WikiLeaks members who felt frozen out of the decision process, according to Domscheit-Berg and other insiders. The organization’s structure means that it will be a more silent partner in the distribution of leaks and not use the leaks to further personal political agendas, which Assange has been accused of doing with his organization.

“To me the key element is that it introduces an accountable editorial ingredient into the publication process and that’s promising,” says Steve Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, which also publishes leaked government documents.

Aftergood has been critical of WikiLeaks for what he calls “information vandalism” — that is, publishing documents in violation of copyright law and publishing information that has seemingly little or no news value just because it can. Examples of these are documents WikiLeaks published that revealed the secret rituals of college sororities and the full text of a book on corruption in Kenya written by an investigative journalist that WikiLeaks published without permission from the author or publisher.

“The OpenLeaks approach would presumably only lead to the publication of newsworthy material,” Aftergood says. “It would also exclude violations of personal privacy, libelous material, infringements on intellectual property and so forth, because the news organizations publishing the material would be in a position to exercise editorial control.”

As a result, “it may prove to be both more politically palatable and more resistant to external controversy,” says Aftergood.

Photo: Julian Assange (left) and Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Jacob Appelbaum/Flickr

See Also:

• Unpublished Iraq War Logs Trigger Internal WikiLeaks Revolt
• Massive Cache of Iraq War Docs to Be Published by WikiLeaks
• Suspected Wikileaks Source Described Crisis of Conscience Leading
• Cyberwar Against Wikileaks? Good Luck With That
• U.S. Intelligence Analyst Arrested in Wikileaks Video Probe

Authors: Kim Zetter

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